Sally Obermeder on the ‘fall from grace’ that changed everything
Media personality, mum and Real Housewives of Sydney star Sally Obermeder gets candid about the brutal realities of running her mega successful beauty business Swiish, revealing; “We, up until now, are still bootstrapped.”
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Not only the co-founder of wellness and skincare empire Swiish, the Real Housewives Of Sydney star is also a cancer survivor. On the Stellar podcast Something To Talk About, she opens up about why society doesn’t like “women with ambition” and how feeling grateful has become her norm
On the difference between what her life looks like through the shiny lens of Instagram and as a cast member of The Real Housewives Of Sydney TV series, and the reality of her life as a mum and business owner of wellness and beauty brand Swiish: “We, up until now, are still bootstrapped, and that has meant a lot of sacrifice on our part in order to get the brand to the level that it is with only our own money. That has meant we’ve sacrificed. We’ve sold things that we’ve owned. We’ve gone months without getting paid. We’ve sacrificed our salaries. That’s the part people don’t see because you don’t get online and be like, ‘Hi, everyone, I’ve just put my pay on hold for three months because we’re in a growth period and I’d like to reinvest it.’ You don’t see that... It wasn’t that long ago, we were living in an apartment. There’s like [her husband] Marcus and I and two children in a two-bedroom apartment with one bathroom. That’s a sacrifice. I’m happy to make that sacrifice but it’s not for everyone.”
Listen to the full interview with Sally Obermeder on Something To Talk About in the player below or wherever you get your podcasts:
On being told a few years into owning the business that Swiish was facing bankruptcy, and the lessons she learnt from that: “We were kind of rolling along and we didn’t have all of our stuff sorted [financially]. [I said to] Marcus – at that point, he wasn’t working with us – ‘Can you just do me a favour and while we’re [away in the US, where Obermeder had travelled with her sister and Swiish co-founder Maha Corbett] pay some bills and check some numbers.’ Like, really casually.
And he was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ It was when Elyssa [the couple’s youngest daughter, now 6, who was born via surrogate in the US] was being born and she wasn’t born yet. We were staying in this hotel and every day we’d go to the [pool] cabana, we were living the good life... We’d been working so hard for so many years. Anyway [Marcus] rings us and says, ‘Girls, do you want the good news or the bad news? OK, I’ve mapped all the numbers. And the trajectory is looking up.’ We are like, ‘We know, we’ve had such a good year and we’re working so hard. What’s the bad news?’ And he says, ‘You’ll be bankrupt in three months. This is a mess... you’ve got to basically stop your pay immediately.’ We obviously had staff so we wanted to make sure they continued to get paid. So we left. We no longer could afford the cabana, and we’d go to the free happy hour in the lobby. It was a fall from grace, let me tell you. We always joke about it. ‘Remember the free pizza and wine from the happy hour in the lobby, and the guy from the cabana would be like, hi, ladies, you coming back?’ It was a tough lesson, but a good lesson and that’s part of resilience. If you want something enough, you just keep going. You pick yourself back up and you go, OK where to from here?”
On being a woman in business and what she hopes her two daughters (Annabelle, 12, and Elyssa) have learnt from seeing her as a working mum: “For a long time, to be seen as ambitious and female was considered to be a dirty word... being cutthroat and ruthless, as opposed to wanting to see what you could achieve. We love sports stars because they’re ambitious. But in any other arena, we don’t like ambition and we don’t like women with ambition. But I feel like that’s changing. I think that’s a really good thing. You need to actually, as my sister said, get very, very comfortable around the numbers, get comfortable around the dollars because at the end of the day, it’s on you. For me, with two girls, I like that they see that I do that.”
On the highs and lows of being an entrepreneur: “We’ve just gone into 460 Priceline stores, which we are really excited about and that is a big high. It’s something we’ve worked on for a long time. People see just the bits that they want to see. One of my least favourite phrases is ‘you’re killing it’. It’s my least favourite phrase when people say it to me, because the thing that you’re really not seeing is the 10 years before that. What you’re not seeing is the sacrifice and the slog and the tears. When you finally get something like this, it’s such a great feeling because then you’re like, OK, all that sacrifice hopefully has been worth it.”
On how her experience with cancer has informed her perspective on life (Obermeder was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer when she was 40 weeks pregnant in 2011, the day before she had Annabelle): “It’s one of these things that, it kind of never leaves you, in good ways and bad. In the good way, it’s my filter on everything. I’m like, well, I’ve been through worse, it’s not that bad. It gives me a level of gratitude, not that I wasn’t grateful before, but it’s given me just something very different and now in a way that’s become my norm. The bad though is that it’s a little bit like a scab that heals but never really fully heals. It never leaves you. So you can kind of just lift the scab up and the blood will come back out. It stays with you.”
On her relationship with ageing, having turned 50 earlier this year, and given that she was once faced with the reality of possibly not making it to 50: “Look, it’s still weird when people say 50. You’re like who? Who’s 50? Who here is 50? They’re like, you are! Oh, that’s so weird. Because you haven’t caught up with the number. Sometimes my youngest Elyssa will say to me, ‘How old are you again? Are you 38?’ And I’ll be like, ‘Yep, yep.’ And she thinks that because I often say I feel like I’m 38. In my mind what I picture at 50 years is from when I grew up. It’s like at 50 you’re in a rocking chair and all your kids have grown up and you’ve got some grandkids, yet here I am at 50 and I’ve got somebody who’s in Year 1 [at school]. So I think it’s just going, well, that number doesn’t, in and of itself, mean anything, but every day that you get, that means something.”
Originally published as Sally Obermeder on the ‘fall from grace’ that changed everything
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