Carly Vidal Wallace comes from an entrepreneurial family business in the textiles and manufacturing industry. She has successfully started new fashion companies either for herself or with clients and leveraged these to profitable businesses to maintain or sell profit.
Throughout her career, Carly has lived and worked around the globe, including in Paris and Los Angeles. Currently, Carly works as the Creative Community Curator for Not Just a Label, and writes for publications in America, such as Coast Magazine and websites in Australia including Fashion Weekly.
As the fashion industry continues to boom in Los Angeles, Carly says she is immensely grateful to have the pleasure to help brands build up their following and business. “I am extremely lucky to have been able to take my fashion experience from Brisbane and take it global where I curate over 30,000 emerging fashion labels from all over the world”, she says. While Los Angeles can be big, busy, fast paced and content heavy, Carly sees it as a magical place where anything is possible. However, her hometown, Brisbane, will always have a place in her heart. “The businesses and brands from Brisbane are still my staple labels that I love to buy and wear and I would swap Brisbane traffic for LA traffic any day!”, she says.
Carly founded and directed the annual fashion festival, Brisbane Fashion Month. Seeing a gap in the industry, Carly set out to budget, source sponsorship funding, and create a company and team to run a series of 30 events each year in Australia. Among her career highlights she lists interviewing Professor Jimmy Choo, being part of the Australian Designers Abroad showroom in New York as well as coordinating multiple venue fashion runway shows with more than 800 tickets sold. She has worked as a Fashion Editor for Brisbane magazine South City Bulletin. Additionally, Carly guest lectures and mentors at different universities in Australia and America.
As well as being a successful career woman, Carly also plays the role of mother and wife. She says getting the balance right between work, family and fun, is and has to be a daily work in progress for her. “I am a firm believer that we live in a generation where woman can, if they want to and have a supporting family, have it all,” she said. Despite her busy lifestyle, Carly believes that it is always key to remember that children only grow up once. “I have built and run four different businesses but losing a business deal never hurts as much as missing an important children’s event.”
While there has been many challenges for Carly, the girl boss firmly believes that every bump in the road has lead her to great learning lessons. “Hard times are great moments to grow as a person and as a business. The challenge however is not to give up!” She remains passionate about improving and ensuring her business succeeds while being a mother and a wife and will continue to lecture at the universities in both Los Angeles and Australia. “Family does need to come first, but being a mother does not define who I am, it is just one of the many hats I wear”
