How Canberra opera singer Teresa Wojcik is helping people colour coordinate
The Moore Street Journal editor Serina Bird chatted with Your Season founder and opera singer Teresa Wojcik about her inspiration and startup journey.
Teresa Wojcik is wearing a unique retro embroidered dress that suits her so well it is as if it was custom designed for her. I could tell that she loved style – and understood what suited her. ‘I wanted something that didn’t have too many contrasting colours,’ she said of her light-blue dress with green embroidery.
Wojcik had just come from day one of the Canberra Innovation Network’s signature program for entrepreneurs – the Griffin Accelerator program –and she was excited and nervous yet prepared.
‘In a sense, the Griffin Accelerator program started a month ago,’ she explained. ‘I’ve been busily working with my mentors to prepare the legal documentation and launch the prototype of the website.’
Your season
Wojcik is the founder of Your Season, an online categorization service that allows shoppers to filter fashion items into their ideal colour palette. The site is designed to enable shoppers to search across retail stores to find items that suit their seasonal colour analysis palette. Wojcik has already signed up Amazon, Petal + Pup and Birds Nest to the scheme and hopes to include brands that people know and love.
The Your Season prototype website is up and working and easily displays a selection of clothes according to your preferred colour scheme. Wojcik’s now working with developers on a model that incorporates harder-to-classify items such as patterns.
No longer dressing plainly
The idea for Your Season came about after a comment from the mother of Wojcik’s partner. On the face of it, the comment wasn’t terribly polite, although Wojcik was quick to explain that it was meant with love and not as an insult.
‘You always dress very plainly,’ her partner’s mum said. ‘You really should get your colours done.’
Intrigued rather than offended, Wojcik went and undertook a personal colour analysis. ‘I’d been meaning to get my colours done for ages,’ she said. Through that, she learned that her personal palette is Cool Muted or Soft Summer - which explains the blue/green theme of her dress.
‘I thought, great, this is amazing! Now I know specifically which colours are going to suit me, and sorting out my wardrobe should be really easy.’
Wojcik then set about finding clothes in the right colour but soon realised it was harder to search for colours in her shades than she realised. ‘I found it really hard and time-consuming to try and find the right clothes,’ said of the experience.
Changing who decides what is in fashion
“Most stores sell whatever’s in fashion at the time, which has been decreed by someone who doesn’t care about you.”
Wojcik’s experience of finding it difficult to search for clothes in her colour palette led her to develop a better solution for filtering and searching by seasonal colour palettes. Beyond colour filtering, a deeper objective is shifting the current fashion model away from one where the industry decides what is fashionable and what will be available on the shelves.
‘Most stores sell whatever’s in fashion at the time, which has been decreed by someone who doesn’t care about you,’ she observed. ‘You - the shopper - has to fit your square peg into their round hole. I want to invert that by looking at things like your skin tone, hair colour and eyes, to choose items that are going to make you look the most attractive.’
Saving time, money – and the environment
Wojcik said that making it easy for people to buy clothes that suit their colours will save time and money. ‘It’s saving time for customers. It’s reducing customer dissatisfaction – they'll buy clothing that is more likely to work well on them. It allows them to put together a wardrobe that works really well, and everything is cohesive because the colours all work well together. And it saves money because you’re not spending money on taking risks: you know what’s going to suit you already,’ she said.
And Your Season also reduces waste: on average, Australians buy 27kg of textiles a year and throw out 23kg into landfill each year. ‘Your Season reduces a lot of waste because you’re not just buying things: you’re choosing in advance what is going to work for you, and you’re doing a filtered search.’
From Europe to Canberra
After graduating with a music degree specialising in composition with classical singing and songwriting, Wojcik headed for Europe. She lived and worked in Germany as a singer, travelling with a small opera group that took their opera program to schools in Europe. ‘We did two to three of those tours a month,’ she said. ‘It was fun. Hard work, but a good way to see Europe.’
During this time, she worked in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Austria and Switzerland. Fluent in German, Wojcik can also sing in several other languages.
How, then did she wind up in Canberra?
Wojcik ended up in Canberra because of her best friend – who is also a performer as well as being a creator, dancer, cabaret artist and MC. Her friend was working on a clown show, titled S.A.D: A journey through the seasons of mental health, in Canberra in 2017 and asked Wojcik to write the music for it. ‘So, I said, OK, I’ll do that. I don’t know what it’s going to look like, but I’ll do it.’
When working on the creative project collaboratively across different time zones proved difficult, Wojcik moved to Canberra for six months. The idea was to work on the project and move back to Germany if she didn’t like it in Canberra.
‘I came over, I wrote for four months straight, and then we put the show on in October at the Courtyard Studio,’ she said of the experience. And then she stayed: not because she was locked down due to COVID and unable to flee, but because she wanted to be here. ‘It was nice being in the same town as my best friend for once, because we’d spent at least 8 years in separate towns. It was really nice to have that, and I thought, now I’m ready for a change and just decided to stay here.’
Teresa Wojcik is a Canberra-based singer, composer and now startup founder and entrepreneur. She is an Innovation Connect (ICON) grant winner and has been selected to participate in the 2023 Griffin Accelerator program.
