Meet the Real Me

If you've been following me for posing tips, you probably feel like you know me. You know the woman who makes posing fun and tells you to never stand side-on. She's real, but she's only the last chapter of my story.

I was born and raised in the suburbs of Brisbane, and I spent half of my life in outback and rural Australia. Before I ever taught you to pose, I worked in woolsheds, led a national campaign, nearly died bringing my son into the world and raised him in a caravan.

I'm sharing all of it now because in 2027 I'll be working much more closely with you, and I want you to know who you're working with. So grab a cuppa, because this one is long.

The city girl who moved to the bush

In my twenties I left Brisbane and moved to the bush. I had never set foot in a woolshed, and I had no idea what happened to wool before it became a jumper.

I started as a roustabout, sweeping the boards and throwing fleeces. I cooked for shearing teams, earned my wool classing stencil and went on to become a master classer. For over a decade I worked in sheds across Queensland and New South Wales, moving from station to station and sleeping wherever the work took me.

It was hot, dusty and beautiful work, and it paid about $28K a year. It taught me how to work hard with very little, and that has never left me.

A camera, a hashtag and a national campaign

I always had a camera with me in the sheds. I photographed the shearers, the working dogs and the golden light coming through the shed roofs, because almost no one was showing what the modern wool industry really looked like.

There was a lot of misinformation about wool online, and the people who lived and breathed it had no voice in the city. In 2016 I started using the hashtag #TheTruthAboutWool and made three simple videos explaining crutching, shearing and wool handling. One of them reached over half a million people.

That hashtag grew into a national campaign and tour to bridge the gap between city and country. I travelled through Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania and Western Australia, a lot of it in my caravan, photographing farms and shearing teams, including some of the largest sheep stations in the world on the Nullarbor. My work was featured on ABC News and Yahoo News, landed me on magazine covers and had me speaking on stage at industry events.

It also brought death threats. They arrived as messages on social media, especially while I was out on the Nullarbor. I ignored them. I was moving around so much that I truly believed no one would ever find me in my caravan.

That campaign taught me something I still use every day. I had no budget and no team, but I had a clear message and I knew exactly who I was talking to. That was enough to get a whole country listening.

The day I met Travis

In the middle of all of this, I fell pregnant with my son, Travis.

My pre-eclampsia was missed, and it turned into eclampsia. I went into early labour and had a grand mal seizure, and the doctors expected me to have brain damage. I was put into a coma and taken to ICU, and I didn't meet my baby until a couple of days after he was born.

I came through it, and I know how lucky I am. It changed the way I look at time, and it's a big part of why I protect mine so fiercely now.

Motherhood in a caravan

I bought my caravan in 2016, and it was home until 2020. Travis spent his first years with me on the road, living and working in remote and rural Australia and the outback.

It was challenging, but I didn't know motherhood any other way. I had postpartum depression and I dealt with it on my own. The wide open spaces helped me through it more than I can explain.

I hung up my classing stencil and started teaching photography. I ran more than 200 workshops for rural beginner photographers, often inside the same woolsheds I used to work in, hours from the nearest town.

Coming home

When COVID hit in 2020, my in-person workshops stopped overnight, so I took my teaching online. I built a membership that taught over 400 beginner photographers, and a course that showed photographers how to launch and sell their own businesses.

In 2021, after half my life in the bush, I left. I became a single mum and moved back into my childhood home in Brisbane with my parents. Travis and I lived there for seven months before we got our own place, just the two of us.

I had come full circle, back to the suburbs I grew up in, but I was a very different woman.

Posing and 10,000 women

In late 2024 I started teaching posing. I set myself a goal of helping 10,000 women love how they look in photos within two years, and I started with a $5 guide.

We hit that goal in 18 months. Along the way my Instagram grew from around 12,000 followers to over 380,000, and my online courses and guides have now made over $780K in sales.

Every one of those guides was built with the same skills I'd been sharpening for years: knowing exactly who I'm talking to, getting seen without a big budget and selling in a way that feels good for everyone.

Why I only work 16 hours a week

I live with extreme generalised anxiety, and it shows up every single day. It's one of the biggest reasons my business looks the way it does.

Running my business online means I can work around the hard days. So I moulded it around my anxiety, around being a single mum and around the two things I value most, time freedom and financial freedom.

Today I work around 16 hours a week. I take Fridays off and two months off every year, I bushwalk every day, I'm studying a marketing degree at uni and I'm there for Travis. None of that happened by accident. It comes from simple systems, automations and sales campaigns that do the heavy lifting, so I don't have to.

Why I'm telling you all of this

I wouldn't say my life is remarkable, but it certainly hasn't been ordinary. I also know a lot of you are carrying more than people can see. You're running a business around kids, health, money and everything else, and you're working hard without the sales to show for it.

Everything I've been through has taught me how to get seen, how to sell and how to build a business that fits around my life instead of taking it over. In 2027, that's exactly what I'm going to help you do.

If you would like a woman like me to guide you with your business, a great place to start is on my Instagram.

Chantel x