Fashionable Healing: Yvonne Hogenes and Firma Energywear
Fashionable Healing with Firma Energywear: Fashion + Health Collide to Create Community Impact
Yvonne Hogenes of Firma Energywear uses business success to support and empower women both locally and internationally.
This Spring we are celebrating Fashionable Healing. We set out to interview local designers and learn their thoughts around positive body image and fashion, where the two intersect and where they – at times – collide. We discovered so much more thanks to Yvonne Hogenes of Firma Energywear.
PH: Yvonne, what are your thoughts around fashion and positive body image? As a woman, a wife, mother and grandmother do you feel the fashion industry and the media that represents it, has a responsibility to women?
I have always taught women that come into my boutique that fashion is all about personal style and understanding what your particular personal style is. There is no right or wrong in the sense of fashion trends.
So, for example, this spring season the trend is all about skinny jeans, leggings, and short crop bomber jackets, and perhaps you look absolutely lost and uncomfortable in this look! That is when I encourage every women and young girl to forget about the trends and find the fashion items that allow them to feel empowered, valued, and totally at ease.
This is their personal style, and once they accept and understand this, they will have an amazing fashion look that exudes a positive body image. The media and fashion industry will always be a promotor of new fashion trends, seasonal colors, textures, and concepts. I believe this is their mandate, and this inspires all of us to explore new fashion ideas and trends, but we do not have to be a slave to them or feel any lesser than the models on the runways.
A positive body image needs to be instilled into our daughters and granddaughters so they will grow up with a strong sense of worth, value, and acceptance of the beautiful women that they are. This is the ‘higher calling‘ that I work on each day to instill in my granddaughter as I play with her or with the young women that I am honored to dress for their special graduation, wedding day or first job interview, and with the countless amazing women that I meet each day at the boutique struggling with their self worth and body image.
If I can have each woman I spend time with leave my boutique with her shoulders back, her head held higher and her face aglow, then it has been a worthwhile day!
PH: Tell us more about your mission, what you are most passionate about and how you’ve been able to use your work to support and empower women?
I am living my dream to educate women in Fashion and Health through my businesses of Malary’s Fashion Network, Firma Energywear, and TAB Custom-fitted Bras. Since I have been so blessed with healthy and sustainable businesses, I can now give back by supporting young women in our community and around the world so they can realize their dreams! This really completes the circle and I just see the circle getting bigger and bigger!
I choose to focus my time and energy on projects that fill me with joy and satisfaction. Last last year, I opened a second-hand chic boutique called Inn for Women just across the street from Malary’s. It is run by volunteers with donated clothing so all of our proceeds go to support homes and a school for young women who are working to escape addiction and human trafficking.
We also play a role in mentoring these young women when they are ready to start to work, and work closely with SAS to restore and reintegrate them into our community as women with great value!
Another project I am involved in is Cancer de Mama Days in LaPenita, MX. We donate many of our bras to them each year to help over 500 Mexican women who are breast cancer survivors come for a weekend in February to be treated like a princess. We fit them in bras, give them prosthetics, wigs, makeup, hats, clothing, food, and education about their health.
PH: Amazing! We believe more and more female entrepreneurs and business leaders are motivated to be successful because of the impact they are craving to make rather than solely being ‘money-motivated’. What are your thoughts on this, and do you have any advice?
Absolutely! There was a season in my professional life when it was all about my time, my rights, my money and my success. It was a very dark and empty time – there was no joy in each day’s work! I never could reach that mark that I set for myself where I felt I had arrived or succeeded. I was awarded the Surrey Business Person of the Year award in 2004. I was very honored and flattered, but it still did not fill the “void”. I began to explore how I could be more influential by helping women in my community and abroad. I have to admit that I was still trying to pour into myself, but as I began to pour into the women of SAS of Surrey and the women in Mexico at the Cancer de Mama days, I had a “heart transplant”! I found so much joy, fulfillment, purpose, and success in the very truest sense of the word! My business continued to flourish and grow as I gave more and more of my time to these projects, the women in my community and around the world.
I KNOW that we were created and placed here in whatever community we live in to make a difference, and when we listen to that calling on our lives, we experience so much more!! Don’t hold back – just lean in and make a difference!
Editor’s note: Yvonne has graciously extended our PowHERhouse community a 20% discount on all orders placed by May 31st, 2015. Simply use the coupon code “Fashionable Healing PH” when placing your online order.
Connect online with Yvonne and her mission to support and empower women: