Stirfry MBA

The woman who makes a beautiful woman look more beautiful and confident. Ramdas Shenoyy in conversation with Bia from Parfait Image Consulting.

Mentoring beauty pageants — The story of how it all started

I actually got into this, I started in the year 2015. So it is almost 5 years now. So the first pageant that I mentored is Mrs. India – I am beautiful which took place in Goa in 2015 and it was straight after I did my course in image consulting and after that, there has been never looking back. After that I have gone ahead, I have mentored girls for national pageants, international pageants and recently I have sent a girl who represented India at the Mrs. Universe, which is known to be the biggest pageant for married women in the world.

Role of an Image consultant

Image consultant is where we bring out the best version of people, best version of the group, individual or corporate. If it’s an individual who comes to me for image consulting then, I would completely transform the person. So, we are actually transformation coaches who transform people not just externally in terms of their clothes, in terms of their confidence, their personality but also internally. There is a lot of internal engineering that we do as well for an individual. We do a corporate workshop, then we do it for a batch of 20-25 people, try not to take a very big group that we can give individual attention to everybody and again work on both externally and internally.

Internal re-engineering

Internal Re-engineering is all about soft-skills. We do a lot of communication skills, we do time management, we do personality development which comes from body language. How to react to different situations. How your body language reacts to different situations is important. Image management is completely a combination of internal and external transformation.

Building image in the offline and the online world

In the offline world, there have been people who have walked up to me in my office and said that they want a complete transformation because they are not confident on the way they look, not confident on the way they are, not confident about the social skills when they step out of their house when they are in the working environment when they are in corporate environment, or even with the family relationship. They need a lot of confidence. I had individuals who are extremely shy, who are extremely under confident and who are not happy with the way they look, the way they dress, so I transform people by individually working with them to what their requirement is. So first, I do a need analysis on what the individual client requirement is and based on that work on somebody if you are saying offline. Online I work on clients who are not in the same city. There could be a client who is sitting in a different country or client in a different city, I have a lot of video calls with them, I have obviously lot of telephonic calls with them. I have transformed a lot of people in the past with online consultation.

On Personal Perception and brand management

I actually help people with personal brand management example, I am right now working with a young guy, who has just passed out of his hotel management. I am helping him with his personal brand management. He is exceptional and very talented but he doesn’t know how to use his brand, how to expand his brand to where all and who all, in terms of his networking. I am helping him with individually how to work on his external appearance, on his confidence, his communication skills, because you know he has the talent, he is brilliant at what he does, but the other requirement is that he needs to be a successful individual in his field on what I am helping him within his personal brand management.

The Secret formula for winning a beauty pageant

Definitely -intelligence, confidence and the right attitude. I feel every woman is beautiful in her own way. Of course, for a pageant looks are important, because it is a beauty pageant at the end of the day. For a pageant, you will always have girls who are good looking, but more than that I feel, internal beauty is more important. In a pageant, all these things are looked at, because all the girls who come for the pageants are beautiful. How you stand out in spite of being beautiful, is what makes you win a beauty pageant.

What is more beautiful – the beauty of face and body or beauty of the soul?

Beautiful soul any day..definitely. A beautiful body or skin will fade away with time, but a beautiful soul is something which stays immortal and stays with you forever.

Advice to aspirants who want to be an image consultant

Follow your dreams, if you want to be an image consultant. You should be very aware with things like what is in fashion to suit different body type. What are personal colours?  All these things you do go through when you study to be an image consultant because you need to have flair for fashion, style, styling and its very important to dare to dream and follow your dream because that is what I have done. I still can’t believe that 5 years ago I started the company and in 5 years I have already reached national pageants and one of the best International pageants. I have come a long way, I had never thought I would reach here. If you feel you have it within you and you are really confident then the sky is the limit.

Impactful story

There is a lady called Rash Nora, who I had mentored 3 years ago. When she came to me she told me that my family tells me that I am ugly and that my family tells me that I am very dark and under-confident and I have zero confidence and she came from a small town..a small-town girl in south India.I mentored her and she sent me a very long email much later. She went ahead and won a beauty pageant not just in the first at national and then at an international level and today she is actually holding her own pageant. This is just a 3 year old story. She now actually mentors beauty queens…her story is very close to my heart. This gives me a lot of satisfaction and makes me feel very humbled.

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