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The Style Servant
Certified Image Consultant | Brand Communications Designer
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platforms, newsrooms, and runways since adolescence, Tessa St. Pierre is a highly personable styling and branding professional with a vibrant passion for leadership, communications, and the written word. With 100+ articles spanning local and national publications since she was fifteen – and the unique skill to craft anything from motivational speeches to technical finance lingo – Tessa’s storytelling structure grips and inspires through an innate ability to preserve the authentic voice of any individual’s story. A veteran motivational speaker with nearly a decade’s worth of high-pressure public relations, non-profit, and networking experience, Tessa deeply understands and respects the value of brand image and identity. Certified in Image Consulting with a small business owner background, Tessa has finessed her eye for design since she could see – which, unlike most, wasn’t immediately at birth…
TRAILBLAZING
Express Excellence™️
Express Excellence (n):
1. Rising to the responsibility of representing yourself as the expert you are, for the sake of serving others well.
The Style Servant helped me express excellence on every level of my personal and professional brand by teaching me the foundational elements of presenting a remarkable image.
Synonyms: strategic design; signature style; sincere expression
Our Brand Story
Cancer & Closet Space in
1998
Tessa spent her first Christmas at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, where she went in with two eyes and came out with one. Bilateral Retinoblastoma was a cancerous culprit present in both of Tessa's retinas at birth, taking up so much space in her eyes that doctors believe she couldn't actually see. After months of flying back and forth from her hometown Alberta to Toronto's downtown core, her family settled into the comfort of remission amidst the mountains. Her parents packed away the three-inch thick medical binders detailing Tessa's past, storing them on closet shelves that would later hold Tessa's dearest garments of self-expression.
2010
"I was raised like any
other 'normal' kid, but I was different from the get-go."
Tessa developed a triple-threat artistic, academic, and athletic personality early on. A competitive swimmer by age 10, her aptitude for entrepreneurship was revealed when she started selling colourful shoelaces braided together as a hair accessory in the 7th grade: Hippie Headbands. She was constantly experimenting with style. One day she was channeling Watts from John Hugh's 1987 Some Kind of Wonderful (complete with drumsticks in her belt loops), the next she was sporting paisley harem pants with a billowy blouse and exposed-toe sandals.
Brick by brick, Tessa was building the foundation of personal image education without even realizing it. Something else became clear in those days, too: having experienced cancer as an infant wasn't something Tessa could understand, but it affected her enough to write and deliver her first speech on the disease for English class in the 5th grade. And by extension, how to overcome adversity. From the classroom to the school gym, to a silver medal from the local legion, she did not realize then the significance of the career path she had just taken her first steps upon.
2012
There was a 4% chance that Tessa would develop Osteosarcoma
as a teenager given her previous cancer experience.
Tessa was thirteen when that four percent became a reality.
Losing a limb stripped her of a physical identity. And seven months of high-dose, intense chemotherapy threatened to strip away her personality, too. But she had her style. She had a deep-rooted love of fashion that had been growing for a decade at that point.
Every week she was admitted for another round of treatment, the nurses would gather around her wheelchair to see the outfit she put together and how she'd accessorized. Her face would grow paler through the week, her smile sagging at the edges, but her earrings were an iconic and ever-present burst of colour.
Tessa's style was experimental back then, but for as long as she can remember, she has expressed herself through clothing. That expression became a reliable lifeline when everything around her - herself included - threatened to collapse.
When expression becomes
ESSENTIAL
"...for as long as I can remember, I have expressed myself through clothing. That expression became a reliable lifeline when everything around me - myself included - threatened to collapse."
2016
Four years cancer-free
found Tessa at a peak point in the career she never planned on having. But it was one she was well-equipped to dress for.
Through high school, Tessa began avidly pursuing a career in journalism. Getting her first internship with a local paper at fifteen meant she needed a uniform to match the fast-paced professionalism of the field. Her closet quickly flooded with dress pants, blouses, and blazers, contrasting the mini skirts, graphic tees, and leather jackets already hung with quiet pride.
By the time she was seventeen, delivering motivational
speeches for SickKids (SK) and The Terry Fox Foundation (TFF)
had become a regular occurrence for several years, even before
Osteosarcoma. But in 2016, TTF asked Tessa to be their official Ambassador and Poster Girl for that year. Suddenly her face decorated thousands of schools across the country and she decided to go with it.
Tessa voluntarily began traveling Ontario delivering presentations to elementary and high schools, post-secondary institutions, businesses, commerce, and corporate events alike. She represented TFF and SK over the course of a decade in this capacity, successfully raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for research advancement.
Talk about having to dress to impress.
2017
By the time she started university in 2017, Tessa's personal style was evolving quickly alongside her personal brand. She was beginning to recognize the integral difference between what she liked that was her style, versus what she liked that wasn’t her style. This shift in understanding herself more intimately impacted her confidence on every level: how she showed up to important events, how she carried herself in conversation, and how people responded to that confidence. Understanding her style and the image she wanted to project was the beginning of feeling truly comfortable with herself.
Tessa worked four different jobs at Trent University throughout her academic career, separate from which she sat on Trent’s Board of Governors as a Student Governor for two years while running an opinion column in a local paper for three. She was still responding to motivational speaking requests, though it had become much less frequent to accommodate her education. Every single semester she faced some kind of post-cancer health issue that required surgery, tests, or time to rest from the stress of everything. But she continued exploring her passions. Whether she was in sweats on the couch, or in a dress at a podium, she never stopped exploring.
my access to new opportunities."
"Understanding my image
ELEVATED
Serving up
style
2020 - TODAY
The year before she was set to graduate, the world shifted under the weight of covid. So Tessa shifted with it.
Supplementing her income after losing her job to covid, Tessa began casually selling her old clothes on Instagram. Within weeks, she developed the page into a full-time small business reselling vintage and secondhand garments. Originally called Access to Adventure, she made 200+ transactions over the next year and a half, shipping orders as far as Mexico and organically generating a loyal online community of 1.2k+ people. As she learned how to source and style garments for the brand she had single-handedly designed, her natural ability as a Creative Director started flourishing through a regular practice of photography and videography composition and editing.
Tessa's heart for serving others through the lens of fashion and style solidified when she joined the RW&CO team as a Fashion Associate, where she's been polishing her Personal Styling and Shopping skills since the summer of 2022.
At the same time, she seized the opportunity to work as a freelance Writer & Social Media Manager with Canada's #1 branding agency for elite financial advisors: Coin. Mentored for 18 months by Coin's President directly, Tessa added invaluable industry knowledge to her ever-expanding skillset, coming to understand the mechanics of effective, high-end brands and how they get built to sustain generations of leadership.
PS. She did still earn that degree. Tessa graduated as double-scholarship student on President's Honour Roll in December 2021 with her Bachelor's in English Literature with a Focus in Creative Writing.
Our Brand Foundation
It's who we are. It's what we believe.
It's what makes us different from everybody else.
Our Purpose
We exist to coach business professionals to excellence through the power of personal image.
Our Mission
Is to elevate the image of every business professional so that they effortlessly produce generational client loyalty.
Our Vision
Is to encourage authentic expression in every individual for the sake of serving others well.
Our Position
Express Excellence™️
Our Character
Professional | Tailored | Elevated | Patient | Sincere | Compassionate | Encouraging
Elect for Excellence
Our Brand Lookbook
Our brand mood board, showcasing how we Express Excellence™️
