Then I thought maybe I could start an Instagram account about what you could wear to work. I hummed and hawed about a name. If you scroll back the first picture of four necklaces is still there."
"Then I started doing outfit pics. Back then the QTU came around and did the spiel about social media, so I thought 'I can't show my face'. My first outfit pictures are me in my laundry. You can see my washing machine behind me, and there's no head in the shot."
"In the first couple of weeks I was doing it, I was getting followers. It was like, 'What is this?' Then it started going up a couple of hundred people a week, and I'm thinking, 'This is crazy'. I started following Nikki from Styling You, a very successful Brisbane blogger. I went to her book launch and was chatting with her. She said I was on the right path as the teacher market is massive. It wasn't so much about the teacher market back then because I didn't even know what a teacher market was. Now I can see where she was going with that."
"At around a thousand followers I thought if I want to grow this I need to put a name to the face, so people have something to recognise. When I started putting my face in the photos, I got a lot more traction and a lot more likes. I got an email one day from the CEO of a shoe company saying, 'Hi there Alex, I don't really know too much about this, but my daughter is a teacher over here in Perth, and she said that I must give you some of my shoes.'"
"It was such a lovely moment because the people I worked with at my first school were there from the beginning. When I got the shoes, they put an announcement over after school that I was going to open up the free shoes in the staffroom. There was about ten of us there, and everyone is Ooohing and Aaahing. It was really lovely."
"Back then, I'd get to work early before the kids and find whoever was walking past, stand in front of a brick wall at school and say 'Can you quickly take a photo of me?'"
In 2015 I put in for a transfer because I began teaching kids whose parents I went to school with. My mum also worked at the school. She had been a Business Service Manager at the school for 26 years, so it was a change for me to go and see what was out in the world.