PORT TOWNSEND — Walk into this one-of-a-kind boutique, and you find much to tantalize the eyes and fingertips.
A soft pink cashmere sweater. A down vest in periwinkle. Rich wool coats, trimmed by scarves in a lush display.
This is Working Image, a place where women and teenage girls come to make a new start, and where a new outfit makes all the difference.
Since last summer, Working Image has undergone a makeover of its own.
Juliette Sterner, the new executive director and a self-described “woman with a thing for organizing,” has joined a team of fellow volunteers to move Working Image into a pair of former classrooms at Mountain View Commons, the old elementary school at 1925 Blaine St.
Sterner first heard about Working Image two and a half years ago, when she saw a short announcement in the newspaper about a “garage” sale the organization was about to have. The sale was to unload excess donated clothing.
“I said, ‘They shouldn’t have extra clothing; they should have more clients,’” Sterner recalls.
Working Image has served women and teenagers who are homeless; women struggling with addiction and trying to get on their feet; women who have finally escaped from abusive husbands or boyfriends.
The boutique’s coverage area is wide, from Neah Bay to Port Angeles and Port Townsend all the way to Kitsap County. Clients have come to Working Image’s door in pajamas, having fled a violent husband in the middle of the night.
Others have come just before a court date, wearing ankle bracelets and having nothing nice to wear when facing the judge.
Then there was the grandmother, mother and daughter who lost everything when their house burned down. The volunteers at the boutique found new wardrobes for all three.
Yet Sterner says there are so many more women and girls out there — and agencies — who don’t know what Working Image offers.
It offers a chance to begin again. Clothing is just pieces of fabric, of course. But Sterner, along with the personal dressers who work in her boutique, know that when it is put together in the right way, an outfit can work magic on a woman, outside and in.
Sterner has seen that change happen, when a woman walks into the boutique, perhaps not feeling her best. Another woman is there to welcome her; she then listens carefully not only to what the client needs but also to what she hopes for.
Working Image is set up just like a classy ladies’ shop. The dressing rooms are spacious with violet drapes.
Near the entrance is a jewelry and accessories counter, so women need not depart without a necklace or a silken scarf to complete their new outfits.
Sterner and her volunteer crew arrange the clothing by color, season and style — no small undertaking with the amount of donations they receive.
When the boutique recently moved from its previous space at Olympic Community Action Programs in Port Townsend, Sterner got busy reorganizing, using one of the Mountain View classrooms as a sorting center while renovating the other as the boutique space.
A flock of supporters, from the Boeing Bluebills to Hadlock Building Supply, Henery Hardware, Potpourri Northwest, Peninsula Paint and Strait Floors, provided the materials for transformation.
“I’m a big-picture person,” Sterner says. “I had a vision when I walked in,” of how this school room could become a stylish — but not intimidating — shop.
The time came to set a date for Working Image’s grand reopening party: Tuesday, Nov. 1.
With construction work finishing up, Sterner stepped up her correspondence. She sent out invitations to every social service agency she could think of in Clallam, Kitsap and Jefferson counties and went well beyond the boutique’s existing clientele from Dove House shelter services to WorkSource and Healthy Families of Clallam County.
Sterner wants to raise awareness about Working Image’s offerings among local Native American tribes, for example.
All women and girls who come to the boutique must be referred by an agency, the school they are attending or by another social-service organization.
Sterner is also reaching out to potential volunteers — who can work in the sorting center, as personal dressers or both — and to donors of clothing or cash.
Working Image first opened in 1999, after founders Anne Schneider and Ruth Merryman saw the need for a place that would provide women with the tangible and intangible: good clothes for work and a regained sense of dignity.
The founders, along with a small group of other volunteers, gathered donated apparel. Sometimes they took it home for washing and ironing — and then they put the pieces together into stylish outfits.
It wasn’t always easy getting clients to try those new looks, though. Schneider remembers helping a woman choose an outfit that was entirely unlike what she usually wore. The woman emerged from the dressing room — reluctantly — and she looked great.
But “I can’t wear this,” she said. “It’s not me.”
Gently, Schneider let her know: This is the new you.
There was another woman, Schneider recalls, who was emboldened by a few things from Working Image. She came back in to tell the volunteers how she had found a house to rent — where she believed the landlord wouldn’t have looked at her if she had gone to see him in her old clothes.
“We do actually see a metamorphosis here,” Schneider says.
It feels as good to the volunteers as it does to the clients.
Meantime, Sterner believes in keeping donated clothing moving. She refuses to let things sit in the Working Image storage room for long; she picks out pieces to go over to the Port Townsend Food Bank for its Wednesday distribution days, and even consigns some things at the Wandering Wardrobe, the shop at 936 Washington St. in Port Townsend.
The more you share the wealth of donations, Sterner says, the more come in. At Working Image, she has a sense of abundance.
And “when we get donations,” she adds, “it’s like Christmas.”
Seeing the face of a client light up — that is a gift, too.
Sterner, 60, grew up in cities on the East Coast, then majored in psychology and minored in women’s studies at the University of Delaware. She discovered, and fell in love with, the Olympic Peninsula after her sister, Tamasin Sterner, moved out to Port Angeles.
Tamasin, who was that city’s energy conservation manager during the 1980s, now runs Pure Energy, a Pennsylvania-based company providing energy audits, home retrofits and conservation “coaching.”
Sterner and her sisters, five in all, were raised to be strong women.
“I don’t believe in limits,” she says. “I look at things for a while and ask, ‘How can this run better?’”
She keeps her expenses low and makes her living via a collage of jobs: creating glass-bead jewelry, filling in at the Inn at McCurdy House in Port Townsend plus pet- and house-sitting.
“Juliette is really energetic,” says Jefferson County Community Foundation director Kristina Mayer. “It’s one thing to do this with money, but another thing to do it with volunteers and donations.”
Shirley Moss, manager of the Port Townsend Food Bank across the hall, sees how Sterner has turned her volunteer post practically into a full-time job.
“I come here every day,” said Moss. “I see who the backbone is.”