From cleaning toilets with toothbrushes to partying with P-Diddy, Melissa Phair has seen it all. The Fermanagh native has no shortage of tales to tell from her life working as a Head Chef on a SuperYacht, which has played a part in inspiring her latest venture, her very own sustainable fashion brand.
But rewind back to over a decade ago, Melissa had just completed her degree in Mathematical Science and Theoretical Physics and was offered a job with a Derivative company in London, but having spent a year in Spain studying Physics as part of her degree, Melissa decided to travel and see a bit more of the world first.
Whilst working in French Alps the Enniskillen native met a billionaire who was impressed with her cocktail-making skills and offered her a job on his SuperYacht, something she initially politely declined.
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She told Be: "I worked as a bartender during my time studying at University and I was their bar trainer so I would travel around the UK training up their other bartenders in cocktail making. He said to me I seemed very knowledgeable about cocktails and offered me a job but I said 'no that sounds a bit posh to me'. He said if I was interested to come to the South of France in the summer and said there were plenty of jobs there."
After chatting to her friends she was travelling with, the three of them set off for the South of France where she trained for work on yachts.
"So we did the whole course firefighting, sea survival, all the medicals, first aid the whole thing and then we did the dock walk. On my first day out dock walking I met a girl that used to be in the Alps as well and she asked if I could cook and I said 'yeah, well my dad's a chef and a baker, how hard could it be?' So she asked me back the next day for a trial.
"I went back the next day and my friends were laughing because I didn't even cook at home, my boyfriend did, so I went back and it was horrifically hard but they loved the food and I was decent enough, I had been baking bread from when I was younger so I blagged my way through and got it.
"My friends and I were actually living in this little caravan where yachties would stay when they were looking for work. So total rags to riches, I would go to work on a superyacht and then come home to this wee caravan. I could stay on the yacht but I went back to my friends for the first few weeks to bring them food and money, it was mad. Then I'd be back to work the next week cooking for the rich and famous."
Melissa continued: "Half the job was cooking which was just for the crew so that was easy, then the other half of the day I'd be helping the girls and I thought I would be working with the best trained in the world, but these girls didn't even know how to open champagne so I luckily I had all these qualifications from my part-time job when I was at Uni, so I taught them how to make cocktails and open champagne.
"One day I was cleaning toilet bowls with toothbrushes and cue tips and I thought, what are you doing? I have just done a Masters degree for four years and I am upside down in this toilet with a cotton bud, and I was like this isn't the life for me. I did a year there and really put the graft in but I did fall in love with cooking."
Her love of cooking inspired Melissa to pursue it further and she returned home and went to Dublin where she took an intensive three-month course at the Lynda Booth Cookery school.
Determined to make it as a chef, the Enniskillen woman offered her services for free in a five-star hotel in Enniskillen, two different Michelin star restaurants and anywhere she could build up experience for six months before she jumped back on a yacht where she worked her way up quickly to Head Chef and hasn't looked back 12 years on.
"I wouldn't change it for the world, you have your highest of highs on some days and the lowest of lows, there is never a normal day. I was Eric Clapton's private chef for a summer and that was phenomenal he was a lovely man. I've worked for most of the Saudi Royal families and a couple of the huge Tech moguls from America. I've also worked with a few different Queen's of Hollywood as well, it's been wild."
Having loved fashion and art since her school days the 35-year-old was then inspired to create her own clothing line, which would focus on timeless capsule pieces, rather than fast fashion.
"I loved art at school, I was always very creative and loved drawing and sketches of shoes and bags and I just stumbled upon this passion whilst I was travelling. I always had very nice pieces because I bought my clothes from all over the world, I was never a fast-fashion kind of girl and not because I could afford it, I grew up on a council estate and I didn't have money for clothes, and if I had of stayed in the UK I would have fallen into the fast-fashion bracket.
"But because at 21 I ended up working on a yacht, when you're in Greece you don't have your H&M so you learn to buy less and buy better, and that's how my wardrobe started and how my style evolved.
"The Melissa dress in my collection is inspired from when I trained and studied in Japan and I bought this vintage kimono and drew inspiration from the sleeves of it and modernised it into the linen dress that we have now. I changed the material and I wanted it to be sustainable, I wanted it to be something that people can actually wear for years and years.
"So you know that dress in your wardrobe that you've had a while and you look amazing in, I want to encourage people to wear and wear again, be seen in it again and again and just change the narartive that you always need to be seen in something different."
Melissa is still working on SuperYachts alongside working on her fashion brand and says it's not all lifestyles of the rich and famous as she found out recently whilst working with a Hollywood star.
"It's not as glamourous as it sounds really, it's very time-consuming. I took a job on recently with a very famous celebrity, we call her the mum of Hollywood and she was lovely, but everything else was absolute hell. I worked for 21 hours some days and the Galley was so, so dirty and I took it on as the two chefs got Covid and they were already mid-trip when I flew out.
"I've done this for over a decade but I've never seen a boat in such poor condition, it was beautiful what the guests could see but behind the scenes it wasn't. Either the crew hadn't been trained well enough or they just didn't know and hadn't been keeping it the way they should have so that was 12 days of absolute hell. Then at the same time I had my social media manager breathing down my neck asking for content for TikTok and Instagram for the fashion brand."
Melissa has not only been showcasing her fashion brand and educating people on eco-conscious and sustainable fashion but also unveiling secrets of her encounters with some celebrities and what really goes on below deck on those luxury boats.
"I've been doing my TikToks telling tales about what happens on board and the things that happen all the time so some of them have really caught on. There's also ones on there about gatecrashing a party with P-Diddy and some other antics over the years which people will enjoy trying to figure out who they're about."
Melissa's brand has launched worldwide via their website and exclusively with Wolf and Badger, the leading sustainable, luxury marketplace and she hopes that her pieces will make people think twice about their wardrobes.
"People would always stop me in the street and ask where my clothes were from but it's only because my pieces were different. I put my ethos out at the start that I wanted it to be an eco-conscious brand, I wanted it to be a career but it wasn't going to be about money. It was going to be sustainable materials, completely recycled packaging so the bags the dresses come in are decompostible, I wanted it to be beautiful but I didn't want it to be at the expense of the environment.
"I'd like to sell clothes, but I also want to make a difference," she added.
You can find more about Melissa and her clothing brand on TikTok and Instagram.
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