The founder and CEO of Australian custom uniform business Total Image Group wants to grow her company by 30 per cent over the next two years. Some may consider this an ambitious target considering the current economy, but Pamela Jabbour has more than a few tricks up her sleeve.
Some of these tricks are well-known, like boosting team morale, striving for discipline and maintaining consistency, but other strategies are a bit more nuanced. Think price structures and tapping into artificial intelligence.
On top of that, the uniform supplier is reportedly on a hot streak, boasting 17 per cent growth over 2024 and 2025, with Jabbour saying this is actually less than anticipated given the pipeline they were working towards and based on what their historical close rate has been like. Over that time, Total Image Group has designed and supplied uniforms to the likes of Woolworths, Harvey Norman, Honda, Raine & Horne and Park Royal Hotels & Resorts.
Jabbour says Total Image has had the biggest pipeline over the last two years since she founded the company 20 years ago. As is always the case in business, she has faced many rejections, and part of that is because the market is so tough. To put salt on the wound, Total Image came second in the vast majority of these no's.
“I've been equating it to a business war, where I've seen big businesses and big competitors just have tactics that, in the 20 years of running this business, I've never seen,” Jabbour says.
“Think prices. You can try and compete with them and battle them at that level, which is what we were doing in the past, but it's not true to who we are and the market we want to service.
“We want to find our own space where there are businesses that value what we offer, and it's not a race to the bottom in terms of margin. That's where I was seeing margin go down, because to win business, we were having to compromise on what we would normally charge, sometimes by a lot… there's compromise and then there's compromise.”
Total Image Group runs a contract-based model, with the onboarding process including 3D designing, multi-location management, marketing, logistics, and a custom online portal for a company’s staff to place their individual orders for outfits.
Jabbour says the contract-based uniforms system can be painful if it's not controlled. There can be many stakeholders involved, and waiting for the results after presenting pitches to a boardroom can drag a year. She says where Total Image thrives, and what they prefer, is a deadline date they can work towards.
In recent years, the business has designed uniforms for the Australian Winter Olympics team, and Jabbour says her team had eight weeks to design and present to the Australian Olympic Committee.
“If they don't have a timeline, we expect the design process to take anywhere from six to 12 months, which is a long time,” Jabbour says. “Some have taken longer when they have a date, like a conference where it needs to be signed off for a rebrand launch.
“Our preferred timing is three months on design.”
For the custom order site in particular, Total Image Group has been leveraging AI to speed up the build of each personalised website with fewer developers.
“Coding is a great example. It's earmarked as an industry that has been hit the hardest in terms of job replacement. Not taking away from that, but we would have had to have four or five developers involved, where now we just need one. That's a huge cost saving,” Jabbour says.
“And then the speed at which we can launch is a lot faster. Something like a systems review and an overhaul of our e-commerce would have taken two or three years of planning, failing, tightening, execution, whereas we know we can achieve that same thing in a 12 month period.”
Jabbour adds that this hasn’t required a material increase in investment, but simply a redirection. She says a key factor in these company-wide changes came from its B Corp certification. In April 2025, Total Image became the first Australian uniform company to gain B Corp status, hitting a maiden score of 84.6.
“When we first did the test, I did it with my sustainability manager just to understand what was involved before I could commit to going on this journey, and I was shocked at how bad our test score was. For me, being super competitive, I saw it as an opportunity to rework how we did things, and that it would give us an edge. Because when we tender, when we pitch all this content and process and policy that we're creating.”
Ultimately, Jabbour says uniforms are a representation of a business. If it comes cheap, then that could cheapen your brand. It's also getting replaced far quicker, which is no good for the environment.
“We almost got caught up in that, where it's easy to be like, We want this contract. It's a huge name. It would be amazing. Let's compromise margin, compromise price, lose money on it. But then it becomes an ego-based business.
“We are for profit. We can do so much more when we make a profit. I'm not ashamed of that. And it's been a tough few years for all businesses, particularly post-COVID, and it's taken a long time to recover. If I jump on that [pricing] bandwagon now, there's no coming back.”