Heather Carulli spent 25 years helping other people build businesses before she finally asked herself a fairly obvious question: what if she built the thing that was already in her head?

The answer became Love Spell, a small, defiantly colourful shop on Piper Street in Kyneton. It arrived out of a sequence of events that don’t immediately seem connected: a career in fashion and corporate life in New York, a move across the world, becoming a mother at 49, a pandemic and, eventually, a shop that Heather insists was never really about clothes.

“New York and New Jersey is in my DNA,” she says. “It taught me to be curious, work hard, notice everything and never be afraid to ask, ‘Why can’t we do it differently?’”

She didn’t come to Australia hoping to reproduce New York in miniature. In fact, she wanted precisely the opposite: a different kind of life. What surprised her was how readily she fell for regional Australia, and particularly Kyneton.

“Kyneton gave me something I didn’t know I was looking for,” she says. “It gave me a place to belong.”

Love Spell began during the pandemic. After a quarter of a century working inside other people’s businesses, Heather wanted to create the place she herself wanted to enter: “Something colourful, feminine, a little loud and completely unapologetic.”

“So I did,” she says. “It was either incredibly brave or completely insane. Probably both.”

The shop is an expression of Heather’s particular understanding of femininity. Not as a set of rules, but the freedom to ignore them. A woman can wear a tiny dress, leopard print, sequins, jeans or men’s tailoring. She can change her mind the following morning.

“I think women spend an enormous amount of their lives being told to tone things down,” Heather says. “Don’t be too loud, too sexy, too ambitious, too old, too much.”

Her alternative is wonderfully succinct: “More you. Louder.”

That philosophy became more urgent after Heather became a mother at 49. After what she describes as an extraordinary journey involving an egg donor and surrogacy, her son, Wolf, arrived. Motherhood changed, above all, her understanding of time.

“Life suddenly felt very finite.”

She wants Wolf to grow up watching his mother take risks, make mistakes, remain ambitious and create things. “I don’t want him to see a woman who decided she had to become smaller once she became a parent.”

Perhaps this explains why Love Spell has gradually expanded beyond the conventional boundaries of a shop. Heather hosts gatherings, VIP nights and events. The fitting room becomes somewhere conversations happen. Champagne is opened. People arrive separately and sometimes leave together.

“A shop can sell you a dress,” she says. “A community can make you feel like you belong.”

That idea has spilled onto Piper Street itself. Heather became involved in bringing traders together through Piper Street After Dark, trying to give visitors a reason not simply to shop but to stay. Independent businesses, she believes, make a town recognisable. Lose enough of them and a place begins to lose its personality.

“I don’t believe in competing for the same pie,” she says. “I believe in making the pie bigger.”

Now Love Spell is preparing to travel again. A second store is set to open in Daylesford’s new Rex Arcade this spring. Heather is excited about the expansion, but talks more about the people she will meet than the square metres she will occupy.

Her definition of success has changed too. Once, it might have involved becoming a CEO. Now it is creating jobs, supporting other businesses, empowering women and making her “little corner of the world a little more magical”.

She remains ambitious. She wants Love Spell to grow. But growth, after 25 years in corporate life, is no longer enough.

“I want to build something with soul,” she says.

Maybe that is why Love Spell works. Clothes are tangible things: they can be bought, bagged and taken home. What Heather is attempting to build around them is less easily measured.

“The clothes get you through the door,” she says.

“The people make you want to stay.”

Love Spell
56 Piper Street, Kyneton
lovespell.com.au

STORY BY MAHMOOD FAZAL
PHOTOS BY KAIYA RAE