From Boulder to Brandon, new resident brings career in styling to area women

Book a style consultation with Patricia Be, and you’ll likely walk out uplifted.

In at least two senses of the world.

Because when Patricia Be — officially Patricia Belanger, but she prefers the nickname — sits down with her clients for a styling session, almost invariably she counsels them to throw away their old brassieres and substitute them for ones that fit.

“You need to get those boobs close to where they should be, get them together,” she tell the clients who come to her for advice. “The designer means for that bra to be in a certain place.”

From there, she moves on to other elements of her client’s style, asking a lot of questions: Does she wear shells, jackets and pants? Is she a dress girl? Does she like jewelry? What kind of purse does she like to carry?

“I will put the whole thing together and totally transform her,” Patricia Be said. “I know I’m on the right track, I know I’m on my way. It’s all about finding the pieces she needs. And there’s no charge for any of my advice or expertise. It’s part of my spiritual mission.”

While Patricia Be believes that clothes make the woman, you see, she also knows that a higher power also is in play to make sure everyone who comes into her orbit leaves knowing that they can live their best life.

Since last fall, Patricia Be and her husband, Frank, have worked in partnership to fulfill her mission from their home in Brandon. That house — known locally as the “statue house” or the “Harley house” after former Harley-Davidson dealership owner Lonnie Entenmann and his wife,  Betty — is where Patricia Be meets her clients for conversation over coffee or tea and learns why they have been sent to her.

“Sometimes, people come to me because they like fashion or they like clothes and they notice I have a limited suggestion,” she said. “Sometimes, there’s more than clothes involved. Sometimes, they’re in transition, they’re starting a new company, or they wanted to move up in the business world. Or there’s been a divorce, and maybe she’s gained weight, or she doesn’t feel attractive. I try to understand where she is in her mindset.”

The house earlier this summer hosted the last of a series of style shows, showing women how the right pieces of clothing and accessories — and a head-held-high attitude — can make positive changes. She both produced and hosted the Makeover Magic events, using live models and a PowerPoint presentation from past shows to demonstrate how to turn bland into bling-worthy.

Her first show took place in 2011 in Colorado, where she and Frank had moved from Canada. The final show in Brandon was her 88th. In the ensuing years, Patricia Be said, she has dressed more than 1,000 women through her business named Patricia’s Big Closet. It may seem like a staggering figure but, as she points out, Boulder has appeared on the GQ list of worst-dressed cities, stressing casual and comfortable over chic. The women would wear, Patricia Be said, sweater sleeves cut down to function as wristlets.

She also started a line of skin care products after finding the dry climate of the Rocky Mountains was unkind to her skin. When the couple decided to move to South Dakota, they considered continuing with one popular product but have decided to retire that business entirely.

Patricia Be also will not add to the collection of clothing and accessories that she has gathered from willing donors in Colorado, but she plans to continue to her styling services and selling the wardrobe pieces she does have until they’re gone.

The delayed retirement is what Patricia Be calls her “service to others philosophy.”

“It’s less about making money and … more about watching women change,” she said at the final Makeover Magic show.

Dee Van Deest, president of the Minnehaha-Lincoln Republican Women, had already met with Patricia Be in a private appointment. At the show, hosted by the Brandon Valley Area Chamber of Commerce, Van Deest wore an outfit made up of items already in her wardrobe such as a shell, pants, earrings and shoes. The jacket, purse and necklace that Patricia Be had suggested kept Van Deest in the tailored, office-professional style that she prefers but with something extra.

“Patricia is a breath of fresh air,” Van Deest said. “She knows how to make women look good and feed good, so I learned those tricks, how to want to have better posture and how to want to have better-fitting clothing.”

The neutral-tone jacket she wore to Makeover Magic will allow her to go in many directions when dressing for events, Van Deest said. She also brought several other pieces, including a “beautiful Republican red jacket” to wear to political functions.

“I think women have lost the fact that we are women, and we are feminine, and we are pretty,” Van Deest said. “Patricia has awakened that again and is reminding us that we’re special, we should look and feel special, and our men appreciate it when we look and feel special. And it moves me to know that there’s a — do I want to say it? — a Christian message in her mission, the message of kindness towards one another is so important in today’s world.”

For her last show, Patricia Be chose a belted fuchsia dress with lace trim, black suede booties, a black hat and rhinestone earrings. Her models— Bridget Kraemer, who is an old friend from Colorado, and Kim Petterson, a new friend from Brandon — made several quick changes in a nearby bedroom, then walked the room while Patricia Be talked about adding this, that and the other together to make a cohesive and eye-catching outfit.

She was wearing such an outfit 14 years ago in Boulder when she made a quick trip to a Costco store for needed supplies. It would have been easy to go out in grubby work clothes, she said, but she took the time to make the effort with a leopard print, a hat and “fabulous purse.” It paid off — a total stranger came up to her in the parking lot to gush over the outfit.

Her background isn’t in fashion. Her career began in broadcasting in Canada, starting as a television producer in her early 20s. Eventually, she owned her own company, writing and producing entertainment, industrial and sports videos.

In her 30s, she ended up on the other side of the camera at a cable station and learned how much fun that could be.

But her goal after moving to Colorado was retirement.

Surprise — Patricia Be soon learned that wasn’t really an option. She had too much energy, she said, and boredom was creeping in. With Frank’s encouragement — the couple marked their 25th wedding anniversary in 2023 — they launched a business.

“If there was a perfect union of creativity and financial genius, it would be Frank. He’s my coach, my brains behind the whole thing. He has a creative mind and a business mind,” Patricia Be said. “He truly is the brains and brilliance behind all of our companies. If you love what we are doing, thank him.’

That started Patricia’s Big Closet. The business expanded when Patricia Be was asked to give a presentation on how she transformed her clients at a big women’s gathering in Colorado. She said no because, despite her TV background, she couldn’t face having all those eyes focused on her.

Frank encouraged her, however, and she asked a friend to serve as a model. It went well, as did the second one. People attending other events left to line the back of the room at her presentation, and Frank told her: “We’ve got something here. We’re going to do a great big show that’s informative and inspirational.’ We put it together in six weeks, and it kind of snowballed.”

Through women she had met in Colorado — she calls them her philanthropic partners — she was able to build up a wardrobe of high-quality clothing that could be purchased at discounted prices.

As the years went on, however, Colorado became less attractive as a place to live. Dry conditions meant extreme fire danger, and the couple went through more than a half-dozen evacuations and saw people lose their homes. They decided to move.

But why Brandon?

“The simplest answer is God brought us here,” Patricia Be said. “It was our mission to empower and help 1,000 women, and we hit our goal. Frank has a list of 14 reasons, like no state income tax, and there were many good things about Brandon. God directed him to come here. It was a leap of faith.”

When Frank saw the Entenmann house, with its hand-painted ceilings, on the market, he knew he had the right place. The whirlwind move meant there was no time to liquidate all the Patricia’s Big Closet apparel, so they moved it with them.

They decided to hold a Makeover Magic event in Brandon because the house would be a perfect background.

“We negotiated some of the furnishings with the house because everything matched. It was almost eerie. Some were ours; some were his. The bedding matched, the lamps matched. It’s a beautiful property, very unusual,” Patricia Be said.

They also wanted to continue their spiritual mission to inspire and empower women. Their new house gave them the room to do that — with no risk of wildfires, she said.

“I also can sit in my backyard without fear of being eaten,” she said. ‘No mountain lions, no bears and cougars and lynx. We had a bear coming on deck while we were shooting a video.”

Without wildlife worries, Patricia Be can focus on her free one-on-one style consultations and the resulting transformations. She doesn’t take credit for the latter, however.

“I can’t create that, that comes from her heart,” she said. “When you put clothing on a woman and make her feel beautiful, it’s very transformational. When a woman feels pretty — it’s hard to stop a woman when she’s feeling confident and good about herself. That’s where our femininity and power come from.”

To book a style consultation with Patricia Be, email her at [email protected]. The private one-on-one consultations take place by appointment only. Since it is a service she offers women, it does not take place in a retail location.