Angela Beer has been a global success with her Hello Dolly range of tools.

Angela Beer has been a global success with her Hello Dolly range of tools.

Watching DIY entrepreneur Angela Beer totter down a steep driveway in 10cm heels and designer fur-trimmed coat, it's hard to picture her on a building site. She's clutching an over-sized handbag, not a 30-piece toolkit.

"Sorry I'm late. I took the wrong turning off the motorway," chirps Beer.

Beer launched Hello Dolly in 2006, with five products, meagre funds and a huge ambition to go global. The range now includes 37 products and another 15 are in the pipeline. It retails in 700 stores throughout New Zealand and 2000 in Australia and Beer has lost track of the international stores carrying the range.

She has also forged partnerships with six distributors operating in Britain, Australia, Singapore and Malaysia, Canada, the Middle East and Europe.

Real blokes might scoff at the ultra-feminine Hello Dolly range of DIY tools. Surely the hammer with dainty pink handle and diamantes isn't up for the job?

"Well, that sucks," says one Hello Dolly devotee. "They may weigh less but they do a bloody good job."

Passing through my half-Gibbed hallway, Beer looks unfazed, and yes, she's been through the hassles of renovating.

Beer, 35, has a worldwide following for her range of DIY products. There's a toolkit for the home and garden, and even a raunchy one for the bedroom (think sexy negligee, riding crop and spanking paddle).

"The women who appreciate my brand are intelligent, feminine and have a sense of fun. And men love it too 30 per cent of my customers are men."

Back in New Zealand after nearly six months promoting the brand overseas, Beer says her mother was the inspiration for the DIY brand, after raising four children on her own.

But isn't the pink branding a bit, well, girly? "I've managed to offend a few feminists, but if you don't know I'm taking the piss by calling it 'Hello Dolly' then you don't get the brand. What's more, the colour pink is less a feminist issue and more a practical business decision when you're manufacturing in the thousands- but I do want more colours."

With 12 years' experience in sales and marketing, Beer was a year into researching her idea when a friend entered her for the New Zealand series of Dragons' Den.

In her scene-stealing debut in August 2006, Beer appeared before the potential investors as the fairy godmother of femininity with a team of pink-clad models demonstrating how the idea would bring flair to the soberly constructed tools of the trade.