6 minute read
Certified unconventional
By Marcia Tillett-Zinzow
Lauren Poppen, CPA, holds the title of CFO at The Equitable Bank in Milwaukee, but she once held the title “Fancy Pants” when she was in high school in Hampshire, Illinois. In fact, in her senior year she was voted “most individualistic” — and there is no question that the label fit. “I think I’ve just always been a little bit quirky,” she said. “In high school I liked to wear crazy patterns of pants — and the shirts I wore probably didn’t match them.” In college, she didn’t have a colorful name, but she confesses to having a lot of different colors of hair. That she’s not an artist surprises people, especially when she tells them she’s a CPA. “Maybe I just like colors!” she said. That assessment is obvious when you drive by her house in the Grasslyn Manor neighborhood of Sherman Park in Milwaukee and see a handpainted mannequin wearing a rebar hoop skirt next to the front door. And she’s working on finishing another one, which currently resides in her living room. Poppen bought the two mannequins from Boston Store when the retail chain closed in 2018. On a lunch hour, she went to the Mayfair store just to see what was on clearance and saw that the fixtures were also being sold. “My brain just went, I need to buy mannequins so I can paint them and put them in my front yard. It just seemed like it needed to be done,” she said.
Poppen thinks the idea was likely inspired by Chicago’s “Cows on Parade,” Madison’s “Bucky on Parade” and Milwaukee’s “Beasties” — fun, colorful art objects installed throughout the cities for people to enjoy. People who drive through her neighborhood enjoy the surprise, sometimes stopping to take pictures. “There are even some families that made passing by the house a more regular stop on their walking route because their kids like to see the mannequin,” she said. Just like pets, the mannequins have names. “Irene is the one in the front yard,” she said, “and the hexagon mannequin in my living room is Veronica.” That one is her favorite because of the hexagons but also because she really likes statistics and random sampling, she said. “Veronica is more my style of art because it has a lot of rules. For example, hexagons are almost a perfect shape when it comes to filling space and efficiency. And I have placed them randomly. I have a box of 48 different colors of paint, and I used a random number generator to give the paints an order. That is how I went around and painted the hexagons,” she said. “I like that whatever the universe wanted it to be is just what Veronica is.” Poppen said it takes about a year to paint each mannequin because of the other demands on her time — like work and other personal pursuits.
Work and other endeavors
Poppen graduated from Rockford College with an accounting degree in 2006, immediately going to work for McGladrey & Pullen LLP in Rockford, Illinois. The firm had a program whereby employees who had been there for at least two years could take a leave of up to five years and be guaranteed a job when they returned. So Poppen took a year off in 2008–2009 to do volunteer work in Milwaukee. But when she was ready to come back, the firm was getting ready to cut jobs nationwide, and she found she had no job to go back to. “I applied for jobs in both Rockford and Milwaukee,” she said. “I got a job offer in Milwaukee but none in Rockford, so I stayed.” She was hired by M&I Bank as an internal auditor and stayed until 2013. In 2014, she joined The Equitable Bank as assistant controller. Five years later, just as the bank was moving through a stock offering, the controller position was vacated, and Poppen moved into it. About a year later, the person who was CFO was promoted to president & CEO, and Poppen was offered her position. She took it on last July. Poppen said she enjoys the challenge of the work she’s doing at the bank, but she also really likes the environment of a community bank. “It’s a small workforce, and I’m able to know all of my employees pretty well. It’s just a positive working environment,” she said. “It’s also really nice to know that we’re having impact in the community, whether it’s walking a first-time homebuyer through the mortgage process or working with ACTS Housing and other programs to help people get grants for down payment assistance.”
She is also an entrepreneur of sorts as part owner of the Greenbush Growing Co-op, a community farming venture and CSA (community-supported agriculture, which allows consumers to buy locally grown foods). In December 2020, she and a group of friends purchased land in Plymouth. This is their first year of having a CSA, which is fairly small with about 30 full shares.
Poppen is “kind of the on-site food preservationist” of the group, partly because she doesn’t live in the farmhouse with other owners. “While I’m not directly accessible to help with chores every day, I do try to get up there at least once a week to spend time with the group,” she said. The night before she was interviewed happened to be the night the Milwaukee Bucks won the NBA Championship, and she was in the process of preserving 15 to 20 pounds of garlic scapes, so she missed the game. “I heard my neighbors setting off fireworks, so I assumed they won,” she said.
Love for community
Poppen loves living in Sherman Park. “It’s a very diverse and friendly community,” she said. “I’ve been spending a lot more time working on my yard this year, and I probably have met more neighbors than I have over the last four summers combined. There are a lot of people who really care about the neighborhood.” Currently, Poppen is working on restoring her depressionera house (built in 1931) to its original 1930s flavor. There are some things that she won’t have to do; for example, the interior woodwork has never been painted, so it’s all natural. Other things, such as taking up all the tile, linoleum and carpet to expose the wood floors, she’s already done. “I had those refinished,” she said, “and I hired a company to refurbish all of my storms and screens when I had the house painted.” The house is brick, but all the trim had been painted bright blue, and Poppen wanted a more historically appropriate color palette “and also to have more than one color on the trim, as that’s generally how houses were in the ’30s,” she said. “So I had it painted in two tones of color. I was going to do that myself, but after things got busier with the stock offering at work, I decided that was never going to happen.” As for the mannequins, she’s still trying to find time to finish Veronica’s hexagons and install her in the front yard with Irene. And she would like to place another mannequin — one that is seated — in her backyard. “I don’t know where I can find one other than the internet, but I’m hoping there is a local fixture store that might have one. The only one I knew about closed during COVID,” she said. So if you know anyone with a spare seated mannequin …
Marcia Tillett-Zinzow is a Wisconsin freelance writer and editor. Contact her at mtzinzow@icloud.com.
