INTERVIEW
Rising to a wild new challenge After living much of her working life overseas to date, Lisa Friis has now taken on a new challenge as CEO for WildTomato magazine and WildMedia. Editor Lynda Papesch finds the company’s new chief is a determined DIYer who lives by the creed that women can do anything. PHOTOGRAPHY AIMEE JULES
E
xperts say that to understand the child, one should look to the parents. WildTomato’s new CEO Lisa Friis is an excellent example of that. Full of praise for her upbringing, she credits her parents, especially the example from her mother, with helping to shape her into the strong, successful individual that she is today. Along the way she faced numerous challenges such as learning to live and work with dyslexia and in male-dominated working environments. With no university qualification to her name, she has risen high in investment banking internationally in the United Kingdom, Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong. Now she’s using her considerable skills to continue the success of Nelson Tasman and Marlborough’s only local lifestyle magazine WildTomato and its marketing and social media arm WildMedia. Born in Auckland to Danish parents, Karen Elisabeth Friis – aka Lisa – is a first-generation Kiwi, unashamedly proud of
her birth country. Indeed, wanting her daughter Charlotte to have a ‘Kiwi kid’ upbringing is what brought her home to New Zealand and specifically to Nelson Tasman after decades of working abroad. She grew up in Auckland after mum Vibeke married her dad Peter and migrated there from Scandinavia. “Mum arrived in New Zealand aged 21 and pregnant, ready to start a new life. Mum and Dad have always been such hard workers, they don’t do I can’t. They thrived and so did we.” Her mother, she explains is Danish but grew up in Sweden where she went to an elite photography school, notwithstanding the fact it was a male-only domain. In Auckland, Vibeke and Peter ran their own business with Lisa and her siblings helping out and learning valuable skills along the way. “Slave labour,” laughs Lisa fondly. A move from Titirangi to a four hectare lifestyle block at Kumeu when she was nine brought new impetus for Lisa and the start of a life-long love affair with animals. “I loved it; I’d spend all my spare time on the farm with Dad, such a great childhood; I was a complete tomboy.” In the meantime she struggled through school because of her dyslexia, until her mother came to the fore, helping with special tutorial sessions during the day. “I remember saying to my mother a few years back that I would give my right arm not to be dyslexic; that if I could spell I could rule the world. Her answer was that if I had been able to spell, I wouldn’t have had the challenges that I overcame to be the person I am today.”
Photo: Peter Friis
With no university qualification to her name, she has risen high in investment banking internationally in the United Kingdom, Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong. 20
