Naomi Simson

Pictured: Lorna Elms and Naomi Simson

Naomi Simson used to dream about being an artist. It was her mother who suggested a university degree in marketing, and today the successful founder of gift experience business RedBalloon is an award-winning entrepreneur and author. One of the most important lessons her mum taught her? That equal opportunity is something worth fighting for.

My mother, absolutely, is a feminist; she believes in an equal, balanced voice. Unfortunately, ‘feminism’ is a word that has been hijacked by some people, and repurposed as having anti-men sentiments; my mother is definitely not a supporter of those ideas. Mum knows that without the love and support of Dad – they have been married for 55 years – her life and career would not have been the same.

Mum’s all about equal opportunity and making sure that everything that is available to men is available to women. Mum both worked and shared the load at home, and this made her a great role model. She led by example, and I learned from the early days that there could be a lovely balance in any relationship.

My dad is equally a feminist. He was always amazing in terms of washing dishes, or putting a load of washing on – he was always supporting Mum in all of the domestic duties and it was like that for all of us. We all just chipped in and no one had specific jobs. It’s the same in our house today; it’s not one person’s job to do the cooking or do the dishes – we are all in it together and we have to pitch in.

My parents’ relationship as equal partners made me sure of what I wanted for my own family. I have taught these beliefs to my son and my daughter – they are independent souls, but share my family values. I’m grateful that both my parents taught me these lessons.

In the household I grew up in, everything was equal, every­body contributed and everyone just pitched in. There was an expectation that we would take care of our own financial future.

I cannot tell you how normal that is for me. I have young women come up to me who are getting married and who didn’t have mothers who were the sort of role model my mother was, and they automatically slip into doing everything for their husbands and then wonder why they are exhausted.

Mum never said: ‘Don’t be an artist,’ but I do remember my art teacher saying that a career as an artist might mean that I would be starving in a garret. It certainly wasn’t the most inspirational thing that anybody has ever said to me. That was probably when I was about fourteen or fifteen.

Mum knew that I had a creative soul but she also knew that I needed to be financially accountable for my own future, so she said she could see me in a career in marketing and sales. We used to watch the fabulous television program Bewitched, where Darrin – or was it Darryl? – was working in advertising and was always drawing pictures. I thought that was what working in an advertising agency must be like, and so Mum explained to me how, in another side of advertising called marketing, you work for the business instead of the agency. It was Mum who took me on that journey and it was very much under her encouragement that I went to university.

My mum had the idea that your education wasn’t finished until you finished university. The idea that high school was the end was never entertained in my household – it was just, go to primary school, go to high school, go to university and then you have finished your education. There were three stages to education and that was how it was done.

I fell in love with university – the whole idea of it. I just did the work, no fuss. I’ve got a B.Comm, with majors in Economics, Commercial Law, Business Administration and Marketing. I found it very interesting, but I know that I learned more during my time working for IBM in New York than I did the whole time I was at university. University sets you up with the foundation, but real world experience is priceless.

You see, in those days, you couldn’t do a major in marketing at university. It was only a sub-major as part of business management administration. I remember my very first lecture in marketing because I was like: ‘Finally, I am here and I have done all this other stuff to finally get here,’ but then it was completely disappointing and I just thought: ‘Is this all it is?’ I really wasn’t sure what I wanted to do.

I think when kids are in high school they are offered such a narrow view of the world. Who do you see? You see teachers, you see police, you see nurses and you don’t really know what is available to you as a career. The one thing that I have told all of the young people in my life is to just be curious and interested in what they are learning at university, because it’s their ability to understand and enquire – rather than what they are actually learning – that will hold them in good stead. Being interested is important. I don’t know if I was particularly interested all the time, but I am very glad I can read a balance sheet and also very glad I can read a profit and loss statement – for me, economics was a generalist, broad degree that let me eventually find my passion. I’m glad Mum directed me that way.

My earliest memories of my mum began when I was at preschool – she would go off to work wearing fabulous heels and suits. I knew from a very early age that she was achieving what I wanted to achieve when I was grown up.

I always had a general idea of what Mum did. She talked about her work and she talked about it with pride, but I never knew exactly what she was working on. I do know it gave her independence – and financial independence, more importantly – and I do remember that was important because there wasn’t a lot of money in our house.

She worked with computers and she used to bring home punch cards and computer print-outs that we used to draw on and use for craft. I would bring them in for show-and-tell, and say: ‘Here is what Mummy worked on.’ I know a lot of the other mothers didn’t work.

Mum worked nine till three throughout my primary school years, so she was still always there at the end of the day, at home making dinner. Often, after school, we would go and play with a friend anyway. That’s what life was like then. I think she went full-time once we went to high school.

My parents were very young when they married. My father put himself through his post-graduate degree in engineering and so he was working hard as a part-time student as well. They were both very hard workers, my parents.

These days, they squabble like children sometimes, but after fifty-five years they are a part of each other. I mean, Mum will often say: ‘Oh, your father – he never stops working. He’s retired and he is working as hard as ever.’ And he says: ‘Oh, your mother, she…’ They’re hilarious, but they love each other.

My dad ran a great small business. He was an expert in the area that he worked in and was very highly regarded – but he would never have grown it to be a big business. It wasn’t the way he thought. My mother enjoyed being part of a bigger organisation – she worked with Aspect Computing for years.

My parents don’t have a very large group of friends particularly, whereas I seem to gather people all the time. I love entertaining and I have a lot of people around – lots of family and lots of kids. It’s the opposite of how we were brought up, really. Dinner time when we were kids was pretty quiet. Dad liked to watch the news and so we didn’t talk much. In my own house, in contrast, there is always conversation going on and I love that.

I had the best childhood. Mum and Dad would bundle us up in the station wagon and we would go camping. Our family holidays were usually just down at Wilsons Promontory or somewhere but we always had a great time.

I travelled overseas for three years after university and my mother did nothing but encourage me. I left to travel to New York at the age of twenty, probably three days after I finished my exams. The only place I had ever been overseas before I went to New York was New Zealand. No matter what my mother’s fear was about a young girl going to live in New York, she never let me know it, and now my own daughter has left to go on exchange at the age of nineteen to Istanbul. She is at Bahçeşehir University studying Applied Mathematics. I had to suck it up and encourage her and support her, and let her know what a wonderful adventure it would be, no matter how fearful I was. I guess I learned that from my mother. My mum, of course, would have preferred me to stay at home, but she knew she had raised somebody who was going to go off and have adventures, and I, too, have raised an adventurer who is going to have a big life and do wonderful things. So, my job now is to just celebrate and applaud my daughter and pick her up occasionally when she falls, but that is what we do and that is what my mother taught me – you support others to live their dreams; you encourage people to greatness and you don’t let your fear get in their way.

Now that my daughter has gone off to Istanbul I’ve asked: ‘So, Mum, how was it when I went off to New York?’ She said: ‘You know, in those days we didn’t have internet or Facebook or anything…’ I don’t know how she did it as a mother.

I mean, we had letters but I was travelling in South America. I thought that I was writing them every week but I didn’t realise that mail took four months to get there. When I left South America I called them and they were just beside themselves because they hadn’t heard from me in all the time I had been away. I’d been writing because it was too expensive to call... In hindsight I should have just picked up the phone. Now it is just so easy for my daughter to send me a text to let me know she is okay.

Another thing I remember is that when I was growing up, Mum was angry with me a lot. I am sure ours was not the only mother-daughter relationship to be tried and tested during adolescence! I remember her saying: ‘You know, you have been given the gift of the gab and you can use that for good or evil, but right now, I think it’s evil.’

I was a very spirited teenager and was always challenging authority, including my teachers, so I suspect that my parents are relieved that I have turned out okay and that I have fabulous children and a job. When I became a mother, I made both my parents swear they were never allowed to tell my teenagers all the things I got up to in my teens. They’ve completely respected that. Still, being a parent of teenagers is not without its challenges. What do they say about the worst two years of a girl’s life? When she is 14 and when her daughter is 14. My mum is pretty articulate but, even now, it’s not a natural thing for her to say ‘well done’. I know she is proud of me – I know – but it’s not really something she would talk about.

My mum always believed in me, there is no doubt about that – she absolutely believed in me. Of course, once you become a parent you finally appreciate what your parents went through and how it is a biological love you have no control over. Your parents might not like you all the time but they do deeply love you, which is quite confounding sometimes. I think my son knows that because when he gets up to mischief, he makes sure to say: ‘I know you’ll always love me, Mum,’ and I think: ‘You bugger!’

My daughter’s in Istanbul so I can’t be too strict, can I? My job as a mother is to encourage my children to greatness, so when they play dumb or play small and say ‘I can’t,’ my job is to just keep challenging them to let them discover that they can.

Mum always had a hobby on the go – sculpture, squash, yoga. She always had some creative outlet to turn to. She could knit, too – I mean, she had all sorts of pursuits. That said, I definitely didn’t learn how to cook from my mother. Cooking was just not her thing. I think her attitude was: ‘I have to feed these people – they need food,’ and it was a meat-and-three-veg solution, really. Nothing very adventurous.

Cooking aside, I believe my mother has a high IQ and a great amount of empathy for others. She is a generous listener and she always took the time to listen to me, too. Being truly present with someone is something she taught me and I live by that every day.

I sometimes don’t recognise the similarities at all between my parents, myself, and my sister. We are very different people. My parents, by nature, are quite conservative. I highly doubt either of them would be caught eating dog food on national television like I did in an episode of Shark Tank. What is intrinsically important to us, what drives us and how we connect with other people – we share those same ethical and family values. It is our paths that have been quite different. But that is to be celebrated in families. My sister is solid, she is consistent. I think Mum would say I am fun.

Mum hasn’t mothered me for years, no matter how I have asked for it. From the moment I left home when I was twenty, I have been independent. My parents have been there for love and support, but I am on my own journey. You have got to make it on your own. There was never any expectation that I could put my hand out and ask for any money or anything like that – absolutely, no way. Mum’s attitude was: ‘We’ve provided the education, now off you go.’

My husband and I are lucky to have all four of our parents alive. We have wonderful dinner parties about twice a year for the six of us, and that is when we get to be the children again. They are hilarious nights when we get together. I know how to have fun with my parents but it is usually when there are no grandchildren there!

I think my mum looks at her four grandchildren and thinks that they are a little wild. From my perspective, they are just who they are. Occasionally, she brings her 1950s values out to play and the kids have no idea what she is talking about. She can disconnect with her grandchildren pretty easily. This doesn’t bother me in the slightest – after all, she is who she is, and she raised me with those values. Our kids will understand that in a few years’ time.

When it comes to me being in magazines or on TV, Mum is so cute. We almost never talk about it, but occasionally she’ll ask something like: ‘Why did they choose that red lipstick for you? It’s quite bright.’ Despite the fact that it’s not a frequent topic of conversation for us, when I go over there she’s got a whole folder full of clippings from the newspaper, and she passes them over to me in case I haven’t seen them – as if I am keeping a scrapbook I might want to put them in or something.

She sent me an email overnight that said: ‘Somebody has remembered that I am your mother – they need a donation for a RedBalloon voucher. I told them you get these requests all the time, but thought I would ask anyhow.’ My mum, I guess, is humble and proud of my success at the same time. I am sure she gets quite a kick from her friends knowing her daughter is ‘that RedBalloon lady’, but Mum being Mum, she would never admit to it.

I really like our time together. She recently came to visit and we had the whole weekend – just the two of us. We saw the Archibald Prize entries and we did some cooking together. We both have improved in the kitchen over the years, and I like to show her a few things nowadays. When the rest of the family is involved, everything kind of gets distracted, so I prefer to have her to myself. That’s when she really is herself for me – not being a grandmother and not doing whatever she thinks she should be doing. She’s just Mum.

We over-analyse everything these days. Back when I was a kid we just did stuff, and now we theorise and philosophise about everything we do. The truth is, we are just all muddling our way through. When it comes to family, we love them for all that they are, and all that they are not, and that is the funny thing about families. We see what they are not so great at as clearly as we see the things that they are great at – people come as a complete package and I think that is the way Mum has always seen me. She sees all of my idiosyncrasies and failings, and often, you know, family see failings more clearly than anybody else because they are concerned that you will crash and burn. They just want to protect you. They just want to see you happy, and to know that you’re doing just fine.