Lucy Folk on family values, creativity and living boldly
From eclectic designs to enterprising endeavours, the jewellery designer and her entrepreneur father Pitzy explore the shared values that shape their fearless approach to life and work.
The Folk family likes spending time together. But don’t ask them to tell you where they go on their annual family holiday because they won’t share the specifics.
“We just fall off the radar,” says patriarch Pitzy Folk.
“When you’re there, you actually meet people and feel like you’re not such a tourist. You’re kind of living somewhere,” adds his daughter Lucy of the escape plan for their extended tribe, including her two children Malon and Lala.
“We go to the same place every year. We have for years and we know the people. It’s a small island. We love it,” says Pitzy.
Lucy’s son, three-and-a-half-year-old Malon, is her father’s shadow.
“He’s dad’s best friend,” says Lucy.
“I’m absolutely obsessed with him,” adds Pitzy.
“Malon and Lala are my two loves of life. And it’s a very different relationship to your children.”
“It’s less complicated?” asks Lucy with a laugh.
“Children are constant, it’s all the time, where grandchildren, it’s just good times,” says Pitzy.
Folk senior, whose long career in hospitality has included owning several cafes and restaurants, co-founding Map coffee, and most recently the Australian mineral water and mixers brand Capi, is firm on the idea that he could never work for anybody other than himself. It’s a belief Lucy also shares. “I think for creative people or creatives, it’s very difficult to work for other people because you have such set ideas and you know exactly where you’re going and suddenly you’ve got somebody else interfering in that. It’s very difficult and I’ve learned with my team to actually let them go their own way because otherwise you just become too dominant,” says Pitzy.
“We don’t really like being told what to do and also perhaps we are just excited to kind of give something a go and that’s where obviously having that support for each other and knowing that if you fail it’s OK [comes in],” adds Lucy.
For the jewellery and fashion designer, doing things differently, and in her own way, has included opening stores in Melbourne and Sydney’s Bondi and Paddington, creating a fashion film with her friend, director Sophie Edelstein, that was shown during the 2015 Venice Biennale, collaborating with Levi’s in 2022 and designing the uniforms for the artist-run Hotel Corazón, which opened in Mallorca last year.
“I think the reason why I started jewellery and even opened a store was because a store became available in my favourite street in Melbourne, which is Crosley Street, where [Melbourne espresso institution] Pellegrini’s backs onto. And it was a very iconic street for food and we’re such foodies that I was really excited about having a hole-in-the-wall jewellery store as opposed to a boutique in a traditional kind of retail precinct. I was like, ‘If this store ever comes up, let me know’. And then within a few months it came up and then I opened my first store and that was in 2011 and it kind of just went from there,” she says of her intuitive way of starting her own business.
Lucy Folk’s Melbourne headquarters are in Pitzy’s office and she enjoys the way her father greets all of her staff in the morning.
“In business and life you spend so much time with your team that it becomes your family and it becomes very intimate in a really nice way and you have to be vulnerable in that. And I think in a sense we have kind of blurred the lines a bit with family and business. He’s upstairs and my team’s downstairs,” she says.
“I’m the old fogey who turns up and annoys the shit out of them,” jokes Pitzy.
“But when you walk in, you greet my team like you would greet me in the morning … and it’s this really beautiful, nice positive start to the day and they feel part of my family because they’re exposed to you guys. They kind of understand me better because they are exposed to my mum [interior designer Annie] and dad. Sometimes that’s kind of annoying, but mostly it’s actually really wonderful to be able to share who you really are with everybody.”
Pitzy sees other similarities between how he and Lucy approach both work and life.
“We are very, very similar … I’m like Lucy, I’m so fixated on where I want to be that really, I just can’t see anything along the way. I can’t see hurdles. You have that pathway and that’s where you want to go ….”
“We’re optimists,” says Lucy.
“But you have to be. If you’re a pessimist, you could never create anything. There are too many failures along the way,” adds Pitzy.
“You are very rational and practical as well. Whereas I’m not,” protests Lucy.
“I think that’s where we are different because I’m much more up in the clouds and you’ve got your feet on the ground.”
“But the rationality or practicality has come out of necessity because you have to succeed, you have to be rational and you have to be practical and … that’s why it’s no point putting your head up there because the reality is down here,” says Pitzy.
“Mine travels up there quicker than yours,” says Lucy, laughing with her father.
Lucy and Pitzy sat down with WISH at Lucy’s breezy Sunshine Coast home to interview each other about creativity, hospitality, and the qualities they admire in one another both as people and in business.
LUCY FOLK: What’s your best piece of advice?
PITZY FOLK: Don’t take yourself too seriously and don’t worry what other people think. Never fear making mistakes. Because what’s the worst thing that can happen? And to be patient. Patience is a virtue because when you do things slowly I think you understand how to do things better. And look, failure is part of success. If you don’t fail, you haven’t tried hard enough.
LF: [So it’s about] being comfortable making mistakes?
PF: I think we’ve always been sort of pretty fearless as a family. I’ve tried to instil in everybody I work with that No.1, give it a go. No.2, don’t worry about failing. And as long as you try your hardest, that’s all you can do.
LF: And also, who cares what other people do? Which is the best, because then you’re doing it for yourself.
PF: What keeps you awake at night?
LF: I mean, at the moment, probably Lala, our daughter who’s six months old, but otherwise nothing much. I used to wake up a bit and sort of think through work …
PF: I do my best thinking in the middle of the night.
LF: What’s your poison?
PF: Red wine, Burgundy. Lots of it.
LF: What makes the best parties?
PF: I love parties and I love entertaining because it reflects your philosophy of life to the people that you entertain. When you have people for dinner, always serve the best food, the best wine that you can afford. I’m a fisherman so I love to entertain – it’s something people never get, fresh fish, unless you catch it. I always say when you entertain, the biggest thing has to be generosity. If you don’t do it well and you don’t give it all, don’t do it.
PF: What is your goal? What do you want to achieve?
LF: I would like to continue to grow the brand that I love and which feels very personal into something international, slowly, because we have a family. So I think to have a handful of stores all over the world would be amazing. But how long that will take and if that actually … I find my goals change according to family. Obviously, where they want to be and how you want to live. So I feel I just want to be really real.
PF: But that’s the most important thing: that your family fits into your life and your business. So often people get it the other way around. Business dictates [when] it should be family. We are all lucky that we were in a position to be able to do that.
LF: I think having a work-life balance, that’s probably the biggest achievement because if you can spend as much time with your family and work and try and keep everything afloat, then that’s pretty great.
PF: When the kids were growing up, I was very much sort of schoolteacher hours, and we took every holiday and we’d go down to Lorne or we’d come up to Noosa and we travelled. And spending time with your family; to have that relationship to me is the biggest achievement you have down the track, so as adults you can still be friends as a family. I think that’s the most important thing.
WISH: What’s something you admire about each other?
PF: I’m proud of her for everything she’s achieved. I love her individuality and that she doesn’t copy and she’s learning every day and I’m really proud that she’s learning the business side more and more and the people side, because that’s really what business is all about. It’s people and it’s the hardest thing. How do I make my team happy and make myself happy at the same time? That’s the biggest juggle you will ever have in business and life. And Lucy’s getting to that stage where she’s building a team around her, rather than just hiring people.
LF: I think it’s quite impressive to have had so many different businesses, but they’ve all been equally successful. Also, there’s no bullshit. It’s really like, you are who you are, there’s no surprises … You are very humble and I think that’s really rare. Often people just want to talk about how much they’ve achieved.
PF: Having two daughters, you have to be a good listener!
This story is from the April issue of WISH.
