Lisa Perese-Cullen is still buzzing from her big win at the 2024 TikTok Awards. Photo: Screenshot / TikTok
Lisa Perese-Cullen has been making short, sharp videos about her everyday life and sharing them on the internet since 2022.
The hugely popular micro-vlogs regularly feature her husband of 15 years, scaffolder, Brandon, her mum, granddad and her two young kids.
Most of the short videos are accompanied with a dry, witty, and very relatable voiceover. There's the one where she "draws on a jaw line" and goes out to town in a hot pink suit that she's grabbed from H&M at the last minute. Or the one that pieces together the unbalanced preparation that goes into a child's birthday party. In another, she asks her followers for a steer in how to kick off a row with "hubby" over some "big mother...... ferns".
"How should I start today's argument - should I start with 'I told you so'? Or should I start with 'you should have listened to me'? Like, what's my opening sentence?" she ponders sitting on her deck, digging in gardening gloves.
In just two years she's amassed nearly 600,000 followers on TikTok and 473,000 fans on Instagram, and this week the Māori-Samoan content creator and 'Mumtok' star was crowned New Zealand Creator of the Year at the 2024 TikTok Awards in Sydney.
She beat out beloved Kiwi creators Nicola 'Nix' Adams, Torrell Tafa, Oliver Mills, and the well-known How To Dad's Jordan Watson for the title.
"I'm still just letting the shock wear off. It genuinely was a massive surprise for me that night, so I'm still kind of buzzing about it," she told RNZ following her win.
"All I started doing was just vlogging my every day kind of mum life, kids, house. You would look at it and you'd think it would be quite boring, but I guess what made it entertaining was just putting a bit of comedy in the voiceovers, just giving it that real dry Kiwi sense of humour."
Perese-Cullen's TikTok journey kicked off kind of by accident. She started a business - lingerie brand Harper James - and knew she needed to get on the app to get the word out. She made her own account and found she enjoyed the process.
"I think what was really funny was, when I first started, I was vlogging kind of like everybody else, like very happy and positive and almost putting on a different voice, and then that persona was actually quite hard to upkeep.
"I didn't have a big following back then so it didn't bother me. I was like, 'Oh, I'll just do it how I'd normally talk in my own head, maybe with my friends and my family' ... I definitely leaned into that authentic self, and that's when it kind of took off."
Lisa Perese-Cullen is still buzzing from her big win at the 2024 TikTok Awards. Photo: Jack Owen Bennett
Being able to show up authentically online, and having that resonate with people, has been the biggest gift, she says.
"People stop me in the street, new mums, people that can relate to your everyday content. Just being able to connect with people, I think that's where social media has done so much good."
But not everyone is kind when you give so much of yourself to an audience on social media.
"There are people that are gonna form opinions about you based on a 30-second piece of content, so you really need to develop a thick skin and just roll with the punches, and set your boundaries about what you're gonna post online, and that took a little bit of time figuring out as well."
Perese-Cullen didn't set out to become a content creator, but now, vlogging her everyday life has become second nature.
"Honestly, I think my 10-year-old can use a phone better than I can. It started off very basic and then as time went on, I picked up a skill here and there ... obviously vlogging and editing takes a bit of energy, but now I think we've really just worked it into our lifestyle.
"Most of the time it doesn't really feel I'm working, I'm just kind of making something for the fun of it."
In the US, content creators have access to the TikTok Creator Fund, which enables users to monetise their content's views and engagement.
While this feature isn't available for TikTok New Zealand, Perese-Cullen has managed to forge a lucrative path for herself by collaborating with brands she loves on the platform. Some of these sponsored posts have fetched well over 1 million views.
For anyone wanting to pursue a career in content creation, she has some simple advice.
"Just be yourself. Your very, very authentic self. Sometimes you can polish it up a bit, I put my best foot forward when it comes to social media. But also from a technical standpoint, I think the biggest thing is consistency and just building that very authentic audience."
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