Pink Tiger CEO Raewyn McBain Feels the Rush
Connecting over the phone with three-year Discovery Bay resident New Zealander Raewyn McBain, Around DB journalist Elizabeth Kerr discovers that the inspirational CEO of Pink Tiger Media is also a dab hand at feng shui.
“Attention to detail is incredibly important to me,” says McBain, on the phone from Penang where she’s currently holed up with her daughter Vanessa.
“In terms of who and what I am, I think there’s a strong interaction between my business, my personality, my position as a woman CEO and my interest in Chinese metaphysics. It’s created an expressive person,” she says. “I am driven and passionate about both my personal and work life. I love how Benjamin Franklin phrases it: ‘It is the working man who is the happy man. It is the idle man who is the miserable man.’”
Born in the wine country (Hawke’s Bay), McBain moved first to New York for two years, before heading to London during its 1980s’ heyday. She lived there for 12 years, working as a journalist for Dow Jones. She founded Pink Tiger Media in 1996, while still in London. Hong Kong became head office in 1998 when husband John visited to complete a two-week project, and couldn’t bring himself to leave.
“I arrived in Asia and basically fell in love with it,” she recalls. “When I was moving out here, people asked me what I was going to do. I made a flip remark about studying feng shui, making light. But when I got here and fell in love with the place – the culture, the energy, the dim sum; it just worked. It’s my favourite city in the world. What’s interesting now is that having studied feng shui, and gotten past the frustration and urge to chuck my books off the ferry, it’s just something I incorporate into my day. I love the balance.” McBain gained her Feng Shui Practitioner diploma while studying under Grand Master Raymond Lo, Hong Kong’s celebrated ‘Feng Shui Lo.’
You could say balance is in Pink Tiger Media’s DNA, or perhaps it’s the natural reaction to a decade and- a-half on the other side of the media coin. A full-service agency specialising in financial services and technology through six solution offerings, including public relations, visual media and integrated marketing campaigns, Pink Tiger Media was partially a response to what Raewyn calls “bad advertising”.
Pink Tiger Media’s agile, technology-based business model makes it easier to ride out storms like COVID-19. For McBain, with crisis comes opportunity, and in “everything-can-happen” Hong Kong, she’s confident about the future and her place in it.
“I’m a maximalist at heart,” she finishes. “I have ridiculous drive – which I wish I could slow down.” Why stop now? After all, ‘Feel the Rush’ is Pink Tiger Media’s tagline.
Original article by Elizabeth Kerr, Around DB, April 7, 2020.
