Breakfast with Bugaboo

This post is in partnership with our friends at Bugaboo, a brand known for creating thoughtfully designed products that support parents through the many moving parts of daily life.

It was the midnight before our breakfast with Bugaboo and one co-founder was Uber-messengering saline across the city to the other. Lauren’s son was sick; so was Amrit’s daughter. (The latter threw up in the plastic bin of a humidifier just hours before the breakfast.) Fifteen minutes before Amrit needed to head out, her friend walked into the apartment to babysit last minute because Frankie couldn’t go to daycare on account of, well, the vomiting-into-the-humidifier thing. And as chaotic as the morning was, like most of the ups and downs of life, it ended up being a very fitting lead-in to the breakfast STJ hosted the next morning with Bugaboo: the power of community when it comes to raising a child, and how often things only work because someone else steps in.

We invited members of their community at GEM Home on the outskirts of Chinatown with our friends at Bugaboo to celebrate the launch of the Donkey 6, a single-to-double stroller meant to transition alongside growing families. It’s a sleek, genuinely convenient way to get to the park without holding one child at your hip while pushing another in a stroller—something that, based on the morning we’d just had, felt especially relevant. We also talked about the new cocoa brown colorway (CHIC) and their diaper bag, which importantly comes equipped with a changing pad. 

We welcomed everyone to the breakfast via the previous night’s anecdote; missed daycare, messengering saline, etcetera. Bugaboo’s CMO Jeanelle Teves spoke next, iced coffee in hand, about what it actually means to support working mothers—and how thoughtful design is just one piece of that equation. She also shared how she talks to her own children about work: that it matters, that it has value, and that it’s important for them to understand why she does it. (Jeanelle also mentioned that the outfit she had planned on wearing had actually been dropped off at the dry cleaners... the month before. Very relatable.)

Attendees included friends of the brand Isabella Boylston, Noor Tagouri, Haein Dorin, Charlotte Palermino, Eva Alt, Coco Mellors, Lauren Rodriguez, Jen Steele, Carrie Battan, and Mandela Cocores. There were several Getting Sicky alums in attendance, too, including Erika Veurink, Chase Cohl, and Jenny Kaplan. The room brought together moms, moms-to-be, and non-moms alike; the reality is that community touches all of us in different ways. A core ethos of STJ is that everyone mothers in some capacity—whether that’s raising three kids or being the auntie who shows up when daycare falls through. Our invite list reflected that.

We all sat at three long tables in the back of the restaurant and ate cardamom buns and fresh sourdough slathered with ricotta and berry compote. The centerpiece was fresh loaves of bread emblazoned with “Bugaboo,” which, frankly, everyone was too impressed by to eat.

Everyone left with a very good gift bag: a special gift from Bugaboo, a fresh loaf of bread, and—true to Spread the Jelly form—customized jars of jelly with hints of lemon and blueberry. Spread the JELLY. Get it?

The best part of our breakfast: it was loud.

There wasn’t a single moment of silence. Everyone was speaking to the person next to them, and for many, it was their first time meeting, which you wouldn’t have guessed based on the animated conversations that were happening. We laughed at the shared understanding of messaging saline across town, of last-minute daycare cancellations derailing entire days, of completely forgetting that the outfit you planned on wearing is still at the dry cleaner, and of how quickly plans fall apart—and how necessary it is to have people you can call on when they do.