My favorite spot in our BK studio in Eagle Rock is the tucked-away alcove corner. It is filled with photos of my time together with our team members and communities, as well as various letters we received from BK friends over 15 years. Recently, I added two more photos to this corner. One with the team and their families after our plant-dye workshop, and another taken on the same day with a photo of Eunice and Nerine with Frido’s homemade cake.
The plant-dye workshop day was extra special because we celebrated Nerine’s 11th and Eunice’s 10th anniversaries with BK.
Every time we look for a new team member, I review about 20 resumes. All past job applicants have been unique, but it has been rare to see anyone with previous work experience beyond a year or two. Based on my observation, people generally don’t seem to stick around the same job for too long. Maybe it’s the particular culture of Los Angeles. There are so many industries and businesses around here that the opportunities perhaps feel abundant. Maybe it’s more fulfilling to gain diverse expertise by spreading the experiences rather than digging deeper and honing knowledge by staying in one place. Ultimately, one is not necessarily better for a person when we compare short or long employment at places.
But I also can’t help noticing the beautiful weight I feel when we acknowledge how long Eunice and Nerine have been with Baum-kuchen.
When Nerine joined me in 2015, BK was five years old. She started by spending a few hours a week at the studio, helping me fulfill a handful of orders. Today, we joke about when Nerine and I used to handwrite (!!!) each shipping label with Sharpies. For many early years, I couldn’t pay myself for the work I was doing for BK while keeping up with the business’s overhead, so Nerine’s paycheck was the first payroll I ever processed. I remember feeling so grown-up to write the check. Even though I could barely afford to have Nerine at the studio back in 2015, the timing was critical, since Baum-kuchen was slowly gaining momentum with our online and in-person community. We visited our families in Japan and Germany each year, which took me away from the studio for a few weeks at a time. I knew I needed support if I wanted the business to sustain while keeping the family life thriving. I am so grateful to Nerine for giving me a chance to grow into the role of having support. Until then, I was doing everything at the studio. BK was my first baby (born a few weeks before Satchi), and it was everything I poured my energy into aside from being a mom to two kids. Yes. It was “just” a shop. But it was also a way of challenging the status quo of the world - my way of activism. I carefully wrapped BK orders, unlike other online shops, which focused on speed and convenience. I sent (and still do) a “thank you” email to the customer who placed an order. In-store space was sparsely curated at the time because I had chosen a careful selection of artifacts that came into my life by serendipity, rather than attending expensive trade shows to fill the space and increase sales. Early on, I also declared that I would never pay for advertising but instead invest in community building. All these elements of BK (and there are more unique BK ethos I firmly stand behind) are still practiced today. They feel legitimate as “our way” now because we have paved a steady track record. But ten years ago, I was navigating all these “strange ways of running a business” primarily through my intuition, without the words to clearly articulate the “why.” It was an active and ongoing lab for experimenting with what might happen if I operated a business differently than a textbook might suggest. Trying to put myself into Nerin’s shoes back then, I am sure some of my decisions surprised her. It took me an additional few years to grow into a role where I could communicate BK's intentions and how we prototype things to our team members, and I am forever grateful for Nerin’s patience in sticking with me through those first few years and more as I learned the ropes.
Eunice joined Baum-kuchen a year after Nerine. It all started with me getting to know her as a BK customer and collaborating to host a workshop at BK. Her exquisite approach to notebook keeping, calligraphy, and lifestyle curation stood out to me. Also, during the workshop preparation, it became evident that she was a thoughtful, intentional, and genuinely kind individual. At the time, Frido and I were making a major shift from having Satchi attend a traditional public school to homeschooling her, and I wanted to stay focused on building a family culture that aligned with our hopes and dreams for homeschooling while moving forward with BK. When Eunice joined our team, she wrote analogue stories and hosted workshops. Still, her time was primarily dedicated to fulfillment, opening hours, and day-to-day in-person studio operations. It wasn’t until Eunice’s relocation that she started to fully grow into her current creative role. During the summer of 2018, I was so saddened when she told me she would need to leave BK because she and her husband were moving for his job. Out of genuine curiosity, I asked Eunice, “What if we created a remote job for you?” Up until then, I had been handling all website-related tasks, including taking product photos and composing product descriptions. As our business slowly grew, so did our curated collection. I was starting to drown in a sea of never-ending photoshoots, website upkeep, other administrative tasks, and homeschooling our kids. Having worked together for a few years already, Eunice had a deep understanding of the BK community, aesthetics, and, most importantly, our ethos & values, both inside and out. Without having the major shake of Eunice’s relocation, it would have been difficult for me to rethink her role from scratch. Reflecting on the time, though, partnering with her to tend our virtual world together was probably one of the best choices I made, as her openness to a new creative role in 2018 has become a catalyst for the next layer of BK growth. When you browse our website or social media pages, you might get a sense of calm that isn't typical of an online shopping experience. That is not an accident. Eunice and I are constantly discussing and exploring ways to transform our online presence so we can offer a small patch of an oasis to our community.
So much happens in the span of a decade. Aside from seeing the BK grow, we witnessed each other’s many life milestones and heartbreak—probably one of the most beautiful gifts of collaborating for many years.
Thank you, Nerine and Eunice! I am so grateful that our paths crossed when they did, and we have gotten to spend time together building something so special!
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