Bucket and Bay in Jersey City(PERMANENTLY CLOSED)
JCFamilies: Tell me about your business.
Jen: Bucket & Bay has been open a year and a half now. In the very beginning, it started out as my project.
Boris: But it’s hard to do something like this and not have the other person involved to some degree. You just share an idea and then that idea goes somewhere.
Jen: So ultimately Boris became a full-time, hands-on participant.
Boris: But I was always involved.
Jen: He’s always been our website and branding guy.
JCFamilies: What are some of the challenges?
Boris: Running a business is a lot about prioritization and the list of things you have to do as a single proprietor is crazy, and you never get to do everything. Even the list of flavors that we want to create, we have had some ideas, like Old Fashioned Oatmeal, that have been on the docket since…
Jen: …since before we opened… and i has been “coming soon” for a while!
Boris: And other things too – like we have a program where we provide our neighbors with 100% grass fed milk, fresh from the farm. We have wanted to expand that for a long time, but it wasn’t a priority. It was summer and summer is ice cream season.
Jen: My focus has always been in the kitchen and operational things that customers don’t always see but take a lot time, like organizing the team schedule.
Boris: We don’t have time to discuss everything.
JCFamilies: And you have kids too, right?
Jen: Yes, and that really adds a lot to the time pressures. We have two girls. They’re five and six, kindergarten and first grade. Mornings are whirlwinds of trying to get out of the house on time.
Boris: Morning are crazy, but very often both of us are there.
Jen: Which is extremely helpful.
Boris: We do a lot extracurricular activities, which is a luxury, because it takes time. There are not a lot of jobs that allow you to leave work and take your kids to ice-skating.
Jen: Or to a performance at the school. The last one started at 5:00. There are a lot of families where both parents cannot attend a performance at that hour.
Boris: While there are advantages to being a part of the corporate world, it’s organized and predictable, being a business owner gives us flexibility.
JCFamilies: I love the way it looks in here. It’s warm and inviting.
Boris: Thank you! We wanted our place to be warm and inviting like a 
coffee shop, not like a typical ice cream store.
Jen: Most ice cream shops are typical scoop shops – they feel cold – not a place where you want to hang out. And we feel that ice cream is very social in nature, we want people to relax and enjoy it.
Boris: So it feels like a coffee shop, but our core focus is still gelato! And we do our gelato with passion and completely from scratch. Jen’s interest in ice cream started as a kid.
Jen: I grew up visiting my grandparents. My grandfather had an old wooden ice cream bucket that I’d find sitting in the middle of the garage churning away ice cream – always vanilla
JCFamilies: What makes your ice cream special?
Boris: We start with the milk. We use the most amazing milk in the world – it’s grass fed milk – 100% grass fed. When cows eat exclusively grass, they produce less milk but it’s richer. That’s why it’s a bit more expensive too. But you can totally feel the difference in the way our gelato tastes.
Jen: And our gelato is not typically Italian, it is more modern American, made from scratch, with inspiration from all around the world. Our flavors are creative but also very elegant, they open up gradually as you eat them, often revealing multiple layers.
JCFamilies: Do you get time as a couple? Do you go on dates?
Jen: We do. But not very often.
Boris: Jen just gave me a present for my birthday. It was a handmade book of “tickets” that I can redeem for things like going out to a movie, a date night…
Jen: We do most things as a family, with the kids – which gives us time to be together and talk. But even when we’re out on dates, we still talk about the gelato and the cafe. We haven’t been able to draw that imaginary line that differentiates “this is for work” and “this is for us.”
JCFamilies: How do you decompress?
Jen: We were supposed to go sailing together. As we used to…
Boris: I teach sailing at the Manhattan Sailing Club, but we did find time to go out together on a boat in 2016.
JCFamilies: Do you watch Netflix?
Boris: We don’t binge watch the series. We watch movies.
Jen: Yeah. We recently watched that one movie – remember?
Boris: Yeah. (He doesn’t.)
Jen: I used to want to watch every single movie that was up for an award.
Boris: Yes… We used to host an Oscar’s party!
Jen: But now I enjoy coming to work every day. People tell you, and it’s true – when you have your own business, it’s 24/7. We’re lucky because our business is a place where I would want to come and hang out
Boris: It does get a bit intense. Marrying someone and being in a business with someone is totally different.
Jen: Communication is key. Only we don’t have the same communication style. While we always have the same end goal in mind, the details and the strategy – which direction we’re coming from – is always very different. It helps to take a step back, and look at the whole picture. It’s something we don’t do nearly enough.
Boris: Last year we were on the beach for vacation, and we had a mini business meeting, thinking about all the different moving parts. We wrote them on a piece of cardboard that we found. We still have it. (Looks for it.)
Jen: Boris doesn’t like lists. I love lists.
Boris: (Finds it!) Tea was part of the plan. And look! It materialized!
JCFamilies: How do the kids fit in?
Boris: The kids have priority. That’s where our movie time went. From homework to extracurricular activities, all these things take time. Growing up with your parents having an ice cream shop – the kids are fully aware of it.
Jen: Sometimes they don’t like the ice cream shop.
Boris: Last year was challenging. We spent even more time at the cafe. Partly because we couldn’t afford to have as much help and we were not as organized – so we’d take turns. The kids knew when it was either mommy night or daddy night.
Jen: The kids requested more family nights. So we have that now.
JCFamilies: Do you have advice for other couples in business together?
Jen: I’d definitely say: Communicate! You’ve got to have thick skin. You’ve got to let things go. Get over the small stuff.
Boris: And establish priorities. The fact that we have agreed that our kids are the top priority, helps us move smoothly through the day. Whatever happens, the kids have to get the attention they deserve.
