Owner of Boing Boing Says Bye-Bye To All That

Image via boingboingmaternity.comKaren Paperno, the founder and owner of Boing Boing, the nursing and maternity shop on 6th Ave. and Union Street, recently took to HuffPo to bemoan her fate as a small businesswoman struggling to stay afloat in a gentrifying neighborhood, with inadequate computer skills and perhaps a reluctance to change with the times.

I've run a successful business for 17 years. I opened Boing Boing, the first breastfeeding boutique in the nation. I rent breast pumps, sell nursing bras, and know the answer to 99 percent of your pumping/breastfeeding issues. But don't bother looking me up online. You will see an old website I can't take down or access, and a new one that will never be complete. These things cost money, and as I've discovered, you cannot run even a small brick and mortar shop without an online presence.

As someone who likens the sensation of breastfeeding to suckling a staple-remover, I should’ve considered Boing-Boing my salvation. And with its convenient location – ONE block from my house – it should’ve been my oasis. And yes, within a week of my son’s birth in 2000, my breasts and I were probably in there 3x a week, desperately searching for some miraculous solution to lessen the agony of the most natural and beautiful of maternal functions, nursing your baby cobra.

The inventory of breast-feeding items I bought in there over the months would read like a “what-the-fuck?” for the non-nursing populace: nipple shields, Lansinoh, nursing tea (wait, maybe that was at Back to the Land), breast-pump replacement bits-n-pieces (flanges, anyone?), milk storage bags, milk storage bag clips, nursing bras. I also bought toys and outfits and gifts and books, at boutique prices. This was a few years before the $1,000 dollar strollers started rolling through the neighborhood, and apparently, through Boing Boing’s doors, pushed by rich bitches with questions about products bought elsewhere.

According to Paperno, who is now planning to sell Boing Boing, her mission was to "make life easier for new moms," and that she “… wanted to help new mothers breastfeed and carry their babies. [she] got certified as a lactation consultant, bra fitter, baby wearing expert, etc., and for years, was happy to share [her] knowledge and honored to be a part of that special time when things require the touch and support of another human.” That’s a wonderful intention, but I personally never found her, her staff, or her store all that warm or welcoming, even back in the good old days of $150 strollers.

Lately, Paperno has been feeling squeezed, having real difficulty making ends meet in a neighborhood that now feels only for the privileged.

Now this neighborhood is filthy with baby haircutting/toy shops, clubs, babyccino cafes, baby DJ lessons, $600 baby proofing companies and cooking lessons for nannies -- and I no longer feel comfortable here as I struggle to pay my bills. It's become a neighborhood of excess and ease while I have sunk into poverty. Here I am, the owner of a shop in the epi-center of the baby universe, and I can't make my rent.

I feel for the Boing Boing lady, I do. I’ve lived a block from her shop’s location before it was Boing Boing, and I’ve seen the neighborhood’s transformation, too. But maybe it’s not completely everyone and everything else’s fault that her business is no longer thriving. Maybe bad business decisions were made (opening a second shop in 2008), maybe customer service wasn’t what it should’ve been (yelling at a customer who asked if she carried Bjorns). And sure, maybe Paperno really did want to help new mothers carry their babies, but by the way, her sling-wearing classes weren't free.

Of course I haven’t been a personal milk bar in eight years. I don’t need the stuff anymore, and who knows where I’d be spending my baby green now, but I’m glad it was there when I needed it.