bibiche club turns one
here's to jumping head first into a passion project that I felt totally unqualified to launch. rambling about how it came to be, lessons learnt, and recapping last year's events.
Last February, I hosted a long table dinner in my Paris apartment. I hired a private chef, designed menus, came up with self-reflection questions for guests, reorganized the living room, set the mood with candles + music, and got 18 friends to gather around a table for an evening.
Sorry, let’s back it up for a second. Hey, hi, hello. I’m Margaux. I’m half Canadian, half French. I grew up in Toronto and am now living in Paris. My move is a whole story that I’ll save for another day, but what I’ll say is that moving abroad is not a small feat. Surviving in Paris is also a feat in itself; the community that I’ve built is what has kept me here (I did have a stint in Copenhagen and back to Toronto recently, but once again, a story for another time).
~ Setting the scene for Bibiche’s ideation moment ~
I was at TRAM with a friend, freshly back from a 3-week trip to Toronto. I had just moved into a new apartment in Paris and the living room was perrrrrfect for hosting a long table dinner. I wanted to host a ⊹₊ mingling moment ₊⊹ for friends who hadn’t met yet. It felt like, as we were chatting, a floodgate of ideas were unlocking. What if I did this as a business, and not just a one-off event? It felt like I could merge some of my passions in this one project: food, community, aesthetics, design… The name was already in the back of my mind, so I claimed the Instagram handle @bibiche.club and started moodboarding.
Am I an event planner? No.
Am I a chef? No.
Did I know what I was getting myself into? No.
Did I make mistakes? Definitely.
Starting felt crazy and overwhelming, but from past projects (I was the co-founder of a fragrance business a couple of years back; a story for another future blog), I can attest to the fact that nobody will ever be 100% ready to launch something. And each event taught me lessons that made the next ones even better. I learned the importance of budgeting or else you’ll end up paying tons of money out of pocket, realized how much furniture rental transportation will eat at your budget, leveraged personal relationships to ease the workload and cost of events, discovered that catering is a whole other ballgame, and saw how time-consuming and mentally draining it is to run and host an event, all for it only to last a couple of hours. But hey, it’s all worth it!
Margaux from a year ago couldn't have dreamt about half of the projects that Bibiche was involved in. So if you take anything away from this post, it’s to just start (cliché, I knowwww). I believe that it’s a bigger failure not to try at all.
Here are links to content from last year’s events, if you want to check them out <3
Engineering the dinner experience for Pierre Bassene World’s Men’s Fashion Week community dinner
One-year celebration of Soft Season in a Greenhouse in Copenhagen
I took a little pause to reset but am slowly working on upcoming events (ps you can sign up for the waitlist here). And if you want to be involved as a partner or work on something together, I’m all ears: hello@bibiche.club :)
bisous,
Margaux
La meilleure 💗