Sunna Yassin + Mollie Jones-Hennes
BASH PLEASE, YOU CAN’T FAKE IT
Interview by Harper Brokaw-Falbo | Photographs by Emily Scott
February 18, 2020
With teams in Los Angeles and San Francisco, Bash Please contains an elusive blend of expertise that is some combination of the detailed mind of a surgeon, with the creativity of a gifted artist. Event planning is in the details and novices can be easily thwarted by nuance. Simply put, there is no faking it in event planning.
Bash Please’s owners Mollie Jones Hennes and Sunna Yassin have decades of experience between them. At 23, Mollie started at the Ritz Carlton, and even though she got to meet Beyonce, in her words, “you can only make a hotel ballroom look so many ways.” She decided to switch things up by taking a job in catering, and the move would serendipitously unite her with Sunna, then Mollie’s client, promoting Sunna to eventually leave her job as an event planner to join Mollie. Sunna saw in Mollie “the skills that I didn’t personally have,” and as Mollie put it, “I knew my own strengths, but Sunna ...she is able to see things with a different eye.”
Knowing they had a winning combo, they started to talk about what was next, and what was next was to own their own business. As Sunna recalls “after many conversations, glasses/bottles of wine, we decided to go after Bash Please.” For those not familiar with the event industry, their conversation was basically like saying “let’s buy a bakery, not just any bakery, let’s buy Tartine,” and then actually buying Tartine. If that’s not enough, after taking over the then LA-based company, they expanded by opening a second San Francisco office.
Event planning is not a 9-5 job. “Sunna and I are always available. We’re not going to spend all day on Saturday talking to clients, but if someone asks if they can call, we’re of course going to answer.” When asked how they make it all work and don’t lose their minds, Sunna replied, “at times when we’re really busy, and we have to hunker down, we do, but when we have time to take off time, we jump at it and Mollie has taught me a lot about taking time to do things for us, both individually and together.”
They know how to weave work and play into their lives, and their husbands (and dogs) are so close that they’ve earned the nickname “the Bash bros.” Their strong bond has also carried them through some difficult situations, like when in October they had to evacuate an event because of the California wildfires. Mollie pointed out that “a lot of the time we weren’t talking, there were a lot of looks and non-verbal communication,” the type of relationship quality that can turn an emergency into just a bad situation that you overcome.
When asked what their advice is when it comes to sustaining a creative partnership, Mollie’s insight is to “make sure the relationship works on both ends,” meaning play when you’re on vacation, but know when to turn off the friendship and turn on the business partnership. Sunna reminds us that “everything isn’t always pretty, and a beautiful photo doesn’t show the messiness behind the scenes.” Also, that company you may be comparing yourself to, with the perfect photos, may only have one client. The point being, you just don’t know what’s happening behind the scenes, so why compare. Only too true.
