BUJO BAE Adds Island-Style Flare to Spice Up Stationery
Writing down important dates to remember and checking off items on a to-do list are excellent ways to keep your professional and personal life organized, but these good habits can feel like a chore when you are working with plain, uninspiring paper.
Enter BUJO BAE, a local stationery brand that aims to reverse this productivity slump with aesthetically pleasing calendars, journals, notepads, greeting cards, stickers, pens and more.
Owner and artist Jenna Ikeda explains that BUJO is shorthand for “bullet journaling,” which she describes as “like a diary, a planner, a journal, a scrapbook. You just start off with a plain dot grid journal, and the fun part about it is that you can create your own pages, … so it’s just a great way to stay creative, stay organized in a journaling style that is officially like your own, and it’s really flexible.”
Ikeda, who grew up in Hilo but now lives on Oʻahu, says she often draws inspiration from her hometown and heritage. For example, she often incorporates palaka patterns and anthurium into her designs “because it’s very nostalgic to me, and those who have been born and raised in Hilo, or have any connection to Hilo, know that anthurium is like the unofficial flower.”
Her products balance this local nostalgia with modern playfulness, featuring cheeky slogans like “HOME SWEET HILO,” “DOING THE DAMN THING” and “MANIFEST THAT SHIT.”
Ultimately, Ikeda believes the visual appeal and quality of your tools can “make all the difference” in your motivation to use them. “From there it just snowballs … and it’s that good dopamine hit of ‘okay, I have all these organized plans, I can do what I need to get done, and then I can hit my goals,’” she says.
