We recently connected with Lauri De Brito and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Lauri thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

Surrogacy & Egg Donation Based in Los Angeles, Fulfilling Dreams Worldwide

Since 2004, The Fertility Agency has helped bring over 1100+ babies into the world—but we are so much more than just the thousands of matches, babies, Surrogates and Egg Donors.

We are an international full-service Egg Donor and Surrogacy agency based in Los Angeles California, whose goal is to honestly and professionally help create families where each person involved feels heard, safe, cared for and supported throughout the entire process. We work with all Intended Parents, Surrogates, and Egg Donors no matter their sexual preference, relationship status, ethnicity, location, etc. Our personal experiences and years of expertise provide us with the perfect balance of business and passion.

We are a unique agency in many ways, but one thing that sets us apart is that 100% of our staff have either gone through, assisted with or will face fertility challenges.

Each person has been brought onto our team because of their compassion, business skills, attention to detail, and the emotional desire to help others. Together, we have a combined 145 years of professional experience coordinating, troubleshooting and bringing babies into the world. For all of us, this is more than a job, it’s a calling.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Kathryn Kaycoff & Lauri de Brito (The Fertility Agency C0-Presidents, Co-Owners) underwent numerous IVF cycles, many miscarriages, a combined total of 200+embryos, 5 Gestational Surrogates and 6 Egg Donors (and a partridge in a pear tree) before we were blessed with our babies. Sadly, part of our struggle was not just the failure to get and keep a pregnancy, but the lack of supportive and reliable resources for us to turn to.

In creating The Fertility Agency, it was our dream to build the type of agency that we wish had been there for us on our own surrogacy journeys. The business began as a labor of love, and we continue to run our agency with the same passion and professionalism since 2004. We are always available to our Intended Parents, Surrogates, Egg Donors and staff for advice, support and personalized care.

We don’t mean to brag, but we know for a fact that we have much higher standards than most other surrogacy agencies. Of course, there are other good ones, but most agencies are just not as selective as we are. We turn down about a large percentage of applicants because we only accept the best. We’ve looked at other agency’s profiles and have discovered that we do more comprehensive screening for our Surrogates.

Our agency works with Intended Parents of all types from all over the world and surrogates from all over the US (but only from surro-friendly states where the Intended Parent/s name/s go on the birth certificate). We pride ourselves on making great matches, plus giving highly personalized service from before you sign with us until long after your baby or babies are born. We heavily screen our surrogates — only accepting a small portion of those who apply to us. We also place a lot of emphasis on matching the right IP with the right GS — we realize how much more incredible a journey it is if you’re in sync with your surrogate in terms of personality, desires, communication styles, etc. As corny as it sounds, we won’t work with a surrogate if we wouldn’t have her carry our own child. We nurture kind and respectful relationships between our couples and our surrogates, and our reputation has been that we are there for the entire journey.

In this day and age, it is extremely important to work with an agency that you can trust. So, rest assured, our agency has never been sued or had legal action taken against us. We work honestly and transparently and are confident you will quickly see the difference in the way we do business.

Both Lauri and Kathryn (and many of our staff) had years of business experience before devoting themselves to helping others on their fertility journeys.

Prior to starting the agency, Kathryn and Lauri were both successful television producers who oversaw big productions with lots of moving parts and high stakes – and it’s interesting because a lot of the same skills come into play. We like to say that before we produced television, now we produce babies! (A much more rewarding result!)

We are both living proof of ‘do what you love, love what you do’. We don’t go to ‘work’ every morning – for us, creating families is not a job, it is truly a passion.

Our expertise and passion for what we do has led us to become sought after speakers at fertility conferences around the world and online. We’ve written and appeared in numerous news and magazine articles, on radio and television.

We would be honored if we can someday help you – whether you are creating a family of your own or helping someone fulfill their dreams of having one.

Have you ever had to pivot?

Both of us (Kathryn and Lauri) were successful television producers prior to starting the agency. We didn’t intend to open a surrogacy agency – it was something that happened due to the circumstances we found ourselves in. We both got married in our late 30’s and started our family building at that time. But it wasn’t easy for either of us. We both suffered multiple miscarriages, and both ended up doing various fertility treatments with no success. We both had to go to the extreme of using a surrogate and an egg donor to finally have our families.

All the time we were going through our infertility struggles, we were still maintaining our intense, high-pressured careers in the television industry. Once Kathryn’s twin boys were born and finally home from NICU, she had no desire to go back to TV. She wanted to stay home with the babies she had fought so hard to have. At this point, Kathryn had already started and was running a pretty large infertility support group and both Lauri & Kathryn found themselves entrenched in the online world of surrogacy support groups, etc. With their ‘producer’ backgrounds, it was almost a no-brainer to start helping others ‘produce’ their surrogacy journeys. The turning point was when Kathryn incorporated the business, and officially opened it to the public. The two of us thought it would be a part-time job that we could do as we stayed home to raise our much-loved babies, but it quickly grew into something much more. Word of mouth took off and soon we were getting referrals from various IVF clinics that we had used ourselves, attorneys, and other experts in the field. From that point, there was no looking back. We had both left the television world behind and embarked on the second greatest adventures of our lives (the first of course being parenthood!).

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

Covid was a very difficult time for not only our agency but for the fertility business in general. Clinics shut down and business dried up. Many businesses closed up during Covid, but we could not stop working – because we had surrogates who were pregnant and Intended Parents who were still needing to get to the United States or travel state to state to be there at their babies’ births and to take their babies home. We couldn’t let our staff go because we needed them to continue working – plus we didn’t want to let them down – we had become like a family, we really cared about our employees. So both Kathryn and Lauri stopped taking a paycheck during this time, we cut our employees back to part-time but were able to keep all of them employed and we weathered the storm. And we came out on the other side even stronger — we learned how to operate on a lean budget and we learned what was really important to both of us. Once the fertility clinics opened up for business again, we were ready to kick into full gear – we had our staff intact and everyone was eager to get back working full time. Business boomed because there were so many Intended Parents who had to put their dreams/journeys on hold during Covid and now everyone was ready to get back into baby-making. We ended up having to hire more staff to help with the increased business.

But the main lesson we learned is that we could weather any storm – that if we looked at our core principles and kept to what was most important to us – we could come out of anything even stronger. Which is what happened with Covid.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://thefertilityagency.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_fertility_agency/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheFertilityAgency/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-fertility-agency
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@thefertilityagency9427
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/the-fertility-agency-studio-city