We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Taryn Lagonigro and Jess Quarello. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Taryn Lagonigro and Jess Quarello below.

Hi Taryn Lagonigro and Jess Quarello, thanks for joining us today. One of the most important things small businesses can do, in our view, is to serve underserved communities that are ignored by giant corporations who often are just creating mass-market, one-size-fits-all solutions. Talk to us about how you serve an underserved community.

Hi! We are Jess Quarello and Taryn Lagonigro, the co-founders of Extra Lucky Moms. We both welcomed children with Down syndrome in 2020 and found immediate support and connection from the Down syndrome community. We founded Extra Lucky Moms in May 2021. While navigating the early days of our children’s Down syndrome diagnoses, we struggled to find support that was not just hopeful, but also raw, authentic, and REAL. We also didn’t see a place for ALL caregivers to come together to support one another, so we decided to create one!

Extra Lucky Moms, (ELM) celebrates all differences including Down syndrome, autism, Jordan’s Syndrome, trisomies, heart conditions, and many more through our blog, social media platforms, in-person events, keynote, and corporate speaking program, brand and nonprofit partnerships, and the Extra Lucky Podcast (coming this spring 2024)! Extra Lucky Moms is a place where everyone belongs and no struggle is too big or too small.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

We share a passion for bringing the beauty of disability to life, even though some days can still be challenging. We are driven to show the world what it truly means to be Extra Lucky and to inspire those outside the disability community to join us in creating a more inclusive world. We are committed to having the difficult conversations, shifting narratives, and ultimately making a positive impact on people’s lives. Below is a list of business-focused items that we are excited to highlight:

ELM Corporate:

We were devastated to hear the statistic that only 4% of DE&I topics presented in the corporate world represent disability. What’s even more unfortunate is the 40% burnout rate for working parents of children with disabilities! We were devastated to hear these statistics but even more upset to see it happening in real time in our community. Extra Lucky Moms is already committed to changing these statistics by empowering the working parents of companies like Societe Generale, Rightpoint and Sculptor.
Our topics range from disability awareness, the disability parent experience, inclusive and supportive language for the disability community, corporate strategies for communication and support for employees, and much more.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

By the summer of 2023, we had built a thriving community of caregivers across the nation and the world. We were advocating and celebrating the disability community at large together with all Extra Lucky individuals (over 5000 strong!) however, we were struggling to scale our business. We have always been committed to never lean on our community to support our revenue and cash flow. We are STILL committed to that and we have been able to overcome this, but not without a partnership with a business coach. We hired Kim Breiland over the summer of 2023 and she helped us reach and understand our revenue potential without sacrificing the authenticity of our platform and community. We started focusing on larger brand collaborations, our corporate speaking, and other initiatives, including the podcast, to help support our business. We are thrilled to say we can still continue to provide free resources for the community and never charge them for our offerings because of this new opportunity to scale!

How’d you meet your business partner?

We met in the fall of 2020, after both of us welcomed daughters with Down syndrome. We were both in an online chat room that became a ‎WhatsApp text chain and as these things go, when you are on a chat group and text chain you swiftly find out who your “people” are. We connected as friends, and we like to say that we became each other‘s first community members. It was Covid, and we had never met in person but we talked almost every single day. We were able to hold space for each other in ways that our own family members and friends that we’ve had for years couldn’t do. We truly understood what eachother were going through. That’s what launched our idea for ELM, because of our experience becoming each other‘s community.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.extraluckymoms.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/extraluckymoms/ https://www.instagram.com/extraluckypodcast/ https://www.instagram.com/elmcorporate/ https://www.instagram.com/jessquarello/https://www.instagram.com/mindfullytaryn/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/p/Extra-Lucky-Moms-100068007851477/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/extra-lucky-moms/?viewAsMember=true
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@extraluckychannel
• Other: Tik tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@extraluckyjess 163K+

Image Credits
Carley Storm https://carleystorm.com/