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Passion to Paycheck: Quarantine is making better business for creatives
While brands like Chanel have halted production and companies like J. Crew have filed for bankruptcy since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the coronavirus a pandemic, smaller designers have used quarantine as an opportunity to produce and peddle their products online.
Cut & Sewn & Profit
One creator in particular, however, has been able to turn her passion project of thrift flipping into a paycheck during quarantine: Sarah Nocquet.
I met Nocquet the way most of us have been meeting strangers in this age of quarantine, through the internet.
It was a Sunday, March 29, and I was on Instagram, you know, aimlessly scrolling past the bread loaves and corona updates that seemed to dominate my feed these days. That is until I stumbled upon a video reposted by someone I follow of Nocquet turning a pair of red second-hand corduroy pants into a backpack!
I laughed. This was one of the coolest projects I’d seen all quarantine, like way better than the Dalgona coffee posts and new Netflix show promos I kept on seeing in my feed.
I immediately slid into her DMs.
Nocquet, a 21-year-old graduating senior at NYU, first began turning pants into bags when she made her first backpack for herself earlier this year.
It was a brown backpack, just big enough to fit her laptop and a few other items, made out of an old pair of corduroys that she had found on a sales rack at No Relation Vintage, a popular thrift store in Manhattan’s East Village.
Seeing her bag, Nocquet’s friends told her,
“If you made that I would buy it.”
Out of Necessity
However, it wasn’t until after the coronavirus was defined a pandemic and college’s switched to online for the rest of the spring semester that Nocquet ever seriously considered selling her bags to make a living.
“I think they announced on Saturday or Sunday that my job was canceled so I just started sewing…”