It’s Tuesday evening and Liz Chick is in her studio in Brooklyn, New York, watching Ella Emhoff – the daughter-in-law of US Vice President Kamala Harris – teach twenty-somethings what’s called painting knitting.
Running the studio, called RecCreate Collective, is Chick’s dream job, she says. Several evenings a week, Chick – often sporting a quilted jacket that she dyed herself with avocado pits – hosts instructors who teach classes in knitting, collage, painting and sculpture for up to 45 people.
It’s also the most lucrative job she’s ever had, Chick, 27, says. In January, just ten months after hosting its first class, the studio generated $25,000 in revenue, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. RecCreate has been profitable since December, and Chick pays herself a salary of about $5,500 a month, she said..
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To get her business off the ground, Chick took “windowless office” jobs, hauled art supplies up and down her fourth-floor apartment, and trusted that she would eventually get paid for her art.
She also had abnormal luck. In 2022, Chick won $50,000 in a drawing she didn’t even realize she entered, providing her with the startup money she needed to rent the physical studio space and start your business.
The unexpected injection of cash was a lifesaver. “I’ll never go back to a desk job…I hope I never have to,” Chick says. “It’s amazing to be able to make a living doing my dream job. I think there are so few people who can say that.”
Create a balancing exercise
As a teenager in the greater Chicago area, Chick thrifted, laundered and sold high-waisted denim shorts to YouTube influencers, she says. “I always wanted to be an entrepreneur,” she says, adding, “I’ve been doing creative projects on the side, trying to turn them into a business for years and years and years.”
At age 18, she moved to New York to attend Parsons School of Design. When she graduated in 2019, entry-level design strategy jobs were hard to find, so she took a salaried office job at a local park. The pay was meager and the office was dimly lit, Chick said.
Liz Chick in RecCreate Collective’s Brooklyn studio
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Without a professional creative outlet, Chick created a personal one. She began dyeing fabrics using natural items like avocado pits, onion skins and dried flowers. She hosted a pop-up shop in her 12-by-14-foot bedroom, selling beeswax-dyed wraps — like saran, but made from wax-coated fabric — to her friends.
Soon, Chick was selling patchwork-dyed jackets and bags at pop-up flea markets around New York on weekends. She changed jobs to fund these artistic endeavors – first in marketing, then as an environmental educator, tutor and nanny.
“I really needed to work because I’ve always been able to support myself,” Chick says. “(But) it was so clear to me…I felt like I had to find the jobs with the least resistance while I worked on my own stuff.”
Lucky breaks
Chick’s artistic side cost him most of his free time and salary, and required manual labor. At night, she dyed fabrics in 20-liter pots, so heavy that she had to ladle the water instead of throwing it into a colander, she said.
After a pop-up event in 2022, it reaches a breaking point. “I carried all my stuff up to my fourth-floor apartment and was laughing ridiculously,” she says. “When I walked into my apartment, my roommate said to me, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ I (realized) the number of hours of unpaid work I had been doing for years.”
Chick needed physical space. When she started looking for studio apartments to rent, she had a huge stroke of luck: She received an email informing her that she had won $50,000 in a drawing hosted by Earnest, a private student loan and refinancing provider based in San Francisco.
She unwittingly entered the competition while researching potential rates for student loan refinancing, she says. After taxes, she took home about $30,000, what she calls a “life-changing amount of money.”
The funds came in handy when, nine months later, she found her ideal studio. She started renting it for $2,800 a month in March 2023, subletting it while she developed a plan for RecCreate Collective.
“I had never had a job that allowed me to save, let alone have a big fund to invest in something,” Chick says.
“Vibrations are expensive”
Back at the studio, Chick watches as Emhoff teaches participants how to use duplicate stitches, which are added to existing ones, to embed images on knits. They sit on folding chairs in front of brightly colored taper candles, sipping tea and chatting to music as they work.
It was expensive to make the space comfortable and creative. “Vibrations are expensive,” jokes Chick.
RecCreate Collective participants in knitting painting class
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Of the $25,000 RecCreate raised in January, $9,000 went toward rent, supplies, contractors, insurance and more. The remaining $16,000 was profit that Chick used to pay himself and reinvest in the business. A portion of RecCreate’s profits goes to a fund that subsidizes low-cost tickets for people who can’t afford the classes — which typically range from $20 to $50 per session, Chick says, but can sometimes reach 130 dollars.
She attributes RecCreate’s growing popularity to a single factor, the same one that pushed her to find a creative outlet in the first place: “In the post-Covid digital age… a lot of people work on their computers all day (are) really looking for a tactile experience.”
“People really want spaces to be in person with each other,” Chick adds. “Anyone can sit at home and knit a sweater, but it’s really special to be able to walk into a room with a group of strangers and communicate with them.”
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