Cookie 1: A Little Spark is Born

If you’re like me you love a good street fair, the food, people watching, and cheap earrings are enough to keep a girl happy for a while. This past Sunday, my zany neighbor/creative partner, Jennifer, and I put ourselves on the other side of the table and decided to be a vendor at the Flatbush Frolic. The Flatbush Frolic is a street fair that’s been a part of Brooklyn’s history for 31 years.

As you know from my last entry, we made tote bags from fabrics that were going to be thrown away. The material that we used was a micro suede from Italy and we had about 20 different colors of it. There were no wrong combinations; we placed fuchsia on chocolate, camel with powder blue, slate grey coupled with crimson, olive against sienna—the colors all seemed to somehow resonate with one another. The bags were "green" without literally being green.

We ended up making 14 totes and we sold 4 (we picked two to keep for ourselves)! I think we could have sold more but we decided to price them at $25 because our friends said we’d be crazy to sell them for anything less, and we agreed. The reactions that we got from every visitor who came to our table were positive. One woman took our contact information because she’d like to consider placing them in a gift shop and another asked for our web address because she wanted to tell her friends about our products (web address? We just got an email account the night before). This made me very happy!

I learned so much from this experience and am amazed that we were able to take a pile of remnants and a vision to introduce something new. We had fun too—the work and the idea came together perfectly.






I’d like to give a really BIG thank you to Cozbi for taking the time to help us sew smart, Craig for giving Jennifer the fabrics, Leanne and Melinda for coming to the fair, and Kamau for sharing ideas and putting up with a messy “Studio W” during production.