27-year-old started a side hustle to get out of her ‘windowless office’—now her business brings in $25,000 a month

It’s Tuesday night, and Liz Chick is in her studio in Brooklyn, New York watching Ella Emhoff — the stepdaughter of U.S. vice president Kamala Harris — teach 20-somethings to do something called knit painting.

Running the studio, called RecCreate Collective, is Chick’s dream job, she says. Multiple nights per week, Chick — often sporting a quilted jacket she dyed herself using avocado pits — hosts instructors who teach knitting, collaging, painting and sculpting classes of up to 45 people.

It’s also the most lucrative job she’s ever had, says Chick, 27. In January, just ten months after hosting its first class, the studio brought in $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 roughly $5,500 per month, she says.

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To get her business off the ground, Chick took on “windowless office” jobs, carted art supplies up and down her fourth-floor walk-up and trusted that she’d eventually get paid for her art.

She also got abnormally lucky. In 2022, Chick won $50,000 in a sweepstakes drawing she didn’t even realize she’d entered, providing the seed money she needed to rent the studio’s physical space and launch her business.

The unexpected cash infusion was a lifeline. “I would never go back to an office job … I hope to never have to,” says Chick. “It feels amazing to be able to make a living doing my dream job. I think are so few people who get to say that.”

As a teenager in in the greater Chicago area, Chick thrifted, bleached and sold high-waisted denim shorts to YouTube influencers, she says. “I’ve always wanted to be an entrepreneur,” she says, adding: “I’ve been doing creative projects on the side, attempting to them into a business for, like, years and years and years.”

At age 18, she moved to New York to attend the Parsons School of Design. When she graduated in 2019, entry-level design strategy jobs were hard to come by, so she took a salaried desk job at a local park. The pay was scant and the office was dimly lit, Chick says.

Without a professional creative outlet, Chick created a personal one. She started dying fabrics, using natural items like avocado pits, onion skins and dried florals. She hosted a pop-up shop in her 12-by-14-foot bedroom, selling dyed beeswax wraps — like saran wrap, but made from wax-coated fabric — to her friends.

Soon, Chick was selling dyed patchwork jackets and bags at pop-up flea markets around New York on weekends. She job-hopped to fund those artistic endeavors — first working in marketing, then as an environmental educator, tutor and nanny.

“I really needed to work because I’ve always pretty much supported myself,” Chick says. “[But] it was just so clear to me … I felt like I had to find the jobs with the least resistance while I worked on my own stuff.”

Chick’s artistic side hustle cost most of her free time and salary, and required manual labor. At night, she dyed fabrics in 20-quart stock pots, which were so heavy that she had to ladle the water out instead of dumping it into a strainer, she says.

After a pop-up event in 2022, she reached a breaking point. “I hauled all of my stuff up my fourth-floor walk-up and I was just laughing ridiculously,” she says. “When I walked into my apartment, my roommate was like, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ I [realized] the amount of hours of unpaid labor I had been doing for years.”

Chick needed a physical space. Around the time she started looking for studios to rent, she caught a huge break: She got an email saying she’d won $50,000 in a sweepstakes hosted by Earnest, a San Francisco-based private student loan provider and refinancer.

She’d unwittingly entered the competition while researching prospective rates for a student loan refinance, she says. After taxes, she pocketed roughly $30,000, which she calls a “life-changing amount of money.”

The funds came in handy when, nine months later, she found her perfect studio space. She started renting it for $2,800 per month in March 2023, subleasing it out while she built a plan for RecCreate Collective.

“I had never had jobs that allowed me to have any savings at all, let alone a hefty fund to invest into something,” Chick says.  

Back in the studio, Chick watches Emhoff teach attendees how to use duplicate stitches, which go on top of existing ones, to embed images onto knitwear. They sit in folding chairs across from brightly-colored tapered candles, sip tea and chat over music while they work.

It was costly to make the space feel cozy and creative. “Vibes are expensive,” Chick jokes.

Of the $25,000 RecCreate brought in in January, $9,000 went to rent, supplies, contractors, insurance and more. The remaining $16,000 was profit, which Chick used to pay herself and reinvest into the business. Some of RecCreate’s profits go into a fund that subsidizes low-cost tickets for people who can’t afford the classes — which typically range from $20 to $50 per session, says Chick, but can occasionally rise to $130.

She credits RecCreate’s growing popularity to a single factor, the same one that drove her to find a creative outlet in the first place: “In a post-Covid digital age … a lot of people who are working on their computers all day [are] really looking for a tactile experience.”

“People are really craving spaces to be in person with one another,” Chick adds. “Everyone can sit at home and knit a sweater, but it’s really special to be able to come into a room with a bunch of strangers and connect with them.”

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