Event Reflection: Designer Side Hustles

by Irina Kukushkin with Nathan Gao

“Every day I'm, every day I'm...” — Hustlin’, Rick Ross

Hustlin’ was this city’s mantra. If you’re reading this and are from NYC, how many of you and your friends DIDN’T have side gigs? But in this hard, changing world that none of the players saw coming, a lot of us needed a reminder of why we’re all doing this in the first place. So, on April 14, IxDA NYC invited four designers who ran their own game not just for money, but to follow their love, for its first online panel discussion of 2020, on Designer Side Hustles. These designers’ side hustles spanned Fashion, Art, Photography to Start-ups, all of them sharing the same need to apply their creativity to their passions. But it isn’t all about love either; Led by Alex Wilcox Cheek, they also discussed at length about how they tread the fine line between balancing their creative output with their professional work.

Ty Saunders kicked things off, sharing his personal experience on founding his streetwear apparel brand, An Honest Living™. From his first job working at his dad’s garage and into his professional career as a Creative Director, Ty’s been inspired by the fighting spirit of the city and the working class all his life. The inspiration comes mostly from the people working behind the scenes, –the vendors selling at the Yankees stadium, to the MTA workers or valets at Peter Luger– the people supporting the experiences we all know and enjoy. He tries to honor that story through his attention to details pulled into the clothes –adding vintage Miller Lite pins to the Yankees gear, or hand signing each item– so customers know they have one of something and it feels authentic and special. Ultimately, Ty’s goal for his brand is to be a conversation starter, allowing people to relate to the stories behind the clothes. Whilst he’s expanded sales to Tokyo, Japan, Ty still intends to keep An Honest Living as a personal creative outlet to express himself and balance his career out. “For me it’s like going to the gym, I have to do it and if not, I feel like I’m wound up… I do it to rest, not doing it as a job”.

“For me it’s like going to the gym. I have to do it and if not, I feel like I’m wound up. I do it to rest, not doing it as a job.” Ty Saunders

Madeline Vu shared a similar personal journey, starting her online platform and offline community, Extracurricular. After feeling overworked, anxious and unaligned from her work, Madeline reprioritized her personal health and wellbeing and started a collective blog of stories with the goal to challenge the status quo around the meaning of work and personal growth. This expanded to offering experiences and peer coaching programs, promoting practical wisdom and helping working millennials look inward and help manage their stress, careers and stay focused and productive. This seems of particular relevance now, with many of us struggling to differentiate our bedroom, from our office, and her advice to manage this ongoing blurring of work/life balance was to “create a mental separation, however small, to provide some distance between all these things that are blurring together”.

Taking a different direction, Adam Zoltowski found refuge from his organized, professional life as a Creative Director, in the artistic freedom of being a media artist. In pursuit of trying to revive his sense of creative flow and inspired by nature, Adam began to conjure up natural systems by drawing repeating shapes in his notebook. By letting go and following a repeating graphic system, he developed his art into a “meditative state”, trusting the repetition of shapes to advance into their own and yield a result he was happy with. Adam’s work blossomed, and in 2018 he began to exhibit at The Other Artfair in Brooklyn, while starting to experiment with new mediums and backgrounds. With these successes, Adam is careful to not let his practice become work. “You still have to enjoy doing it… you don’t want it to become another annoying chore on your checklist“. In turn, Adam’s art has had a positive impact on his professional work, reducing the pressure to be perfect all the time. “The major benefit of side hustles is just that I can tolerate stuff at my work that I probably couldn’t tolerate before”.

Emily Baron’s passion turns her literal lens onto the cityscape, particularly its people, vehicles and dogs. She has always had a growing, confident interest in photography, and developed her craft throughout College, where she documented numerous sporting events, until she unfortunately burned out. After taking a literal break (her camera’s shutter broke!) and moving cities, Emily invested in a 35mm range film camera and found a new joy in a slower, more deliberate medium format of film photography, delighting in the experimental and physical process of developing her own film. “There’s a better connection with what you’re doing, when you’re physically doing something”.  She takes her camera everywhere, capturing street portraiture and pushing herself out of her comfort zone by meeting new people and hearing their stories. Emily now runs the Beers and Cameras chapter of New York City and has finally found happiness and contentment in photography as a hobby, “I don’t ever want it to be full time gig, as I feel like that ruins the fun of it!”.

The IxDA NYC panel led by Alex Wilcox Cheek shed some insight into how side hustles offer self-care and are often an outlet for designer’s creativity that isn’t present in their day to day work. As Adam mentioned, “just keep making stuff, keep making stuff, keep making stuff and then you’ll figure out the other parts”.

IxDA NYC hosted this event via Zoom, the chapter’s first virtual event.