Written by Elizabeth Winn

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 on Wednesday, March 11, 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.” 

Within the first two weeks of quarantine, Nocquet posted six bags — three backpacks and three totes — on her Instagram and TikTok accounts @pants2bags which at the time both had only a few followers. But, that all changed on Saturday, March 28, when Nocquet posted a video on TikTok that went viral overnight. 

“I had a TikTok account that was just for my friends of me just making these bags and one video just blew up,” Nocquet explained. “I posted it Saturday night and on Sunday morning [one of my friends] told me it had 6K views and by the end of Sunday it had almost 50K views.”

By Monday, March 30 Nocquet had completely sold out. 

“I’ve had bags sell in under a minute,” Nocquet said.

“People will comment or just message me immediately or several people will ask at once and I have to pick the person that messaged me first. The one that took the longest to sell [...] was gone in 12 hours.” 

Now, two months in, Nocquet is still sewing. 

Pull Up Your Pants

Though she’s using thrifted pants now, buying in bulk from online thrift stores like Thredup, Nocquet said that ideally, she would like to take people’s old pants and transform them into something new. 

“The heart of the idea is to have your pants be turned into a bag for you.” 

Pricing her totes at $35 and her backpacks at $75, Nocquet’s finally established her rate by factoring how much time it takes her to make each bag — two hours for totes and four hours for backpacks. With 1,300 followers on Instagram, 8,000 followers on TikTok, 35 bags sold, and customers in the U.S., Canada, and New Zealand, Nocquet has no intention of stopping anytime soon. 

“I mean it’s just turned into a way bigger thing than I thought. I feel like everybody’s waiting to get back to normal life after the pandemic’s over but because I’m graduating I don’t really know what to go back to because it’s going to be like a new thing,”

Nocquet said.

“ So I guess this is my new thing for now.”

For Nocquet’s most recent bags go to her Instagram @pants2bags where she posts five days a week at 5 p.m. EST. 

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