Q&A With Maggie Henricks
Owner of Create Good Co. Coming Soon to Fort Collins
With so many boutiques here in Fort Collins, I was thrilled to learn about something new coming this fall in Old Town. While doing research for my article, Why You Should Care About Shopping Locally, I found that most of the stores in Old Town are boutiques or second-hand clothing stores. Both are essential to the community and promote shopping locally, but there was a disconnect between the two.
Create Good Co. is the answer to Fort Collins’ need for a unique, sustainable shopping experience, unlike anything we have here in Old Town. The store, owned and run by Maggie Henricks, offers new, revamped pieces crafted from second-hand apparel. I was so interested in this idea, and I knew that I had to share it with the fashion community. Create Good Co. is the perfect blend of buying new clothing while minimizing waste, and her business will be a great addition to the Fort Collins community. The store will be located on 172 N College Ave Unit A-2, and Maggie hopes to open by November 2nd, 2021.
Maggie started off working with Americorps NCCC, a community-service-based organization that allowed her to travel and work on different non-profit projects. While working at a landfill in Sioux Falls, South Dakota she noticed how much waste we produce, and she wanted to start a brand that would help divert it. Maggie says there is a huge disconnect from when we throw things away to when we see it actually in the landfill, and this made her want to make a difference and start her business. Maggie makes products using second-hand clothing while also giving 5% of purchases back to education. She gets her second-hand shirts from local thrift stores and she also has a donation program, where customers who donate get 1$ back in-store credit for every shirt that is donated.
I met with Maggie to learn more about her story, her brand, and her goals as a new store owner, in hopes of sharing more about her business before they open.
Q: What type of products do you sell in your business?
A: So the main product we do is women’s clothing, upcycled and repurposed from men's dress shirts. So that’s really my main focus because I think it’s really interesting to try to turn something that does exist into something else that can exist like I think it's trickier than starting from scratch. It’s more creative and I don’t know it's fun. It’s more unique. The first product I ever made was the boyfriend skirt, which is the bottom half of a men’s dress shirt that’s turned into a skirt for women. I made it because I was at a thrift store one day and I saw the hemline and I was like, that’s exactly what I need! Because I’m 5'8, my mom’s 5'11 so finding skirts has never been an easy thing to do. So, I saw the hemline kind of draped, and I was like that’s perfect. So, that kind of started my interest in that product being my muse. Everything else is stemmed from men’s dress shirts. So now we do cropped jackets and we do trash shirts, which is like the bleaching and distressed shirts. We just started creating a chaos cropped jacket, which is like sleeves of one shirt on the body of a different shirt so that we can make sure since everything is thrifted. There’s times where you get a shirt home, you do all the steps to prep it, and then you’re like oh it's gonna stain on the bottom. So it’s like we can crop it into a jacket now or use the fabric for scrunchies and that kind of stuff. So yeah, everything stems from the dress shirts but it’s a lot of women’s clothing. And then we also use the sleeves to make wine bottle gift bags, and we use the collars for dog collars. For a while, I was just making the skirts and it was like, well now what do I do with the rest of the shirt? Because it defeats the purpose of repurposing if you’re only using half of it and throwing the rest away. Especially because I was finding some cool fabrics and fun patterns and stuff like that. So now we’re getting into some patchwork stuff and quilting things so we can make sure we’re using almost as much as possible. There’s very little that gets thrown away here.
Q: What is your mission statement as a business?
A: My little catchphrase I guess you could say, which isn’t a full formal mission, is keeping grandpa’s hand-me-downs cool. The mission is also, on top of that, is 5% goes back to education so it’s a combination of those things. But really it’s just diverting stuff from the landfill and trying to do right by your community.
Q: Do you do any collaborations with other businesses, and how does that work?
A: I haven’t done any main business collaborations, I do a lot of pop-up events which is like showing up to their event. But it’s not directly with another company, per se. With the education part, I use a website called DonorsChose.org and it’s a really cool non-profit based out of New York. And essentially what it is is kind of like a kick-starter, the same kind of concept. So teachers go on there and they say like, “Hey I’m doing this project, here’s the ten things I need.” They price everything out, somebody at donors chose goes in and double-checks their numbers. And then they say here’s what I’m doing, here’s where I live, or like what city, what school, what grade, all of this stuff. And so I, as a donor, can go on the website and say okay, I want to donate to science in California or something like that. And I can filter all of the projects there, and give my money directly to teachers. So I know exactly what classrooms they’re going to. So it’s really cool too like, I used to get thank you notes too from the kids like they all write thank you notes so you get little drawings and stuff like that but it’s really important to me to know exactly where the money is going. Because a lot of big organizations, there is a lot of overhead and that’s part of running a big organization but as someone that’s smaller, I want to make sure my money is going towards the actual projects themselves. So this way I get a better, more open experience of who I am helping, which I think is really cool.
Q: What does an average day look like for you?
A: Every day is completely different. Right now everything is kind of in a tornado. But honestly, I usually get up around 6 and start sewing before anyone in the house is awake because the dog gets up and the husband gets up and the roommate gets up, and that kind of stuff. And it kinda gets muddy to me. So I like to start early, I’m a morning person. I usually try to sew as much as possible. Some days it’s a lot of prep work so it’ll be like taking pockets off shirts and ironing things because then they’re prepped and all I have to do is run them through the sewing machine. It just really depends.
Q: Do you make everything yourself?
A: Yeah, so, I’ve got a couple people that have been helping me out. So, I’ve had a friend of mine that’s a teacher, I taught her how to make the wine bags. I bought a surge for her, and I taught her how to make those. So she kinda does that in her free time and then I pay her hourly for that. Just to kind of help me keep up with that because once the holidays start there’s a huge rush for the gift bags, and she helps with scrunchies too. And then my cousin that’s living here now has been starting to work for about 10–15 hours a week. So she kind of helps with more of the finishing stuff like sizing the shirts that we trash or sizing dog collars or tagging stuff, and that kind of thing. Just kind of upkeeping the website and doing those kinds of projects that have been on the back burner for me for 3 years now. It’s really cool, and the storefront that we’re getting ready to set up is going to have a workspace in it, so customers are going to actually get to see that their products are made here in Fort Collins, which I think is a really cool concept.
Q: What are you hoping to achieve in the next year?
A: There’s so much that I’ve wanted to accomplish, I’m really excited to be back in Fort Collins, to be honest, and I think that’s gonna be my main gift to myself. What I’m most excited for with the storefront in the next year is being able to be in Fort Collins. I started the business and moved here almost directly after that and there’s not too many art show opportunities here or pop-up events that I was able to really join the community in the way that I wanted to. I love being here but most of my shows were either in Denver or out of state and things like that. I felt like I was part of the community but I was never selling here. So I’m really excited to engage with the community and be a part of Fort Collins. I’m excited to be here in Fort Collins with the other community members, the other makers, and that kind of stuff. So I think that’s really my goal is just to build a storefront in Fort Collins.
Q: What is your favorite part about your job?
A: There’s no limits, like if I have a wild hair idea to design something that makes no sense but works I can. If I wake up tomorrow and I have an idea for a different jacket, which actually happened to me the other day. I was like I want to make that, that sounds cool, that could work, I can. And I think that’s really freeing and it’s really exciting as an artist. Just to wake up and be like that sounds cool, let’s see if that could work. And kind of work out a prototype and then see how it works with customers and if it lands with them and it’s just such a fluid lifestyle where I can kind of try new things. If something doesn’t work I can put it on sale and not do it again. There’s just so much freedom to that.
