Nicholas, Creative Director, Brooklyn
By Adam Rothbarth
Shift Change tells the stories of ordinary people on the frontlines during a transformational period in American life. The goal of this project is to raise funds for Supply Drop Brooklyn, a charitable organization that partners with local restaurants to deliver meals to healthcare workers at affected hospitals. Your help can make a critical difference. Please visit Supply Drop and learn how you can make a contribution. For more information about this project, check out our About page.
Nicholas is the founder and creative director at OutSnapped and founder of Steady Goods in Brooklyn. This is his story.
Can you tell me about what you do at OutSnapped?
OutSnapped is an interactive photo and video company. We do tons of private events and corporate events, and our clients make one-off events and long-term installations or campaigns in the hospitality industry. We essentially create really cool and fun experiences for people to participate in in real life, and then move them into the digital marketing world.
As a company that relies primarily on public events, how has the coronavirus affected your ability to do what you aim to do?
We had a very busy schedule for 2020, with events lined up through December. We even had events booked for 2021 already. I think it was March 9th, we got the first email saying an event was cancelling. By the 11th, everything had been cancelled or postponed through the end of the summer. Now, a lot of our fall events are looking at canceling.
Are you thinking about new ways to serve those clients?
Something that was really interesting about the first few weeks of this experience is it was a great equalizer where everybody was mentally and physically impacted. Everybody was in a state of shock. Our initial thoughts were, “How do we pay rent? How do we keep food on the table? How do we support our community?” One idea was to use OutSnapped’s automated photo products to do product photography, and then we started doing some market research and realized that a lot of people who needed product photography didn’t realize it.
OutSnapped is in a very interesting part of New York City — we’re in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which includes a lot of manufacturers that have recently been tasked with making a lot of PPE stuff for New York City and nationally. A lot of companies in New York have pivoted to making face masks and hospital gowns and things like that. I started asking around, and the idea came up to do Steady Goods, which is a locally-sourced e-comm platform. We’ve been live now for about a week, and already have about 20 local makers on the platform, which is amazing. We have a really nice range of products, from hand sanitizer (made by our literal neighbor Ecologic Solutions) and handmade face masks made by our other neighbor Alberto Valencia, to leather handbags and shelf-safe food items. It’s really fun meeting people, seeing who’s excited about it.
What are your hopes for the future in terms of synthesizing what you’d been doing with what you’re doing now?
Steady Goods will hopefully be a project that outlasts this era. I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t think it could have legs outside of this period. I do think it’s a really great opportunity to source locally and provide that stuff at a national level. A lot of the makers here in New York City don’t necessarily have e-comm platforms of their own, and that’s something that we can be very familiar and comfortable with. On the OutSnapped side of things, we actually just launched our virtual platform. It’s a lot of the same tools that we used for one-off events, and we’re now able to provide online via a standard web browser on your mobile device or computer for longer term marketing campaigns.
What have you been listening to?
When I’m in work mode, I let a Spotify station go based on one track. But then I always have my starred tracks. This Allesandro Cortini x Daniel Avery collab is super cinematic and amazing. This is what The Strokes should be making more of. Perfume Genius is a genius, always, and I love this little edit. I do have a playlist that I made recently that I love, that’s just a Trip-Hop 101 playlist. I also started a Turntablism 101 playlist but it’s far from done.
