Hasta La Ideas

In our telling of Becky Stern’s Origin Story, we ended with her dropping out of grad school, moving back to New York, and getting a full-time gig at Make. That wasn’t a snap-your-fingers proposition, of course; like her pre-Make video tutorials, it was something she toiled at over time—spurred by her own creative interests rather than a plan with concrete results—and it ended up being profitable for many besides herself (Make, for one). In our Q&A Stern fills us in on the details of that transition, then sounds off on workflow, the work/life balance, social creativity and artistic fulfillment.

Core77: When you say that you dropped out of grad school and “flipped into a full-time role” at Make, was it that easy?

Becky Stern: I had been incrementally increasing the amount of stuff that I did for Make over the two years I was in grad school—doing less grad school writing, more writing at Make and video stuff. It was a really nice overlap because I could interweave [school and Make], so if I did a [class] project that had a craft technique I was already working on a Make piece that used that technique. I’ve always liked to overlap projects that I want to do for myself and projects I want to do for work or school; I can always teach the audience how to do a technique while I am working on a project for myself.

My old boss at Make, Phil Torrone, was like “Hey Becky, do you want to write for Make?” and it progressed to “Hey Becky, do you want to write more for Make? …Becky, do you want a full-time job at Make?” He really got me in.

And you’re still doing that overlapping of projects?

It has to happen, in order to get all of the stuff done in the day that I have to do. I make silver jewelry, and in order to be able to stay in the mindset of silver jewelry—let’s say I need to make a bunch to sell at a craft fair or online—I will do a tutorial video on a technique about making silver jewelry. And it works the other way around, too. There always has to be a personal angle, especially because I do tutorial videos, which are highly dependent on the personality as opposed to just a photo tutorial that just has steps of a project in it. I’m in the video so it has to be about me and my things.

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