JEAN LAFITTE, La. — In the small community of Jean Lafitte, 24-year-old Emily Francois’ sewing machine keeps busy.
“Every time I get an order, I kind of like, you know, get really excited because someone is supporting my dreams,” said Francois.
She sews handmade handbags and leather goods. She started her small business in 2019 behind her grandparent’s home.
“Right here’s like an old chicken coop because this actually used to be my grandpa’s shed,” she said.
That chicken coop is now the headquarters of Francois New Orleans.
From patterning to packaging to paying the bills, Francois is a one-woman show. She had a lot to figure out to set the business up.
“Get an occupational license, register your LLC and trademarking and all this and that, and how an online website works, so it was a lot of things I had absolutely no idea how to do. But I figured it out.”
But 2020 brought lots more hurdles for the budding Francois New Orleans, like lots of other businesses.
“Once COVID hit, it was like crickets,” she said.
Last March, orders dried up. Supplies got hard to find, too.
“It took me a good two months to get lining in, and I was freaking out. And luckily at the time I only had one order because no one was really purchasing,” Francois said.
Then, there was more uncertainty.
“Hurricane season. It was literally every other week,” she said.
A half a dozen times, storm surge threatened her low-lying studio by the bayou. She and her mom had to continuously push all her equipment to the back of the studio and bolt the doors in the event of high winds.
She couldn’t work in her business for days at a time.
“Some days I’m like, dude, I should just go get a job,” said Francois. But she stayed the course; kept sewing kept designing.
“People were going out of business and I’m lucky that I was able to continue doing what I’m doing,” she said.
And while she’s eager to come out the other side, she won’t forget the lessons of a tough first year in business.
“Doing my first full year of business in the middle of a pandemic was not ideal but I think it kind of made me work even harder to do what I wanted to do,” she said.
