From Content Creator to Community Builder
A conversation with David, founder of Thread Studio
Welcome to our interview series, Creative Changemakers. Every month, we will be speaking to a different business owner who is using creativity as a tool to build community and create change!
This month, we connected with David Komisarczyk, founder of Thread Studio NYC in Brooklyn. Born from the recognition that many content creators work in spaces that don't serve their needs, Thread Studio has evolved to be a thriving community hub. Inside their studio, you'll find creators, entrepreneurs, and you'll find creators, entrepreneurs, and community members participating in skill-centered workshops (open to the public!) and community events—all designed to support people who have historically felt isolated in the traditional creative industry landscape.
Thread Studio is committed to cultivating an environment where emerging creators can share skills, build authentic community, and stay true to their creative vision while actually making a living. Keep reading to learn more about David and Thread Studio.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
My name is David Komisarczyk. I am a career content creator and social media consultant and I own Thread Studio NYC, which has become a place for content creators to come and creatives and business owners to help make their businesses thrive. But I've also been opening it up to the community at large to host events and bring us together in real life.
What inspired you to start this space?
What inspired me to start this space is being in the content creation space and having a career that involves going to those events and being very wrapped up in that. I realized that in a lot of those spaces, the interactions felt transactional, largely. And so I was missing that community piece since moving here (NYC) in 2021. And as a content creator, I also wanted a space to be able to create consistently because moving things around in my apartment was just very unmotivating. By the time I got everything set up, it just felt like all my energy had gone to just making the space usable. So just having the space has made it a lot more fun for me to create again.
And then at the end of 2022, my partner and I were rewatching Insecure, and Issa's character arc was inspiring to me in that it was so community-based and it felt like she got her bag, but also she brought other people up with her. I felt like I could use a studio as a community space to facilitate workshops and give people the opportunity to have that same opportunity to do so with their career. In a way, I feel like this is an opportunity for me to bring up people in my community and host cool events.
Where does the name come from?
Thread Studio comes from my IG and business name, which is Threadability, and originally when I started creating content, it was very based in fashion, but because of my previous work and what I was doing, I wanted something that didn't necessarily relate back to my name directly, because as I was working in the shadows, I wasn't trying to have people out me. At the time, content creation was so new people didn't know what it was.
So I was in construction management before so the “ability” part was my way of bringing in “construct-ability” and something of that theme and threads was just relating to clothes because I saw at the time putting outfits together [as] a puzzle so Threadability became my overall overarching name and what I go under, but Thread Studio is just an extension of that.
What kind of community do you hope to cultivate?
Originally, when I opened this studio, [I] was really thinking of content creators and freelancers and entrepreneurs who needed a space to create content and trying to build a community among those people, but naturally in the process of inviting people into the space and to be members of the space, it's opened it up to a lot of different types of people, whether it's photographers, people who run digital art collectives, fashion designers, apparel designers, athletes of various natures, people who do all kinds of things.
And simultaneously, I've invited workshop hosts that I've connected [with] in [the] creative wellness space to come and host things. So it's opened up the community to a lot of different types of people and things happening in Brooklyn. Rather than me trying to cultivate a certain type of community, I love that the space has become something for everybody. There's [people who are] artistic[,] [and] people who are just looking to make friends and community.
So I think it is largely for people who are at some point in their creative journey or even just creative curious. But I like that there isn't a specific designation of who's allowed to be in the space, because I want it to be a space really for everybody.
What would you want your first time visitors to know about your space?
So there's visitors in two capacities. There's people who are just going to come and use the space and create content in here, potentially, and I want them to know that this space is basically what I wish I had as a content creator who was starting early in his career. Somewhere that was accessible, where there was equipment that I didn't have to pay a ton of money for to use to make my content better and create a foundation for myself.
That being said, there's also an energy of respect in here in that, similar to how I said I realize that there's a lot of transactional encounters in my previous career, this place could be as transactional as you need it to be, but there is a community behind this, and that means that you put something into this. Whether it's members bringing their own equipment and things to share with other members, or whether it's people wanting to host events and workshops with other people. What you really should know is that you're going to get out as much as you put into this space, and I think that's important. I also think that there's just a really good energy here and I want first time people to experience that. Some of them, especially the creative wellness workshop[s], feel a little woo-woo or whatever you [want to] call it. You kind of have to surrender some part of your ego, and I hope that first-time attendees or users or just community members surrender that a little bit so they can really get something good out of the space.
What does creativity mean to you?
What does creativity mean to me? That's a great question. I don't know that there's one definition of creativity because coming from an engineering background, which was what I got my education in, I was told throughout school was that I was less creative and more mathematical, problem-solving oriented, or science-brained. [There's] an amount of creativity that goes into problem solving and those kinds of things too because that's how science and mathematics gets pushed forward and that's how we solve problems in general.
Creativity to me is not just putting art out, putting pen to paper, or anything that's seen as a traditionally creative career. I suppose creativity is [a] part of all of us. It's [just] how your brain works in some cases. I think it's just more woven into the fabric of who we are than people give [themselves] credit for, [especially] if they believe that they're not an artist or not somebody who's what we think of when we [imagine] creativity. So I think creativity just encompasses a lot of things and that's what it means to me.
What's your biggest challenge as a business owner and how do you navigate that?
Honestly, my first answer is obviously having a consistent membership and keeping the lights on and having people understand what the vision is. But if I'm being more in depth about it, and in the process of having the studio over the last year, I think my most real challenge with having this business is building trust with myself as a business owner. I come from immigrant parents who have [a difficult relationship with money] and I think a lot of people with immigrant parents can relate, but many of us struggle with our relationship to money because of either the way we saw our parents deal with money or because of what was instilled in us by our parents.
And so last year, in the first year of having this space, [it] was a real test in how much I trusted myself and what the flow of money really was to me and whether I was actually in financial ruin or just felt like it, and trusting that there was going to be more cash flow as I continued to build out this business into what I wanted it to be. That was probably the most difficult and I navigated that by leaning on my community in many ways: my friends, my partner, but also finding a mentor who's [dedicated] to entrepreneurship, as opposed to just another peer in the creative industry.
I needed somebody who was not necessarily doing something that I was doing, but could help me navigate business challenges in a very business minded perspective, and so I realized that I knew a lot of people who are creatives and did things similar to me, but I had to really broaden my support system, I guess, and invite people into that support system. But we're here, so we're doing it.
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