When Rebecca Gomez sees an empty bag of chips, she sees more than a simple aluminum wrapper – she sees Eye Kandy.
Gomez, an apparel design junior, creates purses, wallets, even curtains from food and drink wrappers. She sells them through her newly formed business, Eye Kandy.
Designing purses was not quite the career path Gomez originally envisioned for herself. When she was young, she wanted to be a librarian.
“I always thought I wanted to sit behind a cubicle,” she said. “It looks like things are turning out differently.”
Gomez has good reason to be excited about her future prospects. After only a few months in operation, she is selling 30 to 40 purses and wallets a month, she said.
Her first creation was a shower curtain, she said. It was sewn from cereal boxes, candy wrappers and coke labels. She enclosed the curtain in contact paper and her first Eye Kandy creation was finished.
At the prompting of her mom, Gomez began to create purses.
“It was just a hobby,” she said.
The hobby blossomed into a successful business enterprise when Gomez entered the Baton Rouge Bead Show in June of this year.
“I was nervous,” she said. “Of course I like all my purses, but it was just hard for me to imagine other people would like them.”
Gomez went to the show with 20 purses, she said. She sold all of them.
She makes the purses and wallets out of anything, she said – ramen noodle wrappers, drink boxes, Kool aid labels, Zapp’s potato chips bags and even Budweiser cartons.
Materials come from her high school – students there collect food and drink wrappers to give to Gomez, she said.
When she receives all the empty wrapper and containers, she cleans them, sews them together and wraps them in vinyl, she said.
Her most popular items are her purses, she said. They take her about 30 minute to make.
She has recently started making wallets, and she said shower curtains are next on her list.
Her “hobby” has turned into a full-blown business. She has a Web site. where she takes orders. She custom-makes purses – she even ships.
Her purses are copyrighted, and she is working to get the Eye Kandy logo trademarked.
“It all seems to be happening fast,” Gomez said.
And Gomez’s fiance, Blake Autin, said the success is a surprise for Gomez.
“At first, she was scared to do anything,” said Autin, a business junior at Delgado Community College. “I had to tell her all the time, ‘This will work.'”
Autin said Gomez is a notoriously shy person who has always been afraid people will not like her products.
But Cathy Frondorf, a business senior who has seen Gomez’s purses, said she loves them all – especially the purse made from Capri Sun wrappers.
“They are just too cute,” she said.