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The Way We Work Now
The President Ruined a Business I Spent 14 Years Building
Kate Goldwater says she’s shuttering her vintage thrift shop because of the government’s poorly handled pandemic response
The Way We Work Now is a series chronicling how people’s lives and careers have fundamentally changed because of the pandemic.
Kate Goldwater, 36, owned a vintage clothing store in Manhattan called AuH2O. Goldwater tried to reopen her business in July after New York’s Covid-19 lockdown orders lifted, but her in-person sales never recovered. She is now closing her doors permanently. Goldwater spoke to Meredith Clark about saying goodbye to a retail space she’d spent the last 14 years building up.
I went to college in New York and started a little business out of my dorm room. People would give me clothes to alter, or they would like something I was wearing and I’d make one for them. By my senior year, I had started a website, and I was selling at little open air markets. Then at 22, I found a space in the East Village on Seventh Street and built my business. By January 2020, I employed several people for the store, and I had just hired someone to do our Instagram full-time to keep up with demand online.
And then in March, it was all coronavirus, all the time. It seemed like closing was the right thing to do — then the city put us all on lockdown anyway. I thought, “Okay, we’ll put a bunch of stuff on Instagram every day.” I didn’t have the time, with two kids and no childcare, to also start a full online store like some other businesses were doing, but at least this was a way to keep my customers happy. I never applied for the PPP because from what I’d heard, it took so long and you only could use it toward paying rent or your employees. I thought we’d coast and maybe this would only last a month or two. So Instagram became the store.
