Skellyton Upcycle on the rise
Senior creates business during pandemic
Used with permission from Ciera Skelly.
October 13, 2020
Although painting her clothes started as a pastime in middle school, senior Ciera Skelly said she has now turned it into her own brand: Skellyton Upcycle a reality.
“I’ve always made clothes for myself and then people thought they were cool, so I told them they should buy them,” Skelly said. “Due to quarantine, I’ve had nothing else to do, so I thought I should make something out of that.”
Senior Liberty Powers said Skelly has always been an outstanding artist and she believed in the potential of her art and encouraged Skelly to start selling it.
“She’s one of my really best friends and she’s always just been a wonderful artist, and we’ve always just sort of made clothes together, and we’ve always told her that she should just sell them because it’s cool enough,” Powers said.
According to Skelly, she doesn’t have big plans for the future of Skellyton Upcycle, keeping her brand alive is all she wants.
“I want to just keep it going and keeping it from not dying, that’d be cool. I don’t expect it to get huge, but if it did, that’d be cool too,” Skelly said.
According to Powers, Skelly’s art has the perfect opportunity to grow now more than ever due to the pandemic.
“She’s just (been) making really cool stuff lately and she decided to start a brand,” Powers said. “Especially with Corona right now, she just had a lot of time on her hands, so there’s never a better time to do it than now.”
According to Skelly, she is currently running her whole brand by herself, but she is still receiving support and help from her friends.
“As of right now, I’m the only one making the clothes, but I got all the people that are helping me modeling and supporting me,” Skelly said.
Powers said how she wasn’t truly involved in Skellyton Upcycle until Skelly invited her to model.
“She pretty much just called me up the other day and was like ‘hey, do you want a model for it’ and I said ‘yes of course,’” Powers said. “But up until that point, I really wasn’t a part of it at all.”
To learn more, check out SkellytonUpcycle on Instagram.
Will Dooley • Oct 13, 2020 at 5:10 pm
Hey, I think everything about this article is really great. If there’s ever been a time to get together (safely!) with friends and do what you love doing, now is totally it. It’s inspiring to see fellow students making the best of the circumstances we all find ourselves in, and it makes me feel proud to belong to the same community as these awesome people. I’m gonna keep an eye on Skellyton Upcycle and their wonderfully unique apparel for certain!
As amazing as the subjects of this article are, I’d be silly of me to not also recognize the brilliance of the writer behind the documentation of this epic story. Andrea Melear refuses to quit making waves in the wide world of journalism, and I expect nothing less than witnessing her writing front-page stories in the future. She also has a really cool miniature cactus and I admire it very much. All-in-all, with regards to journalism and raising cacti, she’s going places.