Photo courtesy of Colette Bernard.
Bernard's shop downtown Lafayette, Cocodrie Collective—featuring her products, as well as those of other local and national artists. She calls it a "cool stuff store."
In the spring of 2023 there was a buzz around Lafayette about a local artist who had made thousands of dollars selling hair claws. Colette Bernard, educated in the fine arts at Pratt Institute of New York, had recently moved back home to Louisiana, carrying with her the “financial trauma of student loan debt” and a strong desire to use her creativity to settle it. With sales from her Career Claws—whimsical hair accessories symbolizing various lines of work—she not only paid off the entirety of the debt, she established herself as a designer and artrepreneur. She recently shared a bit of her story with Country Roads, letting us in on a “juicy tidbit”—something she’s excited to be working on for the upcoming new year.
Girl, Make that Magnet!
“I stepped away from the fine art world when I was deep in art school debt and dreading the idea of working entry level positions to pay it off,” Bernard said.
One of Bernard’s early inspirations was her friend, the late sculptor Devra Freelander—who created large resin sculptures, then smashed them and sold the chunks as small, affordable pieces of her work. “She helped me appreciate the value of creating art for others and being able to sell it,” Bernard said.
Photo courtesy of Bernard.
Lafayette-area artist Colette Bernard
This philosophy, which releases artists from the pretension of always reaching “above” the masses and enables them to build an economically sustainable career in the arts, is one that Bernard promotes on TikTok and Instagram @artistcolette. “Girl, make that sticker, make that magnet,” Bernard said in one of her many pep-talk style reels.
Early on, friends had encouraged her to create a sticker from her design of a birth control pill container; they quickly sold out. The success of that first experiment emboldened her to create her now-globally-worn Career Claws.
“Cocodrie Collective is not centered on me. It’s stocked by a collective with artist-made goods plus carefully curated, design-focused items from indie brands.” —Colette Bernard
The first design to go viral was a larger-than-life wisdom tooth with long roots. Using hashtags, she marketed the claw directly to dental hygienists, who polished off her initial supplies. The wisdom tooth design led to more Career Claw ideas. She’s been pushing out new designs ever since—syringes for nurses, pink brains for psychologists, and orange pill bottles for pharmacists. Bernard enjoys observing the irony of who actually buys a particular claw versus who she has in mind during the design process. She claims a crab claw she created for marine biologists has been embraced by “girls yearning for a coastal grandma aesthetic.”
No matter who is buying them, sales of the Career Claws and Bernard’s other forays in accessory design are the reason she was able to settle her $130,000 student loan debt in four years. She had imagined she’d be paying on the loan well into her 40s, but made the final payment by the time she was twenty-five years old.
Photo courtesy of Bernard.
Colette Bernard's Career Claw Clips.
Cocodrie Collective Saturday Night
In late 2023, Bernard established a brick-and-mortar space in Downtown Lafayette, not only for her own products, but as place of opportunity for fellow artists. “Cocodrie Collective is not centered on me. It’s stocked by a collective with artist-made goods plus carefully curated, design-focused items from indie brands,” Bernard said, summing it up as a “cool stuff store.”
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During Downtown’s recent Second Saturday Art Walk, the rainbow colored vortex of creative energy that is Cocodrie Collective was packed with shoppers. Books, stickers, knitted critters, and a rhinestone bejeweled full-sized mirror line the walls of the tiny, maximalist fun-house that is the Collective. A trio of brightly colored mid-century modern fiberglass chairs offers a place to sit and take in the visual delights.
While we were there, my daughter and I bumped into a friend of the family, a local swamp tour guide. Ironic to see him at Cocodrie Collective since we’d heard he was recovering from recently being bitten by an actual cocodrie. Relieved he hadn’t lost any digits to the alligator, I kept perusing the merchandise, accidentally playing elbowsies with a woman who was equally absorbed in the art print boxes.
Photo courtesy of Colette Bernard.
Bernard's shop downtown Lafayette, Cocodrie Collective—featuring her products, as well as those of other local and national artists. She calls it a "cool stuff store."
“I love this store, but I come here too much,” she said, explaining how she’d recently bought four prints from Cora Rose Nimtz’s “Okra Bits Collection,” but needed a few more. Seeking encouragement, she showed me a picture of her kitchen wall, bedecked with the vibrant pastel reimaginings of Southern groceries. I agreed that at $12-$25 a piece, expanding her collection was a no-brainer.
After this quick interior decor consult, I found myself pulling Martina Calvi’s A Year of Junk Journaling from the shelf, prompting a fellow shopper to sigh, “You can never have enough rhinestones when junk journaling.”
“Really?” I asked. She responded with an impromptu tutorial on the process.
I left that night with a rush of desire to create, plus a small sticker I couldn’t pass up (a visual recipe for rice, one of Bernard’s designs—a glass measuring cup depicting the locally sacred ratio of water to rice.)
The New Entrepreneurship
Bernard stays engaged with her customers and supporters across a variety of online platforms, occasionally inviting her fans behind-the-scenes of the design process and sharing lessons she’s learned as an artrepreneur. (One is that customers love stickers; even if they don’t enter a store to buy anything, they’ll buy a sticker.) Newcomers to her brand can binge-watch her Instagram reels, and really get a sense of who the woman behind the large, vivid accessories is.
Like her designs, Bernard’s reels are colorful and often heavily punctuated by the satisfying clack-clack of her plant-based acetate hair claws. Her steady rhythm of promoting products online is interspersed with personal stories—she recently discussed her decision to have minor cosmetic surgery and what it meant to her as an artist who designs accessories. The appeal of her artwork, coupled with this vulnerability, attracts followers—198,000 on Instagram plus over 670,000 on TikTok, many of whom become customers and even collaborators.
By offering commissions, Bernard gets to collaborate with local and national businesses on designs, like the go-cup hair claw for Pop’s Po-boys and her rendering of the blue swirl logo that marks Lafayette’s homegrown world-famous Festival International. She worked with Tic Tac on a strawberry shaped hair claw and was excited about an upcoming launch of a design for a soda brand, whose name she wasn’t free to reveal yet.
Photo courtesy of Bernard.
Colette Bernard's Career Clips.
Bernard often takes cues for new designs from her followers. “If you have an idea for a hair claw, put it in the comments section on social media. The speech pathologists have been asking for a larynx,” she said. Her designs grab attention, especially the anatomical ones. Wearing her heart earrings invites comments on their accuracy and a commissioned hair claw depicting lady parts could pass for a surrealistic oyster (offered in two colorways). But a larynx?!
In late October, her team launched two programs aimed at allowing Bernard more time to devote to designing. One is a user-generated content, or UGC, program that will reimburse content creators for their work promoting Bernard’s products. “We recognize that creating content is a skill that we’re willing to pay for,” she said. The second program is commission based, inviting affiliates to act as brand ambassadors, earning a 10% commission on merchandise sales generated through their personal code.
What does Bernard plan to do with more time to create (besides possibly working out that larynx design)? She is currently in the sampling phase of her debut into apparel design. “I’m so excited to be rolling out a small batch, limited edition line of clothing!”
Hundreds of thousands of her fans all over the globe will be, too. That she is keeping her work rooted locally is bonus for us all.
