Catherall

In a light-filled studio overlooking a busy Wellington street, bags are aplenty. There are the handbags that Jessie Wong has designed, dangling from racks ready to be sent to shops, and a couple of suitcases fresh off the plane in one corner of her openplan office.

The 24-year-old designer has recently touched down after a couple of weeks in Europe, where she showed her 2018 Yu Mei bag collection at Paris Fashion Week, before attending a trade show in Milan, Italy.

Wong’s luxurious deer nappa bags are handmade by machinists in her workroom a stone’s throw from Wellington’s library. Each bag is named after a friend. The Jane bag is a relaxed style in honour of her mother, who loves going to the beach. Jaimee is two small bags joined together, reflecting her friend, Jaimee, who Wong says is ’’fun and positive, and brings people together’’.

Pedalling a sewing machine from the age of 10, Wong was in her first year at Otago Polytechnic’s fashion school when she began making bags as part of a tertiary project. She got the idea for her range in her final year in 2014, when she won an AMP scholarship, which helped her launch Yu Mei, which is Chinese and her middle name.

Many brands begin when their founder looks to fill a gap, and Wong created her first Yu Mei bag because she was looking for a stylish tote big enough to hold her laptop, visual diary, a couple of jackets, and a water bottle.

Still one of the brand’s most popular, she named that first (Braidy) bag after her friend Laura Braidy, ‘‘who was the patron saint of the school library.

"We were approached by all these stockists who emailed me, and wanted to stock the bags, even though they didn't know I was working on a trestle table in a room in South Dunedin."

We were walking everywhere in Dunedin, and we needed the sunnies case, laptop, 1000 jerseys, the kitchen sink’’.

With a staff of 16 in the workroom, every style is created for a purpose. Pointing to a sample on a workroom table, she says it will go through up to 10 incarnations before she is happy with the result. Her bags must be functional and good looking.

Coming from a family of dentists and doctors, Wong has just signed a deal to get her bags into their 32nd Australasian store – Yu Mei sells in Hamilton’s Harper Inc, Good as Gold and Ena in Wellington and Auckland, and Ballantynes in Christchurch. Not bad for a gutsy designer who has shown at three New Zealand fashion weeks, the first just a couple of months after she launched Yu Mei in 2015.