SHOULDER SEASON
Meet the multi-tasking bags that won’t bog you down.
Money, it’s often said, cannot buy love or happiness. It would seem that it also cannot buy a perfect luxury work bag — and in the tech world, that invites an opportunity for “disruption.”
San Francisco startups have been rethinking what working women want to carry, and the result is an outpouring of functional, minimalist options at more accessible prices than designer bags. Call it the handbag renaissance. These understated totes share characteristics including design, materials, utility, but perhaps most of all, a desire to be something not currently in the marketplace.
The newest contender is from serial entrepreneur and early Facebook employee Julia Lam, whose story will be familiar to many.
“I was fundraising for my last company, and I was running around from meeting to meeting to social event and back to meeting. I had this cute shoulder bag with my laptop and my life in it, but the weight on one shoulder was hurting me, and I was tipping over in my heels. I thought there had to be a better way,” she says.
Her needs were straightforward, yet elusive: Lam wanted something beautiful, professional, practical and with distributed weight — in other words, something with the mind of a briefcase, the wearability of a backpack and the look of a luxury handbag. It also wouldn’t hurt to add the portability of a clutch.
“I’ve been thinking about this idea for several years now, mostly around how to solve challenges for the working woman: How do we build products for women who have a dynamic lifestyle? How do you look good and feel comfortable at work?” Lam says.
In 2016, she sold her company, Bucket, and set to work on what would become Tara&Co, working with a designer to create a bag prototype in six weeks. She named it the Tracy 2-in-1 after her friend, engineer and entrepreneur Tracy Chou, whose advocacy for gender representation in technical roles ignited a movement that garnered participation from Google, Facebook and Microsoft, among others.
This being the world of iterations, Lam tapped tech-world friends, including Chou, to be early testers. In May, she launched an Indiegogo campaign to “validate product market fit,” as she says.
The numbers — more than 300 bags presold at $295 each, which was 115 percent of her goal — validated that women were willing to buy a convertible laptop-friendly tote that works as a shoulder bag, backpack or cross-body, with expandable compartments and a zip-off clutch.
“For those not in the startup realm, product market fit is about building something that people want. People will often tell you they want something, but when you build it, they don’t use it,” Lam says. “I wanted to know that if we built this product, people would actually be excited to buy it — and they were.” The Tracy 2-in-1 is available on the company’s website for $395 starting Wednesday, Nov. 8.
The struggle between aesthetics and functionality was all too real for Senreve co-founder Coral Chung, whose $895 Maestra bags have sold out “four or five times” since becoming available a year ago. The leather bag converts into a backpack and was designed to replace the luxury bags from the likes of Prada, Fendi and Hermès that Chung had used early in her career as a consultant at Bain & Co.
“Those types of bags are not made for a multifaceted, busy woman,” Chung said. “They are going for a woman who usually doesn’t carry a laptop, and they might have a driver and don’t need to think about security or a zipper on top, or needing the bag to work from day to night.”
Like Lam, Chung and co-founder Wendy Wen employed customer testing and numerous iterations to understand what would excite women about a work bag. When it came time to raise money, she saw it as a bad sign if a potential investor wondered what was wrong with the current department-store assortment.
“To me that is a very naïve kind of response; it shows a lack of understanding,” Chung said. “That’s like saying, when Google was founded, ‘There were already thousands of search engine companies.’ It’s an oversimplification. I think what we are trying to do is an extremely differentiated point of view that current luxury brands can’t do or aren’t interested in doing.”
When Cuyana launched in 2013, co-founders Shilpa Shah and Karla Gallardo were intentionally pushing back against the “fashion bag” mind-set. They started with a classic leather $175 tote guided by an ethos of fewer, better things. “Before we started out, we couldn’t find bags that were high quality and accessibly priced,” Shah said. “We also noticed that most consumers didn’t think about longevity, versatility and quality in their purchase decisions.”
Everlane’s iteration is the leather Day Market tote, a $165 work bag worn by actor (and Prince Harry plus-one) Meghan Markle. (The brand’s Petra bag is a favorite of Angelina Jolie.)
The definition of a luxury handbag is shifting such that even the material, leather, is open to innovation.
Filbert launched in Sausalito in March with four luxury bags made of vegan leather, cotton canvas and microsuede. Its most expensive, the $415 Riley bag, is the brand’s answer to a minimalist, hardworking professional bag.
“There’s an outdated perception that leather equals luxury,” says founder Bridget Brown, who uses a small-batch factory in Portland, Ore., to manufacture her vegan bags. “I think there’s a newer, better way to look at luxury. Luxury to me is knowing
“I’ve been thinking about this idea for several years now, mostly around how to solve challenges for the working woman.” Julia Lam, Tara&Co founder
that my products are made in a factory with good, safe conditions and where the workers are treated well and paid fairly.” Some luxury brands have taken note. Moreau-Paris, which just feted the opening of its San Frant cisco store (at 345 Powell St.), offers a two-in-one $3,000 leather bag called the Bregancon. Art director Fedor Savchenko designs with a mission of building practicality and durability into the bags, which are derived from the company’s origins as a 19th century luggage maker. Although Moreau introduces contemporary updates to suit modern life — to accommodate a laptop, for ex-thinking, ample — the thinking, he says, is to offer something functional that would last rather than something fleetingly fashionable. “People need real things — something to keep for many years,” he said at the brand’s opening party. “Everyone is looking for perfection, and we try to approach perfection as well as we can.”