5 Reasons Why Women Are Buying Handbags From the Maker Whose Name Was Never Allowed on Them
Twelve years inside New York’s luxury houses. Thirty-two in her own workshop. Some of the women who carried her work, you would know. Her name was never inside any of it. Until now.
I was twenty-one the first time I sat down at a bench. A house here in New York. I signed contracts about it and I’m not going to be the one who breaks them at sixty-eight.
The woman who trained me explained the rule before she explained the work. Nothing I made would ever say I made it. No mark, no initials, nothing stamped into the lining. The house’s name went in. Mine didn’t.
She wasn’t apologising. That’s the trade, and it has been for a hundred years. Most women have simply never been told the plain version of it: the name inside a handbag and the hands that made it have almost never been the same thing.
Which leads to the other thing nobody tells you, because everyone who knows it signed something.
When you pay eleven hundred dollars for a bag, you are not buying eleven hundred dollars of bag. I filled in the costing sheets. Most of that number is the rent on a street where the rent is the point, the campaign, the box it goes home in, and the name. The leather is on that sheet too. It was never the big number.
That isn’t a complaint. I took the work and the money and went back the next morning and did it again. It’s arithmetic, and very few people have seen both ends of the sum.
#1 The hands that made it have made bags you’ve already seen.
There’s a wall at the back of my workshop with nails driven into it, and the patterns hang on the nails. Manila and cardboard, cut and re-cut, some gone soft as cloth from handling. Forty-four years of them. Every one has a date in pencil, a job number beside it, and a client’s initials. Most of the initials have worn off. A few I wore off myself.
A pattern is not a picture of a bag. It is the bag: the seam allowances, the exact drop of a strap, the curve that decides whether it sits against a woman’s hip or hangs there like a bucket.
Everything else sold cheaply on the internet is a reproduction. Somebody photographed a bag in a window, sent the photograph to a factory, and the factory guessed at the rest. That’s why the proportions are always slightly off and you can never quite say why.
I didn’t copy anything. I still have the shape.
The first pattern on that wall that went to a woman whose face I already knew was cut in the spring. I had seen her that January on a cover in my dentist’s waiting room in Queens. I’m not going to tell you the magazine.
What I can tell you is the job. Shoulder bag, black calf. The strap drop had to come up an inch and a half. It was collected on a Tuesday afternoon by a young man who stood at the counter the entire time and never took his coat off. I remember the coat better than I remember the year.
#2 You don’t have to take my word for it. You can check it yourself in sixty seconds.
Go and get the bag you use most. This will tell you more than anything I can write.
Find a raw edge. The cut edge of a strap, the underside of a flap, anywhere the material has been sliced and left. Take it to a window. Real leather is a skin, so its cut edge is fibrous, slightly fuzzy, never quite even, because there are fibres in there and fibres fray. A coated material has a cut edge that is painted and sealed and perfectly uniform, because there is nothing inside it to fray. Once you’ve seen the two next to each other you can’t unsee it. It takes four seconds.
Then look where the strap meets the body. Is it stitched through, or glued onto a tab and covered over? Glued is where bags die, and they die suddenly, usually with your shopping in them.
Then pick the whole thing up by the zip pull. Good hardware has weight. Hollow zinc feels like a toy on day one, never mind year three.
Those three checks are the difference between a bag that lasts eleven years and one that lasts two. Run them tonight on what’s already in your closet. Then run them again on mine when it reaches you, because I would far rather you checked than took my word.
#3 It costs what a bag costs when there’s no name to pay for.
Let me take one bag apart on paper.
Mid-nineties. A shoulder bag I made for one of the houses. The calf for it cost thirty-eight dollars. The hardware came to eleven: two rings, a zip, the feet, the clasp. My day rate then was ninety-four dollars, and that bag was a day and a bit of my hands.
It sat on a shelf at one thousand, one hundred and ninety.
I’m not showing you that to make you angry, and I wasn’t robbed. I knew the rate when I took the bench. I’m showing you because you are entitled to know where the rest of that number went, and the rest of it was never in the bag. It went on the street the store stood on, on the campaign, on the tissue paper and the ribbon and the carrier bag it left in, and on the name, which cost nothing to produce and cost you almost all of it.
Take the name out of the sum and the sum collapses further than anybody would believe who hasn’t seen the sheet.
The bags on my shelf are $39.95 to $69.95.
That is not a discount and I would rather you didn’t read it as one. Nothing has been removed from the bag. One thing has been removed from the price, and it is the one thing I was never allowed to put inside it anyway.
There are twenty-two left. I’ll show you what they are.
See What’s Left on Her Shelf →#4 It’s the only thing you’ll buy this year that fits no matter what.
A handbag is the only thing you can buy that has no opinion about your body.
Nothing else in a wardrobe can say that. Everything else has a number in it, and the number is a conversation you didn’t ask to have. A bag has no number. It fits you now exactly as it fitted at thirty-eight, and it will fit the same at eighty, without alteration and without apology.
Then there’s the sum, which almost nobody does. A dress gets worn six times. A winter coat works four months of the year. A bag is on your arm nearly every day, with everything you own, for as long as it holds together, which is what the first three reasons were about. Sixty dollars spread over eleven years is not a purchase. Two hundred dollars of clothing still hanging with the tags on in October is a purchase.
That is why one good bag does more work than three new outfits. Most of the women I’ve sold to worked it out years before I said it out loud.
#5 Every one of them is named after a woman. When they’re gone, that’s the end of it.
Every bag that came out of my own workshop has a woman’s name on it: Ruth, Frances, Judith, Nancy, Evelyn, Katherine, Ellen, Carol, Susan, Margaret, and the rest. Either she’s the woman I made it for, or the woman I had in my head while I cut it.
I never intended it as a system. I needed something on the job sheet that wasn’t a number, and after the second one I couldn’t go back to numbers.
So there’s no product line here. There are twenty-two bags on a shelf, each with a woman’s name on it, and a fair chance one of them is your name, or your mother’s, or the name of whoever taught you to drive.
Twenty-two is what exists. I’m sixty-eight and every bag is cut by my own two hands, so no design gets made in quantity — and once a design sells through, I don’t make it again. When the shelf is empty it’s empty. That’s the whole of it and I won’t dress it up.
See if yours is on there. A few women have found their own.
See the 22 Bags and Their Names →That’s the five. Here is the part that’s just business.
I pack every bag myself. I have never once handed that job to anybody else and I’m not going to start now. It leaves the New York workshop inside twenty-four hours, tracked UPS, free, and it’s with you in three to six days anywhere in the States.
Thirty days, money back, no questions. If you open the box and it isn’t what you thought it was, send it back and I will return your money. I won’t ask you why and I won’t put you through a process to do it. I have been putting bags into boxes for forty-four years. I am not going to start arguing with a woman about one now.
👉 All 22 bags are up to 50% off while they last
They’re $39.95 to $69.95 — and there are three small things in every box that you didn’t pay for. You’ll find them when you open it.
See All 22 Bags →Nothing gets restocked. When the shelf is empty, it’s empty.
“the smell of it!”
“honestly the smell of the leather when i opened it. my husband laughed at me because i kept sniffing it. its proper leather not the plastic stuff you get now.”
“Very good, one small thing”
“Really pleased. The inside pockets actually fit my glasses case which is rare. Only thing is the strap was quite stiff at first, took about a week to soften up. Would still buy again.”
“bought one for my daughter too”
“i dont usually shop online but i have had a great experience at Rose’s bags and i have bought one for my daughter as well. She also loves hers a lot. It came very fast too.”
Timeless Bags, Made with Love by Rose. — Rose Mary Harper
Comments · 87
Most relevant
Margaret T.
Did the edge check on the bag I bought at the mall last year. Painted plastic, just like she said. My mother had real leather bags and you could always tell.
👍❤️ 47
Kathy B.
Margaret which one did you get? I need an everyday one that isn't huge.
👍❤️ 3Margaret T.
Kathy the Linda, the vintage shoulder one. Right size, fits my glasses case and all.
👍❤️ 6
Denise W.
Ordered the Judith on Tuesday, it was here Friday. The card inside had the name written by hand. I know it's a small thing but I sat down.
👍❤️ 34Rose's Bags Author
The card is always written before the tissue paper goes in, Denise. Thank you for giving one of them a home.
👍❤️ 12
Eleanor P.
I have carried the same bag for nine years because I refuse to buy the plastic ones twice. This is the first article that explains what I could never put into words.
👍❤️ 28
Gloria S.
Three of us at church have one now. I got the Ruth because that was my sister's name.
👍❤️ 21
Frances D.
My daughter sent me this article. I thought the prices were a mistake honestly. Then I read reason 3 again.
👍❤️ 17
Linda M.
Is the strap long enough to wear across the body? I'm 5'2.
👍❤️ 2
Barbara J.
Linda mine sits right at the hip. And the strap is stitched right through, not glued, you can see it where it meets the bag.
👍❤️ 5View more comments