Pippa – our blue leather clutch, the one we never meant to design but today couldn’t picture our brand without it – embodies what we’re all about and, as all great things seem to be, was a product of chance.
It began like it was nothing – a client wanted us to design a necessaire bag to be distributed to a hotel chain. You know the drill: simple, elegant. The client liked our products, the project was interesting so we set out to work and began to think, draw and think and draw our days away.
It wasn’t meant to be: maybe the client had other ideas; maybe the hotel chain decided it wanted something else: who knows? What happened was that we were left stranding in the middle of a new idea, a new bag that seemed forgotten even before it began existing. Papers, molds, materials and shapes – were they all destined to be discarded when the concept seemed so interesting, so right? We were too into the project to just abandon it. So we changed everything and decided to create a clutch.
As we simplified and reduced the size of the thing, we saw ourselves wondering: what makes a clutch a clutch? How much can you remove from something before it loses its identity as a thing, becoming another thing instead? The concepts of minimalism, sustainable fashion and respect for the environment are always present when we start thinking about new products, but it’s how you mix these concepts – without ever compromising your aesthetic vision – that things flourish differently and become independent pieces.
With Pippa, we decided to strip everything to its absolute core. For us, a clutch is, first and foremost, a thing of beauty, a diamond in the raw; albeit small, it shines on its own. It is to be worn by one hand, and one hand only, and it should be simple – clean, straight lines – but not too much, so it doesn’t drown with the rest of the ensemble. With those things in mind, and determined to strip everything that was not needed, we set out to the task.
The end result: a clutch made of blue, vegetable tanned leather – for the body – recycled polyester for the inner lining, stainless steel for the clasp. And thread, to tie it all together. Our Pippa clutch is what we like to show when people ask about our aesthetics, about the style of our brand. It’s minimal, it’s chic and it doesn’t compromise our core values of sustainability. Plus, we think it’s beautiful.
What will, we wonder, the next scrapped projects turn into? All we know is, if they all end up as our Pippa bag, then we’ve never been so eager to again experience that casual, fortuitous failure. It will just be the beginning of another success.