Screen shot taken from handbago.com (September 3, 2010)

All my thanks and gratitude to Nicole over at Handbago, who does a fantastic job covering both emerging and established designers. Please show some love to Handbago and also check out my feature at http://www.handbago.com/blog/handbags-working-woman-taryn-zhang-new-york posted today.

If I may reprint the words that made me glow:

Working women of the world, rejoice!  Taryn Zhang New York debuts their first collection for Fall 2010.  The line includes handbags, briefcases and accessories for the corporate woman and are fashionable while being functional.  Designer Sunny Woan is a corporate attorney by day and designer by night.  She birthed her collection after being pressured to have a child by her parents.  Not ready to leave the corporate world for motherhood, Sunny created her collection and named her company as if it was her daughter.

The bags are structured with clean lines and bold colors and are meant to compliment the women behind the inspiration.  The women that carry Taryn Zhang are professional yet feminine, strong individuals that fit in with the corporate world dominated by men.  Each bag in the Taryn Zhang Alpha collection is “named after a certain facet of the alpha woman: Workaholic, Precisionist, Executive, Catalyst, Peripatetic and Ambitionist.”  The bags themselves are all made of microfiber vegan leather.  Sunny is dedicated to being animal and cruelty free.  The bags are expertly made and structured to perfection.  Check out the collection on the Taryn Zhang Designer Page and tarynzhang.com.

The Executive, by far my favorite, is a satchel brief that comfortably fits manila folders and work documents.  The design is architectural and structured, a must for fall and the bright color lets any woman-in-charge show off her style while still being work appropriate.

We are definite fans of Taryn Zhang New York and see great things in this designer’s future!

And we here at Taryn Zhang are definite fans of Handbago! Thank you, Nicole, for giving us our first feature!

Screen shot taken from handbago.com (September 3, 2010)

Talk about borderline Twilight Zone to see my bag clumped in with those titan fashion houses. There’s Fendi, Gucci, Marc by Marc Jacobs, Alexander Wang, Bulgari…and oh! There’s Taryn Zhang! Next somebody’s going to come and tell me that pigs are flying. Seriously.

As you can see immediately, I didn’t properly prop the pink weekender tote on the bottom left corner. Hubby suggests that we redo it, this time with dental floss tied to the two outer edges and him holding up the floss like marionette strings. That will show off the cool shape of the tote better.

Clockwise starting at 12 o’clock, we’ve got the Precisionist satchel, which comes with an ID wallet (not pictured); the Ambitionist briefcase and matching clutch (comes with a shoulder strap, not pictured); the Executive satchel brief (comes with a shoulder strap, not pictured); the Workaholic shoulder tote and wristlet clutch (center); the Peripatetic weekender tote (the pink one we were talking about earlier); and the Catalyst briefcase. The Catalyst also comes with a matching wristlet clutch similar to the Workaholic clutch (but not pictured).

We’re still waiting on our legit and professional photo shoot. Our legit and professional photo shoot with super-talented photographer Sherrie and former-pageant-queen model Heidi won’t happen until late September, or even October-ish. Hold your breath for it because there’s going to be some sick level of eye candy! =)

In the meantime, I had to settle for me as photographer. Today we shot just the bags in our living room.

That’s our kitchen table pushed up against the living room wall, and the white platform is the backboard of my IKEA bookshelf. Behind me we crowded every freestanding lamp in the house for makeshift lighting. No matter how we positioned them, we couldn’t get rid of the shadows. Ah well. Like I said. Legit and professional photo shoot forthcoming.

I’m also designing a temporary lookbook to use. Since I can’t wait until after the legit and professional photo shoot (late September early October, ish) to start wholesaler-hunting, we’ve recruited our friend Carolina to stand in temporarily as our model. This way I can create a lookbook asap and use it to query wholesalers. Carolina is the total package, definitely a “Taryn Zhang” woman– beautiful, intelligent, kind, successful in her career, and in a loving, wonderful marriage. We’ll be shooting by the bay Sunday afternoon. Pray for warm weather and bright skies!

In addition to working on minor edits to the bags, I’m also designing the dustbags. Every Taryn Zhang purse will come in a sturdy drawstring TZ dustbag. I can’t decide whether I want a minimalist black one with just the logo and brand name (above left) or mimic the black and gray stripes of the interior lining of the bags (above middle) or a repetitive pattern of the TZ logo (above right).

Final update: Everything so far has been in silver. Now we’re exploring our golden possibilities. Some of the bags will come in a gold-tone hardware option, such as the Workaholic set. You could get it in black with silver-tone hardware, for example, or black with gold-tone hardware. However, this gold option is still tentative. It really depends on how the gold samples come out.

Lookbooks, line sheets, hangtags and other details for packaging, edits to the bags for final production, and finding boutiques that are willing to carry my bags… oh, so much to do, so little time…

The more I looked at the original design for the Tycooness doctor style satchel, the more the handles bothered me. I changed it slightly and I believe that change saves the bag. In fact, I can’t even look at the original design now without shuddering a bit. Ew. What was I thinking?

The new handles give the bag a cleaner feel. Stitched on and with metal reinforcement studs, these handles are going to be super sturdy. I’ve also updated blurbs for each piece in the debut collection on the regular website, here (click link).

Funny thing is the revision in the Tycooness bag happened contemporaneously with a revision I made in a short story I’ve been working on. (For those who don’t know, prior to starting Taryn Zhang, I was an aspiring fiction writer. Lawyer by day, fiction writer by night. Now I’m a lawyer by day, handbags designer by night, and fiction writer when I can get it in.) Like the handle attachments, a minor edit in that short story changed it entirely. I had been feeling bleh about the piece,  and that minor edit was what made me go from liking it to loving it.

The contemporaneous revisions got me thinking again about how gosh darn similar creative writing and fashion design are. First and most frustrating are the tropes. Almost any narrative arc you can think of has been done before and will be done many a more times after yours. What sets one story about girl coming-of-age from another story about girl coming-of-age are the details. Likewise, an established fashion designer once told me to rest assured that whatever I come up with will be old news. Somebody else will have come up with it already, and that silhouette or arrangement of zippers or what-not will show up again after mine. It’s something every designer has to learn to get over.

I’ve also learned that after completion of the first draft (of a short story or chapter of a novel) or preliminary sketch (of a handbag), I have to set it aside for a while. When I look at it again with a fresh pair of eyes, awkward sentences, grave omissions of plot, or unsettling proportions and incompatible styling immediately leap out at me. This is because right after the first draft is done, I think, “hey, that’s pretty good, that’s all right stuff.” But then when I review it again in a few, I realize, “wow, this is junk, I’ll be lucky if I can salvage half of it!”

Without any intent of making the design of my bags autobiographical or reflective of my personal aesthetic preferences, Taryn Zhang handbags nonetheless represent my view of the world, specifically women. Same with creative writing. Even when we write a novel that we’d argue tooth and nail “is not autobiographical at all,” it still ends up one way or another an extension of who we are and what we’ve gone through in life.

Then of course, the main theme of this post, revisions. Revision, revision, revision. Edit, edit, edit. These are mantras repeated in both arts. Creative writing students will be instructed by their professors to revise and edit, and then revise and edit again. There’s no such thing as a final draft. How many times do MFA candidates hear that! Similarly, on Project Runway Tim Gunn is constantly telling the contestants to edit their pieces, edit their collections, that the most important aspect to design is editing. It’s kind of uncanny how Tim Gunn could probably teach a writing workshop and Lan Samantha Chang could teach fashion design. They’d be dishing the same set of advice to their students.

Finally, perhaps the most difficult, is finding your voice, and maintaining a consistency in style. Young writers tend to sound like the big-name authors they revere. It takes them a while to find their own voice, and then once they do, it takes them a while longer to learn how to maintain it and be consistent. Turns out fashion design isn’t all that different. To start, whether we’re conscious of it or not, our designs are frighteningly similar to the designers we love. We need to, well first, become conscious of it, and then second, develop our own distinct aesthetic point of view. If that isn’t difficult enough to handle, we then need to learn how to be consistent, just like in writing. Each collection needs to be cohesive. Easier said than done, for sure.

At present, I’m scrutinizing the pieces for cohesiveness, and trying to reconcile that with what I foresee to be saleable bags. For example, I don’t think the Jetsetter is consistent in design with the Catalyst and Workaholic. But Hubby is insistent that I keep the Jetsetter as part of the collection because he believes it will sell better than the Catalyst and Workaholic. He’s got a knack for marketability and all things money or sales related, so I’m inclined to listen to him, even though the artist part of me thinks it’s an aesthetic thorn in the collection. Hence, putting together a solid line feels like one of the hardest tests on my decision-making capabilities I’ve ever encountered. Sigh. We’ll see what happens.

The question I’m left to ponder is this: which am I worse at, novel writing or designing handbags? Oh dear. Hmm….

All illustrations above were rendered in MS Paint and/or Jasc Paint Shop Pro.

In the future I would love to design my own textile and have a custom copyrightable interior lining of my own, but for now, I’ve selected a classic black-and-gray striped fabric. The issue at hand is whether those stripes should be vertical or horizontal.

The vertical stripes remind me of candy packaging, boardwalks, and referees. None of the aforementioned evoke a sense of elegance. Yet I like it.

The horizontal stripes are a bit of an eye sore, like those optical illusions. I don’t think the interior of a handbag should be an optical illusion. Yet the horizontal stripes don’t look so shabby either. Hence the debate. Should I go with the vertical or the horizontal?

I post this in the event that my friends would like to offer their input. I’ve decided not to get back to the manufacturer right away with my answer. Instead, I’m going to sleep on it a bit. Doesn’t seem like a big deal, vertical or horizontal stripes, but it is. The details will make or break you.

All illustrations above were rendered in MS Paint.

2010.07.16 Update.

Via Facebook and private messages, my pals have convinced me. Vertical stripes. We’ll be going with vertical stripes for the interior lining. Vertical stripes will hereinafter remind you of candy packaging, boardwalks, referees and…Taryn Zhang! =P

First, oops, I made a few mistakes in the collage above. I’m making the Tycooness sample in black and gray, for example, not black and that other color shown. I copied and pasted the wrong thing, but didn’t notice it until now, and I don’t have the patience to redo the collage. Then there’s the matter of proportions. Please do not try to determine the size of one illustrated bag by comparing it to the size of another. They were each copied and pasted from different documents or files. For example, no, the Dignitary bowler bag would not in reality fit inside the Jetsetter weekender, and the Executive satchel is not giant compared to the Tycooness, etc. =P

And no, I don’t know why I made the interior lining pattern front and center and the actual handbag illustrations much tinier around the periphery. Guess it started when I had to decide on one universal lining (to keep costs down) and tried to match up the swatch colors to the lining. Then to remind myself what each swatch color set corresponded to, I copied and pasted illustrations of the bag designs.

Taryn Zhang has a specific objective: to design bags for the working woman. It started with the Catalyst (thus aptly named) and Ambitionist briefcasey type bags because that’s what I needed myself for work. I couldn’t find anything that was both girly and corporate, because for some reason society still thinks the two don’t go together. They definitely do! Who’s with me!?

Then, because the working woman still has a life outside the office, I worked on designs for weekend travel, shopping excursions, or brunch with the girlfriends. Also, since not all of us work in corporate, I wanted to include a few handbags for the arts professional.

Folks in fashion design tend to be paranoid-secretive with their conceptions and are constantly in fear that somebody will copy their work and make a boatload of money off it. Perhaps it comes from being educated in Silicon Valley, because I have a more open-source outlook on design. Plus, worst case scenario, if somebody really did copy me, I can point back to this blog and say “Look! We’re the first! Just because it takes us eons to produce a bag doesn’t mean we didn’t conceive of it before they did.”

True, I don’t see many other designers (or any at all that I’ve come across to date) putting it all out there the way this blog does, but I refer  back to a comment on a previous post made by a reader. It’s okay that I have no industry experience or know-how. When I don’t know what’s “right” and what’s “wrong,” I will do what I want, where my passions guide me. And that in fact has been the key to many a success story. So I hope it’ll work out for me as well.

Samples production round 2 will begin in the next few weeks or so.

:: excited! ::

All illustrations above were rendered in MS Paint.