Taryn's Design Diary

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.

Yes. Taylor Swift inspires me. And?!

Please note that the following handbags represent first prototypes and serious blunders. This blog documents our trials and errors and tracks our progress from inexperienced start-up to launching the Taryn Zhang brand. Please bear that in mind as you look through these photos and illustrations.

I am making a “last minute” change to the Alpha Collection. In the initial lineup, I designed a bowler bag, The Postmodernist. For the woman who “defies convention, that woman who is simple when it should be complicated, complicated when it should be simple, a woman with nonlinear aspirations and motivations, the woman who needs enough space in her handbag for Derrida…”

The Postmodernist

The two columns of horizontal lines are pleats and the sides are a combination of smooth material and draping. The back “V” are folder pockets. The Postmodernist was going to be another large bag, alongside The Overachiever and The Workaholic, and while I need a bag that can fit half my office desk and three-fifths of my bathroom counter and still leave room for portable nourishment (snack bar, fruit, etc.), not everybody else is a pack rat. I started to entertain my sister C.’s suggestion, to include a clutch.

I’m not a personal fan of clutches, generally. They don’t make sense to me. Why would I want to manually clutch a purse when I could hook one over my shoulder and leave both hands free? That in mind, I set about designing a clutch for my sister C. and also one that could offer the option of a chain that someone like me could whip out and use.

My intent was to simply modify The Postmodernist design, from bowler bag to clutch, but then I confronted the unanswerable questions “What is postmodernism? What does it mean to be postmodernist?”

Not the can of worms a designer handbags and accessories business needs to open, no sirree. Man, what was I thinking before when I named a purse “The Postmodernist”?! Plus, while I believe that the above bowler bag design could get away with being called Postmodernist, nothing else I was coming up with could! I scrapped the idea of The Postmodernist handbag altogether and went with something different, or sort of different…

The Modernist

And naming this clutch The Modernist makes so much more sense, which will be explained in the description blurbs on the website once I’ve gathered and organized my thoughts.

This is no tiny wallet-sized clutch, no. This clutch is made to fit a slim issue of a literary journal, a small paperback novel, a book of poetry or pen and notebook, fulfilling a requirement that I would have of any clutch I’d buy. You may now go to that fancy evening function in style and still have on your person your favorite book or Moleskine for those spurts of inspiration.

The gray TZ thing is a metal plaque with the Taryn Zhang logo embossed into it, either silver-tone or gold-tone depending on the style selected. I know it looks crappy in the line drawing I did in MS Paint (which, by the way, is the program I use to do the technical drawings; I know, so sophisticated), but I hope the actual thing will look fabulous.

Doodling a few of the purses from the tentative Alpha Collection:

I should probably splurge on a few sketchpads. Instead, I draw in composition notebooks. =)

These five handbags (six actually, since the Overachiever is a tote and clutch duo) have made it into production mode. More about these designs here and here.

The Duchess was the first handbag I ever designed, a few days before the NY bar. The Peripatetic went through many transformations, but I finally settled on a hobo. A purse with that namesake only made sense as a hobo bag. The Postmodernist was a very recent design, from a few days ago. I may still change this one; not entirely happy with it just yet. The Overachiever is the bag I designed around my lifestyle. I want a big bag, a weekender tote, something that will fit my laptop and case files. For that mid-day coffee run, however, I wouldn’t want to lug the giant tote with me, so I like that this comes with the matching clutch, which I’d use as a wallet. Finally, The Workaholic, which I may change around and revise as well.

My sisters critique The Workaholic to be too similar to The Overachiever. Of course as the designer, I would argue it’s totally different. The Workaholic is a more compact tote, that fits magazines upright, rather than on their sides like in The Overachiever. Also, there’s all those front zippered pockets on The Workaholic and the pleating. There’s no pleating on The Overachiever tote. Construction of the bags are different. In any regard, their critiques are worth thinking over.

If all fares well, I’ll be getting my samples done by the end of this year. I’m well on my way toward the anticipated Fall 2010 launch.