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…

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?!

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.