We’re getting there slowly but surely.

Contrast stitching makes me happy. I like how it looks. So most of the bags in this debut collection feature contrast stitching.

Above is a Round 1 prototype from 5-ish months ago. I lamented over the production here and here.

Below is from Round 2. Here’s a preview while the bag is being constructed:

Excuse the illustration at left; it was a sketch from when I thought the metal TZ logo plate would still be 2″ x 2″. Then I changed it to 1″ x 1″ for Round 2, which is what you see in the photo at right. To get a sense of the former 2×2, scroll up and view the round 1 prototype. Yikes. See why I decided it had to be smaller for round 2? In any case, I’m really liking the 1×1 plates! =) (Then again, this is what I said about the 2×2 plates when they first came out, so I’m an unreliable narrator.)

We’ve encountered a few bumps with production of the other designs, but nothing serious enough to make me roll up into a ball and cry. All is coming along generally well.

Looking at the totality, I’m seeing a very distinct aesthetic coming out of Taryn Zhang. (I say this like I have no control over it and I’m not the designer behind the line or anything.) Not to keep drawing comparisons back to creative writing, but it really is like creative writing. Writers have an idea of what they want to write, but once the manuscript is done, the characters take on a life of their own, oftentimes a personality the writer did not intend. Applied here, the bags technically look like what I designed, but there’s a– a something I hadn’t consciously infused into the brand’s point of view. From a business marketing and purely non-art perspective, that’s something I’m going to have to analyze and understand before I put these bags up for sale.

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.

For those who have been following along these last few months, I have endlessly complained about how giant the first metal logo plates were. Nobody’s fault but mine. 2 inches by 2 inches seemed all right at the time. And I still love them. They’re just, you know, flashy, excessively showy and garish.

In the metal logo plate remake, version 2.0, I went for a much smaller size, 1 inch by 1 inch. I cut the actual size out of paper and placed it next to the old logo plates for comparison. See above.

This week, the manufacturer sent back the tooling proofs for the new logo plate:

The top row above shows what I gave the manufacturer (with measurements, of course, which aren’t shown). The bottom row above show the proofs they sent back. Thought I’d share an insider’s view of the production process. =)

The difference between the before and after? Huge. Before, the 2″ x 2″ TZ logo plate was at the front and center of your attention. Now, with the 1″ x 1″ logo plate, you’ll actually look at the bag. Imagine that.

Stay tuned for more progress reports, as they should be coming in with greater frequency. We project to complete all samples production by the end of this summer.

2010.07.15 Update.

And here is a shot of the new 1 in. x 1 in. metal logo plates. =)

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.

It did not work out so well the first time around, but that’s because I didn’t have swatch books! These are fantastic. In fact, I’m experiencing options overload.

I had a same-day flight to and from L.A. yesterday for work and what transpired there drained all my energy. I thought I’d stay in bed all weekend to recuperate from quite the stressful week, but then the package arrived on my doorstep: the swatch books from my manufacturer in Hong Kong! Yay! Forget the bed! It’s gonna be a Taryn Zhang weekend! Samples production Part II commences, officially now!