Contributed to the design and development of luxury handbags and leather goods through concept ideation and prototyping.
Using resources from Simone's design team, I researched proposed trends for the FW 26/27 season and built a style guide for the team to reference, thinking through general themes, color palettes, and silhouettes.
Common threads: ornamentalism, functionality, pockets, and playful looks balanced with earth tones.
Pulling from both FW 26/27 trends and elements of 0914's brand identity:
This board reflects a direction rooted in tactility, slow craftsmanship, and objects that carry a sense of history.
There was a plethora of fabrics at our disposal, ranging from cow, sheep, goat, and vegetable leather, as well as suedes and linings. The wide variety let us explore different textures, structures, and finishes while conceptualizing designs.
Based on the mood boards and materials I'd gathered, I began sketching ideas, leaning into "handcrafted design" through woven materials and canvas that could be custom-dyed to create unique patterns.
Contrast between materials mattered a lot to me here. It plays well into the resurgence of vintage fashion, and it's something I genuinely enjoy as a designer.
I created 3 sketches I felt could realistically be implemented in 0914's next seasonal collection, including Interwoven, a design highlighting hand-crafted construction through woven materials, and Canvas, a silhouette featuring a custom-dyeable canvas panel that gives each piece its own pattern-driven identity.
At my final concept pitch, I presented my designs to 0914's design team: sketches, a digital mockup, mood boards, and leather samples of my proposed materials.
Simone manufactures for multiple high-end brands, including Tory Burch, Michael Kors, Coach, and Kate Spade, translating each brand's design concepts into products built with Simone's materials, machinery, and technical expertise. I was placed with Tory Burch's Global Sales team for the remaining 4 weeks.
Visited a luxury department store and several galleries to get a sense of popular trends in the high-end leather accessory industry.
Each week, my task was to create one physical sample tailored to the sub-team I was assigned, while still bringing my own point of view as a designer, sketching broadly and experimenting with materials popular for that sub-team.
As with 0914, there was a wide range of fabrics available: cow, sheep, goat, and vegetable leather, plus suedes and linings. The biggest difference: each Tory Burch sub-team used very specific, distinct materials, which I had to factor into every prototype.
One of my supervisors challenged me to grab a few scrap pieces of leather and construct a bag prototype from a sketch, in 10 minutes.
Once sketches were finalized, they were passed to the Patterns team, who built digital models of the designs, ultimately sent to the Sample Room to be physically prototyped by the Stitch Masters.
I checked in with the Stitch Masters as they worked from printed versions of the digital model, following up regularly to make sure things were on track, with occasional conversations about hand-feel, hardware choices, and general construction.
