Jackie and an artisan in Otovalo, circa 2006

1. Local Production & artisan craftsmanship

Artisan production has long been important as a brand value for Belen Echandia but 2012 is the year when bigger brands embrace it as a trend, both in marketing and advertising efforts and as inspiration for clothing and accessories.  The big question for me is do they really mean it or are they doing it as a marketing exercise?  It is lovely to see Chanel bags made in an atelier in France, but to what extent does this tell the whole story? This remains to be seen and we are interested to see how it unfolds.

2. Sustainability

As consumers want to know more and more about their purchases – how and where they are manufactured and by whom, the fashion industry is moving towards a model of greater transparency and sustainability.  Consumers are buying less and less, but better quality.  They want to know that companies are paying a living wage and the careful use of precious resources.

More and more companies will incorporate environmental checks and display these in a transparent
 way. More companies will become Carbon Neutral.  There will be an increase in social enterprises which address a social objective, such as The Supply Change.  This company connects artisans in developing economies to the global marketplace.   Other such projects include Afia, the IOU Project and Suno, which work with traditional craftspeople in a modern, fashion-forward way the same way Belen Echandia does.

The Demise of Fast Fashion

Amy Dufault, the managing editor of Eco Salon, sai in a recent interview  “I see the trend of fast fashion slowly (very slowly) waning as more well-researched stories are published on it and mainstream consumers can see in a new light just what the implications of fast fashion are.

I hope in my heart of hearts that we are good humans who want to support fair trade, women’s rights, and smaller carbon footprints and not slave labour and catastrophic environmental degradation. That we can garner a conscience and even a little more creativity in how we present ourselves to the world clad in our personal, daily costumes. That despite the world going to hell in a hand basket, there is always the drumming of a band of young men and women designers, artists of the cloth, who want to make a difference as to how those clothes make it to you, how they make an impression on you, and that you accept and support them.

Fingers crossed (again).”

I also hope that 2012 will be the year when consumers really get behind the independent brands that truly care about artisan production and quality and not just profits.  Here’s to that!

Coming up next week in Part II:

• The trend towards sustainable materials
• The growing demand for handmade, vintage and recycled fashion
• The Human Element; and
• Quality triumphs quantity

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To read reviews of our bags and more about the background behind our brand as well as fashion and more, visit our Online Magazine.

For more of my thoughts and opinions on a variety of subjects, please subscribe to my updates – Jackie Cawthra.

Thursday 10 May, 2012 8.30 GMT

One of our sale customers has received her Copenhagen backpack in oak and sent us a picture:

See more pictures on our Facebook page

Wednesday 9 May, 2012 19.30 GMT

We are down to just one Covet Me in mandarin now.  This bag is unlikely to be made again, for anyone considering a pop of colour in a bag.

Not a 3-Day Sale update, but we just had an order in for the last of the black snakeprint, so that leather is now unavailable for custom bags.

Wednesday 9 May, 2012 8.10 GMT

Google just told us that one of our customers has reviewed her red Paris Tote Midi on a blog. We often hear back from happy customers but it is lovely to see someone recommending us and our products so enthusiastically. See the post here: Effenhaute.

The Covet Me Mini samples in anthracite, tan and black have sold out overnight.  There are just a few sample bags left in the sale now.

Tuesday 8 May 1, 2012 6.50 GMT

The Make Me Smile in Cream and the Make Me Smile Midi in cream are now sold out.  We are down to one chestnut shimmer LA Satchel.

Tuesday 8 May, 2012 – 12.20 GMT

There is now only one Petrol Whisper To Me Midi bag left. Get it before it is gone, because it is unlikely this style will pop up again.

Tuesday 8 May, 2012 – 10.40 GMT

The off-white Make Me Smile bags are now sold out.  We found one remaining Flirt With Me in white pony skin in the sample box, so we’ve added that to the sample section.

Tuesday 8 May, 2012 – 9.10 GMT

We have just been notified following an overnight stock check that there is another anthracite Covet Me Mini available:

Tuesday 8 May, 2012 – 8.46 GMT

The whiskey bucket bags, the sand Barcelona midi and the sand Paris Tote have now sold out.  We have located a couple more samples and we have added the cream Make Me Smile Mini to the sample sale.  Here is a picture of Janelle with the Rio Satchel, which is one of the travelling bags she can send to you to try.  Note that it still has the protective paper on the ends of the drawstring.  This bag is a personal favorite of mine.  It looks a little stiff here but it really isn’t at all. It just needs its owner to wear it a little to soften it up.

Monday 7 May, 2012 – 22.38 GMT

We have just added a couple of new things to our sale.  This chestnut Madrid satchel is new to our website but it is included in our 3-day sale:

Buy it for yourself here:

Chestnut Madrid Crossbody Bag

Andy Dunn was involved with the founding of Bonobos five years ago. One of his main aims was to shake-up the retail industry with a men’s wear brand only sold online.  But a new innovation is emerging in the land of luxury fashion, with brands like Bonobos forming strategic partnerships with traditional brick-and-mortar retailers like Nordstrom, the 111-year-old department store.

Both parties describe the deal as symbiotic.  Nordström wants access to Bonobos’ online marketing expertise and Bonobos will get $16.4 million of Nordströms cash and more than 100 stores to sell its clothes.

“We’ve been thinking about where growth is going to come from across all retail over the next 10 years,” said Jamie F. Nordstrom, the head of Nordstrom.com and the great-grandson of the company’s founder to the New York Times. “And certainly square-footage growth is not where that growth is coming from.”

As more and more consumers shop online, brick-and-mortar retailers and fledgling e-commerce sites realize that they can form strategic partnerships.  The pace and landscape of retail is changing and what may surprise many is that traditional retailers, with all the resources in the world, just haven’t managed to keep pace with the innovative mentality of internet start-ups. At the other end of the spectrum, Internet companies are starting to see the benefits of teaming up with well-established marketing partners with substantial resources and distribution networks.

Nordstrom has been among the most successful retailers online. Last February, it paid $180 million for Hautelook, the first of takeover of a sales site by a traditional retailer. The retailer is also changing its main website, introducing same-day shipping and placing 6,000 mobile hand-held devices in its stores to enhance the customer’s shopping experience.

The company will invest $140 million on e-commerce this year, a 40 percent increase from 2011.  Over the next five years, it intends to devote almost $1 billion, or roughly 30 percent of its capital expenditures, on boosting e-commerce growth.

Nordstromwas initially interested in a typical distribution deal with Bonobos, a brand bought by well-to-do professionals who like crisp plaid shirts and red chambray pants. But the retailer found a greater interest after examining Bonobos’s operations and how it engaged with its online audience. Mr. Nordstrom was particularly impressed with Bonobos’s mail-outs which included customized elements and links to quirky You Tube videos, which appealed to Bonobos’s male clientele.

Nordstrom’s new online strategy has already reaped rewards for the company.  In the last year, the company has improved the personalization and targeted customer emails, mirroring efforts by HauteLook. This has increased engagement “pretty significantly,” according to Mr. Nordstrom. The executives at HauteLook, along with the team at Bonobos, will also help the company design new applications for mobile devices and Nordstrom.com.  The new relationship could be equally advantageous to Bonobos, which is dealing with rising competition online.

In its early years, the business grew fast, supported by word-of-mouth marketing. But as Bonobos grew it began to spend more money on advertisements to attract new customers. By 2011, the company was devoting about 20 percent of its revenue to marketing, about double the previous year.  Finding new clients became more and more difficult.

Bonobos’ hope is that teaming up with Nordström will help Bonobos gain new clients, particularly those who don’t usually shop online. Although Nordstrom may cannibalize some of Bonobos’s existing sales, Mr. Dunn, the company’s chief executive, said any loss in direct sales would be offset by the marketing benefits.

“It was foolish to contain this brand in one channel,” he said. “For so long we were operating like we were so different from store-driven retailers, but we are more similar.”

For more articles and fashion inspiration visit our Facebook page.

To read reviews of our bags and more about the background behind our brand as well as fashion and more, visit our Online Magazine.

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According to Johnny, the brand began as a joke.  Whilst working in a comic store called ‘Newbury Comics’ he earned several nicknames, from ‘Johnny Pancakes’ to ‘Johnny Cupcakes’.  One fine day in 2001 he decided to make his own t-shirt to make fun of this nickname.  He decided to turn a skull and crossbones into a cupcake and crossbones and he wore the t-shirt to work as a joke.  Almost instantly his fledgling t-shirt business was born, when customers and colleagues began asking if they could buy a t-shirt.  Johnny began sneaking out of work to sell the t-shirts from the back of his beat up ’89 Toyota Camry.  At the time, he and many of his customers were in bands and the word began to spread about Johnny Cupcakes’ t-shirts as those musicians wore his t-shirts on tour.  As the company began to take off, he decided to focus on the business full-time.

Having traveled to various shows and taken orders from large department stores from Urban Outfitters to Nordstroms, Hot Topic, Macy’s and Metropark, Johnny suddenly had an epiphany. He actually didn’t want his t-shirts to be available everywhere.    Instead, he wanted to keep them limited and exclusive and keep the prices down, avoiding the huge retail mark-ups retail stores add to the cost of a product.

Johnny’s first retail store opened in 2005 in his hometown of Hull, Massachusetts.  His next store opened on “Boston’s Rodeo drive”– 279 Newbury Street. This is the same street as stores like Marc Jacobs and Chanel. Johnny says on his website “Opening this store was a dream come true”.  In 2008 he was voted America’s #1 Young Entrepreneur of 2008 by BusinessWeek magazine.  He points out on his website that he also gives back, which we love

“I’ve lectured at big universities, small colleges, high schools, and at non-academic seminars all over the world. These lectures focus on how to start and maintain an original business without any startup money or other resources. I have a lot of generally useful advice– like how to use both the web and retail space effectively, the importance of art, graphic design, creative packaging and other often overlooked details, how to create a lot of word of mouth excitement behind your business, and brand longevity.   ut in these lectures I also cover less conventional dimensions of my brand– things that have made me stand out in the crowd. For example, how a drug-free lifestyle has really helped me develop my business, my own creative types of viral marketing, and my unique and carefully crafted shopping environments. My goal in these lectures is to inspire all sorts of people to persistently work toward their goals. Young or old, students or faculty, entrepreneurial types or not, I show what a simple idea (and a ton of hard work) can do. Teaching, inspiring, and motivating people in this way has become very important to me. It makes me feel like I’m doing more than just making t-shirts. “

I love everything about the Johnny cupcakes brand, from his rags to riches story and the fact that he employs his parents to the way he decided to break free from convention and go his own way, selling his t-shirts online to keep prices low and quality high.  More on that later.

Have a great day!

Jackie XXXX

For more articles and fashion inspiration visit our Facebook page.

To read reviews of our bags and more about the background behind our brand as well as fashion and more, visit our Online Magazine.

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This is how ‘Honest By’ describes itself on its website:

“HONEST BY IS A PIONEERING COMPANY LAUNCHED IN JANUARY 2012.THE COMPANY IS UNIQUE IN COMMUNICATING ABOUT THE SUPPLY CHAIN OF ITS PRODUCTS AND PRICING.

Bruno Pieters conceived Honest by during a sabbatical from the fashion industry in Southern India. An award-winning designer and art director, Pieters spent 2010 exploring the developing world, an experience that profoundly affected his personal philosophy and his thinking about fashion. Observing how native people wore clothes that were grown, woven and sewn from sources they could identify around them, he wondered if such transparency could be operated on an international scale when making designer products. On his return to Antwerp Pieters began to work on a radical new concept.

Honest by is the first company in the world to share the full cost breakdown of its products. The word Honest refers to the way in which the Honest by store operates, with a 100% transparency policy. The concept behind Honest by offers designers and brands a public platform to share their own design processes; utilizing the extensive research Honest by has already conducted on organic fabrics and suppliers. Those we collaborate with share their personal production information from yarn and button origin to fabric and manufacturing details; information which honest by then communicates to the client. Every part of the collaboration process is transparent including the store mark up calculations. In communicating all information regarding a garments production process; Honest by wants to shed light on the questions: where is it made and by whom.”

At the bottom of each product is a ‘Price Calculation’ explaining the margins – a €953 ($1246) Bruno Pieters jacket (which they explain is an online-only reduced rate) costs just €197 euros ($257) to produce.

How do you feel? Does the transparency inspire you to buy, or make you feel a little cheated when you hear how high store margins can be?

Please share your thoughts below.

For more articles and fashion inspiration visit our Facebook page.

To read reviews of our bags and more about the background behind our brand as well as fashion and more, visit our Online Magazine.

For more of my thoughts and opinions on a variety of subjects, please subscribe to my updates – Jackie Cawthra.

Raf Simons, the 44-year-old Belgian designer is the new artistic director of luxury brand Christian Dior.

As the Creative Director of Belen Echandia, I thought it might be interesting to discuss the topic of what the role of a creative director involves, as I am often asked.  The ‘artistic director’ of a fashion brand works as both a marketer and a designer. It is often more of a business role than the name would first imply.

My role as creative director of Belen Echandia not only involves designing handbags and accessories but also formulating the messages we want customers to take away with them when they visit our website, blog or Facebook page or interact with us via email.  For bigger brands this might also include the brand’s Vogue advertising campaign or the style of its corporate headquarters.  At Dior, Raf Simons will almost certainly be the chief marketing officer.

The results of having a talented creative at the helm of a company can be astounding, particularly when the brand owners and its creative director share a creative vision.  A couple of good examples are Stuart Vevers for Mulberry and Christopher Bailey for Burberry. I didn’t think Burberry would ever recover from the chav-bashing it took a few years back, but Mr Bailey has truly managed to turn the brand around with edgy designs and a sophisticated appeal which clearly talk to its target audience.

The question is, can Simons do the same for Christian Dior? Simons has quite a different aesthetic from the current brand, which under previous creative director John Galliano was at the most haute end of haute couture.

Galliano was an outrageous creative director in more ways than one. He stunned clientele with his fairytale designs, positioning Dior and fashion itself as a fantasy, a wonderful escape from everyday reality. By contrast Simons’ work at Jil Sander involved pared-back  designs.  Is Dior going for a more elegant approach, as Christian Dior himself once did?  This could be wonderful for Dior, but it may also be difficult to make it work for Dior’s current core customer.

This will be a very interesting story in 2012, something which we can all watch unfold.  I for one am not a big fan of Galliano’s Dior – Simons’ aesthetic appeals to me far more, but it remains to be seen whether the convergence of a brand with the vision of a creative director whose approach and appeal are so different will be a success.

Jackie x

For more articles and fashion inspiration visit our Facebook page.

To read reviews of our bags and more about the background behind our brand as well as fashion and more, visit our Online Magazine.

For more of my thoughts and opinions on a variety of subjects, please subscribe to my updates – Jackie Cawthra.

                                                                                                      Photo by Marco Massaccesi

Luxury is not what it was. After many years of superficial luxury: overt logos and brand names, which began in the 80s with large conglomerates taking over luxury fashion brands and commercializing them, luxury consumers are looking for something more. Belen Echandia calls this ‘New Luxury’.

New luxury is about experiences and not just products. New luxury is handbags produced in traditional ways by true artisans.  It is about craftsmanship, heritage and personalized service.

Intelligent consumers want to go beyond the logo on their bags and accessories. They demand a deeper understanding of the products they buy. Intelligent consumers want to know how, where and by whom their handbags and wallets are made. Goods produced without respect for those making them, what they are made from and how they are made are by definition not luxury goods.

Belen Echandia has identified a number of key New Luxury trends.

1. Experience

Experience is a very important part of buying a luxury product. In years gone by that meant visiting a handbag atelier or store and receiving the red carpet treatment. In today’s world it is just as likely to mean personalized attention to your needs by email or telephone, but the meaning is the same – the focus is on the consumer. To truly serve its customers, a company must have in-depth knowledge of its customers.

2. Customization

Intertwined with experience, customization is the opportunity for consumers to get exactly what they want. True luxury companies focus on individual needs and wants and do everything they can to give consumers what they want.

3. Integrity

Luxury is not just about a logo, a brand name and a price. In truth, it never has been. Traditional, old luxury companies were known for their meticulous attention to detail, expensive, luxurious materials and customer service. But in Deluxe Dana Thomas explains how, in the middle of the 80s, big business started to buy up luxury handbag and fashion companies and turn luxury products into commodities.

In her book, Thomas explores today’s high-end shopping experience and asks some important questions: “What is the new definition of luxury when advertising is targeted mainly toward the mass market? What are we paying for when quality has given way to quantity? Can integrity survive in a corporate culture driven to meet regular growth and profit projections? Is luxury still the best that money can buy?”

New Luxury is about going back to what matters most – heritage, respect, attention to detail and quality. Goods produced without integrity are not luxury goods at all.

4. Uniqueness

True luxury must have an element of uniqueness. It is no fun walking around as a replica of someone else. It must have a certain exclusivity – although others may own the same product, to be truly luxurious it must not be ubiquitous. Customizing a handbag is the perfect example of uniqueness – in many cases you will be the only person with that exact bag. Rarity is a luxury, but more than anything, luxury is the ability to personalize a product, to add your own stamp and to participate in its production.

5. Purpose

Whilst luxury is to some extent superfluous, it must also have an element of purpose. It is truly luxurious to find a handbag which looks and feels luxurious and whose designers have thought carefully about how you will use it. Determining what consumers need from their bags should be a large part of the design process.

6. Passion

Luxury goods must be produced with an element of passion, of love for the work that goes into them. It is the opposite of the cold nature of a production-line process. Human craftsmanship, the fingerprint of the artisan, knowing that your goods were produced by a real person putting real care and attention into the work they do for you.

Jackie Cawthra is the Founder and Creative Director of Belen Echandia, a socially responsible handbag and fashion brand based in London. 

Belen Echandia bags are produced exclusively by expert artisans in an Italian atelier. All Belen Echandia bags are produced with integrity and attention to detail.  The company is the only luxury company to offers a full bespoke online customization service on Italian-made handbags.  Every style is available to custom order, just how you like it.  The Company has been featured in major fashion magazines such as Vogue, Instyle and its bags have graced the front cover of Grazia on several occasions.

Belen Echandia’s Chevre Challenge

We also had a customer do a test and she took these still shots:

Leather pre-test

N.B. It recently came to our attention that some customers may not be aware that just as there are many kinds of different chevre as there are cowhide.  For the avoidance of doubt, chevre is the skin of a goat in the same way cowhide is the skin of a cow.  The leather is then processed in various ways to create different kinds of leather, each with their own characteristics.  Comparing our Dixan Chevre to our Bubble Chevre is like comparing our sheen cowhide to our pebbled cowhide.  This video applies to the tan bubble chevre that is currently on our website.

Ordering a special leather for a customer incurs extra costs in sourcing, buying and transporting a small quantity of leather (smaller quantities are more expensive to buy and ship), as well as leftovers, which are costly.  In order to continue to offer this fantastic and unique service, we have decided to ask customers to contribute an extra 30 GBP/40 USD to partially cover these extra costs of this unique bespoke service.  This cost will be waived if the customer wishes to order a second bag in the remaining leather.  For goatskin orders this is lowered to an extra 15 GBP/25 USD as goatskins are very small and we have fewer leftovers.  Where possible we buy small skins, so where we can (if a skin is small and we don’t have any leftovers) we will waive the leftovers charge and charge the lower amount.

Please note that we will continue to pay this for our Platinum and Diamond customers for one and two orders per year respectively as part of our loyalty program.

We thank you for your support and understanding as we do our best to continue providing the very best service and experience that we possibly can.

The Belen Echandia Team

XXX