We are getting re-stock orders...........!

We have been really active lately with the handbags, hence not writing on here for a while!

We are now getting orders from our retailers replenishing their stock, this is such great news for us as we find it so exciting to think that our bags are selling well in these shops! It gives us more confidence to push forward with the brand and keep promoting it!

We have also been to Fashion Expo in London this week to explore the possibilities for Anaphora Handbags, we would love to be able to add some new designs to the range for spring/summer. We are uncertain how we can do this but are doing our best to try as it would be really great to introduce some more colour into the ranges. The problem is we do not want to have to order large quantities of each colour so this is very difficult.

The Fashion & Textile museum have started to sell our bags now which is good news, it has been a slow start but seems to have got going now!

We are really wanting to get Anaphora Handbags into a few shops in London as this is where the bags would sell really really well for us and gain us a good bit of exposure for the brand.

A magazine approached us to use our bags for a handbag photoshoot that they are doing for their christmas issue so we look forward to seeing that!

We are also experimenting with some different photographs of the bags as product shots.

Post graduate research is going well, I am starting to receive pictures of peoples bags now and their thoughts about them.......

We have another Stockist!

We now have another stockist for our Anaphora Handbags, the shop is called Butterfly and is based in Bishops Waltham in Hampshire. It is a lovely little shop that sells an eclectic mix of exciting, colourful clothing, accessories and footwear for women. It is great to have the bags out there in another lovely shop!! www.butterflyclothing.co.uk

Anaphora Handbags at Sophies Appeal Fashion Show

Anaphora Handbags at Sophies Appeal Fashion Show

Last night we showed our Anaphora Handbag collection at the Sophies Appeal Fashion Show in Hampshire, this was a charity fashion show and also a model competition.

The bags looked great with the garments and were also on sale at the event, we had a lovely evening and met some great people....!

The clothing in the pictures comes from a boutique in Bishops Waltham called Butterfly, www.butterfly.co.uk.

Thank you to Robert Willey for taking photographs of our bags at the event!!!

Anaphora Handbags are now available at the Fashion and Textile Museum in London!!!!!!

Well......we were successful!!! Our handbags will be on sale in the Fashion and Textile Museum in Bermondsey Street, London from Friday 14th October 200, what an achievement!! This is a great opportunity for the profile of the Anaphora Handbag brand......we are hoping that perhaps the brand will get seen by a few stylists or magazine editors and that it will generally raise the profile of the brand...we are very pleased. After two trips to London and a bit of work preparing things the bags are there!!!!

The new exhibition about Bill Gibb opens next Friday at the museum so go along and have a look and check out our bags at the same time.

We are gearing up for showing the bags at the Sophies Appeal Fashion Show on Sunday 19th as well now as that is only a couple of days away....it isn't taking us long to become quite busy with keeping the activity going for the brand.....great!!!

Fashion and Textile Museum

We took Anaphora Handbags to the Fashion and Textile Museum in London today in the hope that we may be able to sell them in their shop, the response to the bags was very positive so we have our fingers crossed. The museum has a new exhibition beginning soon on Bill Gibb, it looks like it is going to be wonderful so I think we will be visiting it whether are bags are there or not!!!
Check it out at www.ftmlondon.org.

Thanks to Andy Espin...official photographer at Facshion

Thanks to Andy Espin...official photographer at Facshion, the trade and consumer fashion show we exhibited Anaphora Handbags at a couple of weeks ago.

Anaphora Handbags on Facebook!

We have now created a Facebook page!

Copy and paste this link into your browser to have a look at our Anaphora Facebook page, you can click to become a fan of ours when you get there!!

http://www.new.facebook.com/s.php?q=anaphora+&n=-1&k=400000000010&sf=r&init=q&sid=4e3a5bb7ed83028311b76af7f4163b00#/pages/Anaphora-Leather-Handbags/33694176804?ref=ts

Tenacity and faith!...oh Handbags !

The two of the most important qualities to have when establishing a business is the strength to keep going and to have faith in your own abilities. The communication channels which are open to you between design room & manufacturers are often email. Time zones and language translation are often small details which need to be over come. This can frustratingly slow the whole design & product development process down to a snails pace. For the small designer this can be a hindrance or may be part of the charm...I can't decide. We are currently starting to look into this as part of our PHD research. How can the small independent fashion designer benefit and maximize on new technologies to help speed up the design and product development process? It must be possible, although the problems are endless as it has to be a multi dimensional approach to benefit all stake holders. We have been looking at some software called 'Optitex' which is based around 3D modeling...very exciting. One day we hope that anaphora handbags will be designed and developed using such technologies. We are also aware of IBM's Black dress technology which looks set to revolutionise product development methodologies and the fashion industry. I will keep you posted especially if i need some help from any readers out there who may be able to help or become a case study!

Busy, Busy, Busy....

We have agreed to take part in a charity fashion show on 19th October, it is taking place at the Botley Park Hotel in Hampshire and is in aid of Sophies Appeal, a great charity for which James and Sarah Beattie are the Patrons. Sophie was a little girl who had cancer and sadley dies at the age of 6 when the disease got the better of her, the fashion show is to raise moeny for the charity that was set up in rememberance of Sophie, we are very happy to be taking part in such a special event. Out bags will be on the catwalk and we will have a stall to sell our bags also.

We are thinking now that perhaps we will do Pure, the trade exhibition that is held in London, the next one is taking place in February 2009, this will mean we will have to get designing soon inorder to get some samples made up for this, we are hoping that this will bring us some new stockists to increas the number of shops that the collection will be sold through. We are keen to find more opportunities to show the bags to get good exposure for the Anaphora brand.

We will both be starting to study for our PHD's soon, this is quite exciting, although it will make us even busier the work that we do for our PHD's is very interesting and will feed into our handbag designing really well.

We have also agreed to having a stand at the HOPIT event christmas sale at Beadales in Petersfield, hopefully that will be a success.

Look at this beautiful lot of brooches!!

Just thought you might all like to see what a lovely collection of brooches we managed to find in America, there are some beautiful ones here so look out for them appearing on our purses on the website soon!! www.anaphora.co.uk

We may be doing a few other events in the lead up to christmas so keep a look out on here and on our site for information.

We are now thinking of developing some of our ideas into scaled down versions, the feedback we are receiving is all great about the bags, however we feel that perhaps we need to have some slightly smaller options as most of the bags in the range are larger bags, also we are going to try to add some more colour into the collection as we gradually become more established. We decided that black was the best option to go for when we produced this collection as to have the range in lots of colours was going to be very costly, we feel that everyone understands a black bag and this does seem to be the case so far!! But people have asked if we have them in different colours so we are aware that this is someting we need to develop.

Looking forward to attending London Fashion Week later this week!!

Wow- Have we at Anaphora been busy!!!!!!!!!

Since we last posted on here we have done sooo much!! We have been to America and whilst there we visited some great places to source lovely vintage brooches for our little leather purses, we found some beautiful ones that we are sure everyone will love, it is such a great thing that we manage to source these from all around the world!!

We have also exhibited the Anaphora Collection at an event in London called Facshion, this took place at the Old Truman Brewery Building in Brick Lane and we really enjoyed the experience and feedback that we received for the bags and we sold lots!

The bag that seems to be the most popular at the moment is the Alysha, you can see that on our website, www.anaphora.co.uk, have a look!!!!

We are trying now to decide what kind of trade exhibition we should do, we think that Pure would be a good option but there are all sorts of things like Top Drawer etc, and we are not sure whether these would be better for us or not? If anyone has any ideas on this we would love to hear from you?????

We have another stockist!!

Today I drove to St Albans to visit a really lovely shop called The Dressing Room to show the owner the new Anaphora Handbag collection!! I had sent Deryanne the images and information of the handbags previously and she had got in touch and asked if I could take the bags to show her, so.... of course I did!!! She liked the bags and understood the thinking behind the Anaphora Handbag brand and the market that we have in mind for our bags seems to match pretty well with hers, she then ordered a few bags to try them out, I think that they will do well in the store as they seem to fit in well with the ranges that are stocked. So that means that within about 5 weeks we have achieved 2 stockists, I have to visit another shop next Friday so fingers crossed for that one! We ummed and ahhed over lots of different shelving systems for the exhibition that we are doing next weekend on London, it is hard to find something that represent Anaphora Handbags in the way that we want to be seen without it cosing the earth, obviously there are lots of things that we would love to have but don't have the budget for at this stage!!! We think we have fond something though so all should be ok!

What a fantastic photoshoot!

Today we had a great photo-shoot, the first for anaphora!!

The two models were brilliant, they worked so hard to get everything right for us, they loved the handbags too, which was a good sign! Beth and Kate really did do us proud, first we did the Vintique collection of bags, the girls were styled in a sort of soft gothic vintage look, very feminine, after this we did the Anaphora Couture collection of handbags, this was great, strong make up and some great colours, black, purple and a green check going on!! We got some really great shots of all the handbags and I am sure we are going to be really pleased with them.

Also, Cassie Linton, our photographer was amazing, she is so professional and is not flustered by anything! Thank you so much Cassie, you are an absolute star and we can not wait to see the images!!!!!

I am going to visit a shop tomorrow as they have asked to see the bags, lets hope they place an order! We have been brainstorming everyone we know to get ideas for more and more shops to approach as stockists, we have to be careful to choose the ones that we think are catering to our market.

Also, an really exciting development today, we booked to appear at the London Exhibition 'Facshion', this is so exciting, but is going to be such a rush for us as we only have a few days to prepare for it, we need display plinths, business cards, a way for people to pay us, catalogues etc etc!!!!!! We will do it though, we have to!! Updates coming soon....!

And we will put some pictures up here that were taken today as soon as we have them!!

Oh...and there will be the Anaphora Handbags shoot video going on youtube soon as well!!!

www.anaphora.co.uk

Oh the highs and lows....

The exhilaration of having our handbag range up on a web site was short lived. We were hacked at 1.39am last night. How frustrating! Luckily I have a patient husband who has re written the databases to get the site up and running....all within 24hrs. So at least our frustrations were short lived!
Starting out as a new handbag design lable is hard enough never mind contending with un expected problems.

So we are now back up and running and planning our first fashion shoot on Tuesday. The models are booked together with photographer, stylist and make up artist. My kids have promised to be runners for the day and making sure we are all topped up with tea and coffee.

We are pinning so much on this shoot. Firstly, as it will be the window of who we are and what we stand for as a brand. A new lable entering the fashion arena is a daunting place to be. This industry is competitve, particularly here in the UK...although we have our sites set on a global market...why not!

Secondly, we need the fashion images to launch the first Anahora handbag PR campaign...if any of you have any tips...please feel free to let us know.

The development of Anaphora Handbags!

Well...here we are, 12 months down the line, after tons of research, many design meetings, emails and communications back and forth with manufacturers, at last we have taken delivery of our first collection! Names for all the bags have been decided, we have gone for girls names all beginning with 'A', the next collection will all be names beginning with 'B' and so on.....

We now have to work our socks off to get some stockists.....this is going to be hard, we have just missed most of the trade shows and will have to visit stores ourselves to try to convince them that they need the range!

We have one stockist already....not bad considering we only had the bags for two weeks when she placed the order!!

We now set to work on some sort of great PR images so that we can send some info out to loads of magazines to try to get a look in on their pages, we need to get our name is some credible places and become a desirable brand!