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!!!