New street handbags section coming on Anaphora Handbags website.....www.anaphora.co.uk

Take a look at www.anaphora.co.uk to see our new papparazzi pics street handbag pictures submitted to us by Sophie Cox, a recent Fashion with Photography graduate. There are some great images to be seen, spot emerging trends and themes coming from what people are using on the streets in the UK. How are they emulating what is our fashion catwalks?!?

Anaphora Handbag Collection spotted by New York Boutique!

Here at Anaphora Handbags we have received another enquiry regarding our bags from New York, this is great news, people are obviously finding us on the internet and enjoying the Anaphora Handbags website! Hopefully we will receive an order from the Babel Fair boutique soon and they will be our first stockist in NY! We are currently doing some research into Amsterdam and a few other European countries to gain more stockists outside of the UK.

Many people are talking still of the recession but there are glimmers of hope all the time.

Anaphora Handbags are looking for new Stockists.

We are currently looking for new stockists as we would like to extend our brand across the UK and Europe, please get in touch if you have a boutique/independent store or any other suggestion for how you would like to be a seller of Anaphora Handbags.

You can contact us through this blog, through our website www.anaphora.co.uk or on our twitter page.

We are happy to work with shops/boutiques/art galleries/hotels as long as the image is one that Anaphora Handbags is going to fit into.

Anaphora Handbags on Twitter!!

Anaphora Handbags are now on Twitter, find us at www.twitter.com/anaphorahandbag !

Anaphora Handbags at 'Romsey In Style' Fashion Show

'Romsey In Style' Fashion Show

We took part in this event on the 2nd and 3rd of April, it was a great event and all in aid of Wessex Cancer Trust/Daisies.

We had a stall with our bags on display and received a fantastic response, which was really great, it is lovely to hear what people have to say about the bags especially when it is all so positive. Anaphora Handbags were also shown on the catwalk with our own slot, the models did a really brilliant job of showing our handbags so we are grateful to them for that, and they looked great in their matching outfits!!

I hope that the charity raised lots of money from the show and everyone involved did a great job of making the event run smoothly.

Anaphora Handbags in Fashion Show at Preshaw House

We took part in a lovely fashion show at the beautiful Preshaw House in Hampshire on Wednesday 25th March.It was a charity fashion show in aid of Canine Partners and Spinal Research, two wonderful charities. All the gorgeous clothing had been provided by Butterfly in Bishops Waltham. It was a well organised and fun event that included a make-up demonstration and even a fantastic demonstration from the dogs that are trained by the people at Canine Partners!!! Anaphora Handbags had a table at the show and also showed a couple of bags in the fashion show, we also donated an Angelica handbag as a prize for the raffle. What was really great was that it was won by one of the ladies who train the dogs!! In the pictures you can see Saffi one of the cute Canine Partners dogs holding our bag! All in all a great evening for us and Anaphora Handbags!!

The Alysha Bag by Anaphora Handbags

This gorgeous bag is called Alysha and is designed by the Anaphora UK Designers.

It is made of superior smooth grain black leather and is lined with a beige soft touch suedette fabric.

We chose the colour beige for our linings due to our research, when we spoke to people about handbag design they told us that bags with dark linings are not always best as you can never find anything in them!!!

The suedette fabric was because we wanted a very luxurious feel when you put you hand into the handbag, it enhances the quality of the Anaphora Handbag range and the comments we have received are really positive.

The bag is padded on the front, this was inspired by the famous Chanel style padding, we have used this principle in our own unique way, the purse that sits comfortably on the front of the bag is held in place by a magnet hidden away in the leather!! If it comes away from the magnet it then hangs freely on the chain.

The metal zips give a chunky look to the bag and add a little bit of bling, along with the gold rings and buckles that attach the handles to the bag, the tassles on the zip pulls give a solid feel when undoing the bag.

All in all this is a real show stopping handbag, I have used one of these when out at fashion events and everytime without fail I have been asked AT LEAST twice where I got my bag from! Obviously I tell everyone who asks that is is one of my very own designs for Anaphora Handbags!!!

This bag is for sale on our website currently for £219.00, go on, treat yourself, you will love this bag for years to come!! www.anaphora.co.uk

Bag Pic's.............

Here are a few pictures taken on a research trip to Milan by one of the Anaphora Handbag designers during December. These give you a little flavour of what is happening in Europe when it comes to handbags!!

There a lots of pleats, folding and lots of very soft leathers giving a really slouchy feel, colours are mixed with black always being the most popular. Here at Anaphora Handbags we always use the softest smooth-grain leather that can be sourced when designing the bags for our collections.

Above are bags by Armani and our favourite, Vivienne Westwood, who always uses some fabrics when designing her bags. We at Anaphora are currently looking into adding some fabric to our leather bags, mixing the luxurious feel of fine quality fabric with the smooth-grain leather that we already use to create unusual pieces.

Fashion & Textile Museum

Anaphora Handbags are selling really well at the Fashion & Textile Museum in Bermondsey in London, we are really pleased to be staying there for another 3 months! Great news, so if you want to get hold of an Anaphora Bag then get to the museum, they are there in the shop for all to see and buy!!!!!!!

We are looking to increase our stockists this year in towns further around the UK and even around the world! We would love to talk new stockists so if anyone is interested in stocking Anaphora Bags please get in touch with us at sales@anaphora.co.uk.

We really want to get some new styles for the summer and perhaps some new colours so keep an eye on our website www.anaphora.co.uk to keep up with the latest information.

Onwards and upwards in this difficult economic time!

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?????