In the Bag

Talk about a crash course in growth. Just this summer, Carrie and Nick Saunders, the founders of Anna Street Studios,will open the doors to two new retail shops for their custom-designed handbags, broadening their Northeast presence beyond their original storefront in the seaport town of Portsmouth, NH. The husband-wife team is also setting its sights on a national audience. Anna Street Studios just took the wraps off an overhauled Web site (www.annastreet.com), which includes new capabilities not offered by competitors, to allow shoppers to customize and view their own handbag creations anywhere there’s an Internet connection.

Life on the home front has been equally as hectic for the working couple. Their first baby is due late summer and they’re in the midst of a major renovation project, gutting and remodeling a home.

It’s a full plate for anyone, but for this family of entrepreneurs, timing couldn’t be better.“We weighed the pros and cons of aggressive growth, but we realized we had to take the shot while we had it,”says Nick, who left an advertising career in 2002 to build Anna Street Studios with his wife and has not looked back since. “We never wanted to be a mom-andpop, single retail store.We always wanted to try to build the brand nationally.”

The Saunders’ latest moves definitely propel Anna Street Studios in that direction, but like most small businesses, it’s been a work in progress. The journey started as a part-time gig for Carrie, who back in 2001 was in search of a creative outlet to supplement her day job as an advertising account executive, discovered fabric and was hooked. She dug out her sewing machine and quickly taught herself the craft. She began to experiment with designs that were square and relatively quick to make. “Cutting curves for something that would fit the body seemed difficult, Carrie says. “I was looking for something that would be instant gratification, and handbags worked out.”

Those handbags, sewn with colorful fabrics reminiscent of Lilly Pulitzer designs, began to catch on—first, informally among both Saunders’ work colleagues, and eventually,with a variety of boutiques in the Northeast and Florida. The couple quickly realized they had the makings of a sound business, and Carrie left her job to begin working on Anna Street Studio designs full time. Initially, the business was run out of their home, then a small studio, where Carrie fulfilled the wholesale orders to retail shops,while also hosting “handbag parties” where groups of woman socialized and shopped the studio.

Finding their first storefront location, while top of mind, took more than two years until they found the right fit.Carrie and Nick put that time to good use.They refined the look of their brand, established a Web storefront, formalized production processes, brought on a small team of people, and developed a manufacturing strategy that could scale as orders from the Web and eventually, the storefront, came in. Figuring out the manufacturing piece was the biggest hurdle, according to Nick. Nick and Carrie eventually settled on a plan to outsource manufacturing to partners in the United States, not overseas. The custom aspect of the handbags was partly a driver; the other was more personal.

“New England was the hotbed of textiles, and we like the fact that we’re continuing to employ people whose jobs went away,”Nick says.

The Saunders opened up the Portsmouth retail shop in December 2004, and the Portland, ME, and Hingham, MA, stores followed this spring and summer. If all goes according to plan, the pair want to expand with additional locations in coastal communities up and down the Atlantic seaboard.

Investing in new Web technology, which integrates with a back-end order-entry and inventory system, is another area where Anna Street Studios is making a leap—again, with growth the end goal.While the original Web site allowed customers to place orders for stock merchandise, the new site has custom configuration capabilities that let people mix and match fabrics and other textiles to create custom bag designs.Buyers can view their designs on screen, and as they click on other materials, the bag will change so they have a strong visual sense of what they’re creating.

With these foundations in place, the Saunders are prepared to do what it takes to achieve their dream of being known, on a national level, as one of the premier custom handbag brands.Both agree, it’s not for the faint of heart.“It’s a balancing act,”Carrie says.“Every time we take the next step, I get a stomach ache, wondering if it’s right.” So far, it looks like those pangs are for naught.
BA

Back