PROTOTYPE OVERVIEW:
Upcycling brings value to material nobody will touch. These materials come in all shapes, states and sizes. As a business that doesn’t want to charge high-end prices, we are presented with a design challenge in finding economies of scale.
P01 // MATERIAL:
For this prototype, we chose materials first. Couch leather, bubble wrap and denim jeans are plentiful in their entry to landfill (the first time we stripped a couch we were shocked at the amount of leather it yields. We typically produce 15-25 Min Sidebag’s from one couch).
Melting bubble wrap gives this layers, opaque effect that we love so that was a shoe in. The challenge here is bringing value to the denim.
Denim (and hessian bags) have their own aesthetic in the upcycling world. They’ve been done to death, so breaking these associations is an exciting design task…
P01 // PROCESS:
I channeled my inner high school student and drew some spider webs over the denim (this would be screen printed in production). The web took shape with the contours of the bag and has a gradient of hierarchy from the center to the edges. Love.
To break the ‘upcycled denim’ vibe, the plan was to layer transparent melted bubble wrap over the web. Unfortunately the plastic is not transparent enough for this level of detail… unsuccessful. So I experimented with a new option on each side. Side one, I added some depth by straight stitching some additional web lines in the white space. Side two, I layered some black fly wire and stitched another web over the top.
Couch leather was easy peasy. Just required a seam to get the desired length for the strap.
P1 // RESULT:
This was the first time producing a bag of this style. The form is asking to be rigid so we’ll add additional stiffness with event banners. The closure/clasp needs to be solved but functionally, this style holds a surprising amount, it stands up on a table, is super accessible and very ‘no fuss’. Will continue iterating in the future.
P1 // NEXT STEPS:
Thanks to the generous support and feedback from our community on social media, we’ve got a few ticks of approval on the spider web style and some calls for a zipper on the top. We will definitely do version two of this style, although zippers are a no-go for Into Carry. Functionally zippers are great but their durability and repairability is not up to standard for the values of our products. We will continue to explore closure methods.
So, does this bag solve upcycling scalability problems? It’s getting pretty darn close.
