NEW YORK — Never mind the Fendi 2Jours, Givenchy Antigona and Saint Laurent Sac de Jour. One of the fall season’s hardest-to-get handbags tops out at less than four figures. Much less.
With sleek bucket bags, totes and backpacks priced from $460 to $950, Mansur Gavriel is targeting women who want low-key luxe and value without overt logos or labeling. And it’s working.
Since launching in April 2012, the anti-“it” bags have spawned waiting lists, sold-out notifications and insane EBay markups.
The brand was founded by Rachel Mansur and Floriana Gavriel, two friends who met in 2010 at a concert in Los Angeles.
Both women had backgrounds in design. Gavriel had worked as a designer for Lanvin in Paris. And Mansur studied textile design at Rhode Island School of Design before starting work at an Internet startup in L.A. They bonded over an early-morning trip to the Flower Mart in downtown L.A.
“We just clicked. We had something aesthetically in common,” said Gavriel during a visit to the label’s New York showroom.
Soon, a business idea was hatched.
They decided to launch a handbag line with two simple styles, a bucket bag and tote, both of which have a spare, Minimalist appeal not unlike designer Bonnie Cashin’s original designs for Coach in the 1960s.
Initial styles came in a blanched “camello” natural brown hue or in black, with a contrasting color patent-leather interior coating. They have since added white, powder pink, red, royal and navy blue bags, and expanded the interior colors to include metallic silver, gold and pewter, and brights such as vivid orange, royal blue and pink.
There is no recognizable branding on the bags, save for the name “Mansur Gavriel” written in discreet, tiny gold lettering at the bottom of one side.
And for fall, they’ve introduced their first backpack, as well as a mini bucket bag.
“We definitely want to add other products,” says Mansur. “We’re reluctant to say what, because the sampling process is so important, and it took us two years to develop the bags. But we want to build a world where we offer many different things, perfected. I hate to say ‘back to basics’ because that’s so on trend right now, but it’s true.”
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