Ruff Life? The Secret Life of a Handbag Company
By Bengala
Fashion Wire Daily August 26,2004- New York - The Intermezzo Collections/Accessorie Circuit show at the Piers is an indecisive shopper’s nightmare. Three piers loaded with every conceivable combination of skirt and top, belt and buckle, with dresses galore and even jewelry. Every label you’ve ever heard of, and even more that you haven’t, deck out their booths and taught their wares.
Most of this year’s show featured faded denim and gothic-lettered slogans—some great, but hardly cutting edge. Bowie reprints, Vintage Disney, yawn. As stylist Brett Douglas says, “There’s never anything that amazing. The cool kids can’t afford the booths.”
But that’s not completely true. At least one grassroots fashion experiment took the gamble and plunked down the $5K for their booth—the Lower East Side-based Ruff Ruff, makers of eccentrically fine handbags for every occasion.
Ruff Ruff was started two years ago by stylist Andrea Ruff and photographer Chris Wener. Both German transplants here in Manhattan, Andrea started making her handbags as a hobby.
“I had a really bad tonsillitis,” recalls Ruff. “One day I got up, pulled a sewing machine out of a closet and started sewing handbags. It was like finding my inner seamstress. A few weeks later I brought one of my bags into the studio working with Molly Sims. She had to have the bag and took it to the VH1 Fashion Awards in the evening. I still have the picture.”
But this was just the beginning. More people stopped Ruff in the street to ask where the riveted, fur-trimmed creations were available, so she made a few more on a request-only basis. The requests kept flowing until Ruff needed help filling the orders. Wener came aboard, photographing and designing their marketing material and they hired their patternmaker and a sample maker and voila! A company is born.
Now Ruff Ruff is on their second collection, sporting a new sleeker selection. If there’s a trademark Ruff Ruff look, it’s about accessories for the accessories. Previously, fur trim, fringe, metal studs and pure sass adorned Ruff purses. The sass is still there, but the materials have become more posh—crunched leather and nylon replacing any remnant of animal fuzz. And there’s still dangly bling in the form of hanging chains.
They’ve also added a second line—Ruffer. Younger, brightly-colored and quirk-chic, the favorite of this offshoot is the Kylie model. Named after Ms. Minogue, this tight little neon bag even sports an original Be@rbrick action figure as trim.
Ruff Ruff, despite its success, is still a mom and pop brand. It’s run by Ruff and Wener in their rented two-bedroom in the Lower East Side.
“I kid people that we have a sweatshop in the apartment,” jokes Wener. It would fit the history of the ’hood. Though Ruff Ruff isn’t forcing squadrons of children to sew fifteen hours-a-day, they do have a staff of six toiling away during the height of production season. You’d never know from the outside of the building. Nor would you suspect the Ruff Ruff product to be homemade, as it were.
Their covert operations won’t stay underground too long, however, as the Pier show brought them some major attention. Fred Segal, among others, is rumored to have placed a whopping order.
Ruff Ruff can be found at Ice Accessories in LA and at Nordstrom.
