Emily Sugihara, 30, has made the lowly shopping bag fashionable.
With her mother, Joan, she is the creator of the Baggu, the colorful, “carry in style” reusable bag sold in hip stores from Urban Outfitters to Collette in Paris, as well as Nordstrom and J.Crew. Hundreds of thousands more, at a basic price of $9, are sold through the bright and spare Baggu website, which looks like a Google home page for the fashion-conscious.
“My mom and I just don’t like to buy ugly stuff. We care about function and fashion, and we feel we are representative of a demographic that appreciates this.”
Back in 2007 when modestly self-funded Baggu launched, the choices at checkout were plastic or paper, with the occasional dorky net bag from France. The Sugiharas felt a simple bag could double as a fashion accessory, an over-the-shoulder splash of pure color — saffron, cobalt — as a shopper walked home. Forget drab brown paper or eco-horrid plastic.
They soon discovered special dyes for custom colors were hard to come by in the U.S., and if they wanted to manufacture in China, the smallest order was 40,000 units. They bet big. Their first 2,000 customers, says Emily, were 15-year-old girls from an interview in Teen Vogue.
“They were sweet, they wanted cute, and teenage girls are powerful. They all told their mothers to buy Baggu.”
Baggu, which means “bag” in Japanese, had hit a sweet spot. People wanted to be “green,” but not drab. Amazon picked up the line in 2008 and aggressively promoted what Sugihara calls “reasonable shopping bags.” In six months they were selling 100,000 basic Baggus at $8 each. The company now has 20 employees in California and New York, and has doubled in volume each year since startup.
Price has always been a consideration. Too cheap, $2 or so, and women might not value them. Buy too many Baggus, throw them in a closet and trash them. Yet, a “designer price point” would be too elitist. They wanted a balance, “a product that people felt ownership about,” like a shirt they could wear, ideally a thing of beauty.
Early customers included New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Chicago Museum, which brought credibility among mass retailers. This also gratified Joan, who had been an instructor of art and printmaking at Princeton University. Joan’s husband and Emily’s father, George Sugihara, holds the McQuown chair in Natural Science at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, a modeler of correlation and chaos theory, and a somewhat-legendary former managing partner and trader for Deutsche Bank, which installed him at the top of the Emerald Plaza in downtown San Diego.
Emily Sugihara had been making things with her mother most of her life. As a kindergartner in Del Mar, she had “experienced some anxiety around nap time,” so with her mother’s help she designed a quilt. It was a flower with pastel petals, she remembers, and her mother let her use a sewing machine to stitch it together. “Then I could sleep!” she says.
She went to the University of Michigan to become an investment banker, but also started a T-shirt company that sold interactive designs over the Web, a new idea at the time. Putting finance to one side temporarily, she enrolled at the Parsons school of design in New York, then became a designer for J.Crew.
She enjoyed the creative fervor, the commerciality, but she decided she wanted to make products that functioned well and lasted long, “to allow you to buy less stuff.”
Daughter and mother liked simple: creations built from one piece of fabric with a single seam to make the bag strong. After all, their first bags were built to hold milk and orange juice, cans of soup, and groceries. Now, Baggu carries a fuller line, carry-ons for airplanes, purses and totes, and even a sling for surfboards. Attending Torrey Pines High, Emily surfed a little, but now surfs regularly, feeling the sport brings clarity to business decisions.
So, how did she do it?
Emily Sugihara had a novel, high-value product at the right time — the Baggu shopping bag, which brought beauty to the checkout experience, and she figured out manufacturing early on, by going to China and negotiating fair practices. Starting at age 24, she understood how her young customers wanted to shop online. But she feels where most small businesses then flop is with customer interaction. You must be easy to communicate with. All emails must be thoughtfully and quickly answered.
In the beginning, Emily would stay up late at night, responding to queries and questions. At the other end, with retailers and chains, she feels a small business must be extra careful to plan and check inventory so big stores know they can place orders that will be delivered on time.
In her parents’ house in Del Mar Heights today, she stands in front of a floor-to-ceiling bookcase staring out at the wetlands of Soledad Creek. The books have been arranged by the color of their bindings, not by subject or author, so that, standing back, the whole wall is like a Mondrian painting, lines and blocks of pure color, like Baggu.
People take her more seriously now that she’s turned 30, “a solid adult,” she explains, “and I can actually rent a car now, which makes business trips much easier.
“Being aware of our own environmental impact and expressing that in the products we buy, that’s no longer the trend it was when we started. Now it’s just part of our consciousness, our daily consumer lifestyle of making choices, and I think all this will continue because it’s just part of our culture.
“You don’t meet people who say, ‘Yeah, we tried eating healthy and organic and we changed our minds and went back to junk.’ People who’ve used a reusable shopping bag because they realize it’s better and looks better, too, they don’t go back. At least, I hope that’s the case,” she says with a laugh.
Elizabeth Li contributed to research for this column. Steve Chapple’s Intellectual Capital covers game-changing people, ideas and perspectives. He can be reached at intellectualcapitalchapple@gmail.com
With her mother, Joan, she is the creator of the Baggu, the colorful, “carry in style” reusable bag sold in hip stores from Urban Outfitters to Collette in Paris, as well as Nordstrom and J.Crew. Hundreds of thousands more, at a basic price of $9, are sold through the bright and spare Baggu website, which looks like a Google home page for the fashion-conscious.
“My mom and I just don’t like to buy ugly stuff. We care about function and fashion, and we feel we are representative of a demographic that appreciates this.”
Back in 2007 when modestly self-funded Baggu launched, the choices at checkout were plastic or paper, with the occasional dorky net bag from France. The Sugiharas felt a simple bag could double as a fashion accessory, an over-the-shoulder splash of pure color — saffron, cobalt — as a shopper walked home. Forget drab brown paper or eco-horrid plastic.
They soon discovered special dyes for custom colors were hard to come by in the U.S., and if they wanted to manufacture in China, the smallest order was 40,000 units. They bet big. Their first 2,000 customers, says Emily, were 15-year-old girls from an interview in Teen Vogue.
“They were sweet, they wanted cute, and teenage girls are powerful. They all told their mothers to buy Baggu.”
Baggu, which means “bag” in Japanese, had hit a sweet spot. People wanted to be “green,” but not drab. Amazon picked up the line in 2008 and aggressively promoted what Sugihara calls “reasonable shopping bags.” In six months they were selling 100,000 basic Baggus at $8 each. The company now has 20 employees in California and New York, and has doubled in volume each year since startup.
Price has always been a consideration. Too cheap, $2 or so, and women might not value them. Buy too many Baggus, throw them in a closet and trash them. Yet, a “designer price point” would be too elitist. They wanted a balance, “a product that people felt ownership about,” like a shirt they could wear, ideally a thing of beauty.
Early customers included New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Chicago Museum, which brought credibility among mass retailers. This also gratified Joan, who had been an instructor of art and printmaking at Princeton University. Joan’s husband and Emily’s father, George Sugihara, holds the McQuown chair in Natural Science at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, a modeler of correlation and chaos theory, and a somewhat-legendary former managing partner and trader for Deutsche Bank, which installed him at the top of the Emerald Plaza in downtown San Diego.
Emily Sugihara had been making things with her mother most of her life. As a kindergartner in Del Mar, she had “experienced some anxiety around nap time,” so with her mother’s help she designed a quilt. It was a flower with pastel petals, she remembers, and her mother let her use a sewing machine to stitch it together. “Then I could sleep!” she says.
She went to the University of Michigan to become an investment banker, but also started a T-shirt company that sold interactive designs over the Web, a new idea at the time. Putting finance to one side temporarily, she enrolled at the Parsons school of design in New York, then became a designer for J.Crew.
She enjoyed the creative fervor, the commerciality, but she decided she wanted to make products that functioned well and lasted long, “to allow you to buy less stuff.”
Daughter and mother liked simple: creations built from one piece of fabric with a single seam to make the bag strong. After all, their first bags were built to hold milk and orange juice, cans of soup, and groceries. Now, Baggu carries a fuller line, carry-ons for airplanes, purses and totes, and even a sling for surfboards. Attending Torrey Pines High, Emily surfed a little, but now surfs regularly, feeling the sport brings clarity to business decisions.
So, how did she do it?
Emily Sugihara had a novel, high-value product at the right time — the Baggu shopping bag, which brought beauty to the checkout experience, and she figured out manufacturing early on, by going to China and negotiating fair practices. Starting at age 24, she understood how her young customers wanted to shop online. But she feels where most small businesses then flop is with customer interaction. You must be easy to communicate with. All emails must be thoughtfully and quickly answered.
In the beginning, Emily would stay up late at night, responding to queries and questions. At the other end, with retailers and chains, she feels a small business must be extra careful to plan and check inventory so big stores know they can place orders that will be delivered on time.
In her parents’ house in Del Mar Heights today, she stands in front of a floor-to-ceiling bookcase staring out at the wetlands of Soledad Creek. The books have been arranged by the color of their bindings, not by subject or author, so that, standing back, the whole wall is like a Mondrian painting, lines and blocks of pure color, like Baggu.
People take her more seriously now that she’s turned 30, “a solid adult,” she explains, “and I can actually rent a car now, which makes business trips much easier.
“Being aware of our own environmental impact and expressing that in the products we buy, that’s no longer the trend it was when we started. Now it’s just part of our consciousness, our daily consumer lifestyle of making choices, and I think all this will continue because it’s just part of our culture.
“You don’t meet people who say, ‘Yeah, we tried eating healthy and organic and we changed our minds and went back to junk.’ People who’ve used a reusable shopping bag because they realize it’s better and looks better, too, they don’t go back. At least, I hope that’s the case,” she says with a laugh.
Elizabeth Li contributed to research for this column. Steve Chapple’s Intellectual Capital covers game-changing people, ideas and perspectives. He can be reached at intellectualcapitalchapple@gmail.com
