The Design
from sketch to stitch
How a single line becomes the Ylana — drawn, shaped,
and stitched by hand.
It starts
on paper
Before a single piece of leather is cut, the Ylana lives as a drawing. Dozens of them. Each one chasing the same question — how do you make a bag that is unmistakably itself from across a room, yet quiet enough to wear every day?
The answer arrived in a single gesture: the Y. From there, every line was drawn to lead back to it — the arched handle, the angled flap, the clasp at the centre of it all.
Three studies
Form, structure, and function — resolved one sketch at a time.
A name,
set in stone
VAYEE began as a wordmark — five letters, set clean and unadorned, then tested across every surface the bag would ever live on. Leather and paper, light on dark and dark on light, until the mark held its own in each one.
The palette was drawn from the leather itself: deep bordeaux, forest green, warm cream, and ink black. Each colorway wears the name a little differently — but the letters never change. Quiet, confident, and made to last as long as the bag they sit on.
Cut, skived,
and stitched by hand
A drawing only becomes a bag at the bench. Each panel is cut from a single hide, the edges skived thin where they fold, burnished where they show, and saddle-stitched by hand with waxed linen thread — the strongest stitch there is, and the only one we trust.
It is slow work. A single Ylana passes through one maker's hands from first cut to final polish. No assembly line. No shortcuts. Just the quiet patience the material demands.
