This blog isn't meant to discourage anyone from following their dream. I think there's nothing more inspiring than someone going for it...following an idea, making it happen, going against the mediocracy of a "day job" that is expected of us. My hope is to save you some dough along the way. I want to help prevent designers from making the same mistakes I made.

We've established that I shouldn't have been sewing my own bags, right? Well, I hadn't figured that out when I called upon a PR company out of LA/NYC that I found on Ladies Who Launch. By the way, if you don't know about this site, I recommend visiting. It gets those entrepreneurial juices flowing everytime I visit. The PR company was okay, but I felt honored that they would take me on (it should be the other way around). I thought I was ready to hit the InStyles and Oprahs of the world and take the fashion scene by charge. What I didn't think about was how the hell I was going to produce all these bags that I was expecting to sell. If it was taking me 15 hours to sew one bag, how long would it take me to sew 200? Okay, and I didn't mention this before, but I was buying leather from a fabulous place that produced leather for the high-end airplane & bar market...not little single-engine planes, but Gulfstreams. Yeah, the leather was about $11-$15 a sq. ft. WAY too expensive for my bags (or any bags). But I liked the leather and it was pretty and I liked the colors and it was soft and they were nice to me and they took AMEX...so I thought it was perfect.

Make sure you have your manufacturing in a realistic place and the cost of your materials fit your selling price (after all, besides being famous, we want to make money!) before hiring a PR company. If you don't have good, reliable manufacturing, you don't have much. And PR services ain't cheap as I found out. I spent over $2000 (in credit card debt) to have them create a press kit (that was less than impressive by the way...I could've done it myself much better.)I spent time sewing, when really I could've written a pretty awesome press kit myself - not to mention I have a TON of creative writer friends that would've done it for free. I thought somehow hiring the PR company made me more real. Not so. It just made me more broke.

Don't underestimate the power of your creative friends. Now I needed to find a manufacturer to sew. Much more to come...

These are my first professional pictures of Denney Bags, courtesy of my talented friend Michelle from Misha Photography.