The Story Behind Our Color Names

Yes, we don't have your typical color names, like Black, Brown, Blue, Green...well you get the picture! As a young designer, it just felt so boring to call them basic colors, then how would I differentiate between colors each season!? It started out as clever names and then turned into something totally unexpected! It all goes back to my days in the music industry.

Right out of college (SDSU), I turned my college internship into a full-time job. Never in my wildest dreams did I every think I would work in radio. Most dream about a career in the music industry, but I completely fell into it. And of course, it revolved around a boy LOL Well I was in college... So I had a crush and this boy and his fraternity were volunteering at the Del Mar Fairgrounds for the summer concert season. So I offered to volunteer too! Since I am not really the bouncer type, they put me in the VIP section to check tickets and whatnot.

Being the extrovert that I've always been, I saw all these young people having fun in the VIP section, so I asked what the deal was (of course in a much nicer way). She told me they were radio winners and she was interning at the radio station in promotions, so this was part of her job. And I thought, well I want to do that! I love music and that sounds like a ton of fun.

Next thing I knew, I had a radio internship that summer! And by that Fall, I was working part-time and when I graduated it turned into a full-time gig! Talk about being in the right place at the right time! Okay, but now you are wondering what does that have to do with my leather names!?! Fast forward 10 years and I decided to turn this hobby of making handbags into something more...

Around 2014, I created a spring collection and called it "London Calling" (Cambridge, English Channel, Old Royal, Tea & Crumpets, Notting Hill, and Rosie Lee). Mainly because the colors reminded me of England and that was a fun name. I ended up calling the next season, "Bohemian Rhapsody," because the colors were very bohemian to me, with names likeMahogany, Sandstone, Meadow, Rustic Clay. If you are familiar, both of these are song titles and thus a seasonal theme naming was born. I continued with Island Girl, Life is a Highway, Born to be Wild, California Dreaming, Harvest Moon and more.

My interns and I had a blast googling slang terms and sayings that related to the song title and theme of the collection. Like Born To Be Wild was Africa inspired with colors like Sahara, Congo and Toucan. California Dreaming had Happy Trails, Free Love, Woodstock & Aquarius. Harvest Moon was 1970's NYC inspired with leather names like Gold Dust, Wicked and Greenwich. So there is a rhyme and reason behind the color names although I no longer work with seasonal collections, because I look at all of our colors as year round offerings. To me it's all about how you pair the colors and what you wear with them that create a seasonal look overall. 

By 2019, I decided to no longer sell to boutiques and switched to direct to consumer. So I took the most popular colors from all the previous seasons and focused on making more of those...it started with Woodstock, Wicked, Aquarius and Free Love and has expanded. Then we brought back Happy Trails and Cape Cod (from our Under the Boardwalk "nantucket inspired" collection) and Rosarito Beach from our "Mexico inspired" Life is a Highway Collection. Since we offered a "black" every season, we narrowed it to our two best sellers, Black Sand and Noche. So although our focus is on these 12 colors, as leathers get discontinued or we round out the color offerings or grow our fan base, you never know which color may debut, disappear or come back! 

Aquarius is one of those leathers, we are wanting to bring back, but the tannery has adjusted the color slightly and we prefer the original color. When something like that happens, we have to either custom order it in larger quantities than we regularly order or discontinue the color from our line. We still have a few items available, so once it completely sells out, we will take another look...

So always stay tuned, as you never know when a color will come back or disappear! Sometimes we don't even know until we go to order more leather. And production on any leather with burgundy lining is currently on hold because we had to custom order that lining color since it was discontinued from regular production.