The Brand: ETWAS...

I first heard about the company ‘Etwas’ a little over a year ago when they were featured in one of my favourite magazines.  I have wanted to feature a bag brand on this blog for quite some time and this was the company that I wanted to feature most as they really stuck in my head, and plus the bags are amazing. I found the Etwas concept and idea really refreshing and with their belief that quality, craftsmanship and eco issues are highly important to the brand only made them more appealing.  Anyway, I managed to get a nice little interview with the brand, Enjoy!

Tell me a little bit about Etwas, how it all began and the reason behind Etwas’ inception?

I started this project a few years ago after graduating college and realizing that there were few jobs that would give me the freedom to work in the way I wanted; to design not just good products, but good systems too. I realized it would be best to start out doing things my own way from the outset.
Bags made sense because there is a need for them and it’s something I already had some experience with. This is partly why we’re called Etwas, which is the German word for something. I could have applied this same idea to anything. The important thing for us is not what, but how.

What is the Etwas project all about?
Quality. Without selective vision. I want to run a great little company making the best kind of things in an elegant and beautiful way. A beautiful thing is useless if made in an ugly way.

What inspires you and your creations?
I’m very inspired by nature, by well lived lives. I’m inspired by modernism, but not by plastic and chrome. I want to approach traditional handicraft with that minimal aesthetic. I want things that are ready to live up to hard and varied use, that are beautiful enough for fashion but durable enough for adventure. Good living for me involves both.

So you make all bags by hand, is this a difficult process?

The short answer is yes, it's a much more difficult way to make things. At the same time it’s also a fundamentally rewarding and enjoyable process. This is part of my definition of good design; a beautiful thing must have a beautiful origin, we too often forget that factories and means of production are designed things too, and have either a positive or negative impact on people's lives. Our workshop is filled with light and has full wall windows and a hardwood floor, it’s quiet enough to listen to music or lectures or audiobooks and we are using our hands and nice old tools making something we can take pride in. It’s a world away from being bent over a loud machine in florescent light.

How long does it take to make one of your bags?

It depends on the craftsman, it takes me five hours at a comfortable pace. When someone is first starting though they can rarely finish in a day.

Where are you based in America, and does the place you live in inspire you?

We are not only in NY, which is such a dynamic and inspiring city by itself, but we are in the Williamsburg neighbourhood, which is one of the epicentres of this craft-revival attitude we’ve been seeing in the states the last few years. This is a place where the artisanal butcher around the corner texts us pictures of the delicacies they’ve just finished for lunch. We have a local distillery across the street and a brewery a few blocks up, wood and metal fabrication shops around that help us make custom tools and jigs, all owned by young people with similar values. It’s like the old world, knowing the people who make your things, from your jeans to the vegetables on your plate. There's a great feeling of solidarity, we’re all supporting one another to build a better kind of world.

Now I love the fact that all your products are completely made by hand, do you find it rewarding to be able to create a

product from start to finish?

Yes, I think it’s important to have everyone, creative’s and business people involved in the whole process of making a thing. It keeps the business honest and results in a design with much more integrity I think. There are no gaps in the critical consciousness as there are when you have things produced in big batches by a workroom or production house.

Why bags, have you always had an interest in bags?

Yes and no. I actually hate carrying things around with me, but it’s so often necessary, so I like trying to make graceful ways of transporting what I need. More and more demographics carry some kind of laptop or device now and we need ways of carrying them. It’s amazing really; these things have freed us from spending our days in offices and studies where we were stuck until so recently. Toting things around is a small price to pay.

 ‘The Standard’ bag is an absolutely beautiful piece, and looks likes a product that is just going to get better with time, I also like how the inside photo on your website shows the grain of the leather on the inside…what was the design process like behind creating this bag?
This is important to me. All our bags are put together in a very simple way- no linings no pockets. This is the only way I could achieve what I wanted, to use the best materials, make things in an uncompromising way, entirely by hand, and still keep the price well below 1K. No one else makes bags this way, we use a lot of tools that we’ve had made specially. I like the idea of a brand having a specific way of doing things. There are too many brands that just focus on their typography and website and make their products in the same factories as their competitors. It all feels and looks the same. That’s not very interesting to me. 

 The 'Standard' Bag

What are your design values, also how do you stay ‘eco-friendly’ if you want to use that term?
I think eco friendliness comes naturally with how we do things. I want to make things in the way I find most beautiful. That means to me using rewarding tools in a beautiful space in a way that is healthy and empowering to workers and is rewarding to all involved. I think it’s no coincidence that this is a totally clean process. Destructive, toxic industrial practices are rarely beautiful. That way of doing things seems distasteful to me and I don’t think it has a place in modern communities.

In the general sense, what are your thoughts on ‘craftsmanship’ today?

It’s definitely on the rise and I think it’s the future. I think we’ve just reached that point in our culture. Look at all the manufactured devices that smart phones and laptops have replaced: clocks, scanners, cameras, compasses, gps, word processors, magazines and the postal service are even in strong decline. As the artefacts of our advancement become smaller and lighter and more effortless and invisible we spend more time thinking about the tangible things. There is more and more polarization between the ephemeral and the real. We want a lot of aspects to be super ephemeral, and the others to be very real, very tangible and meaningful. I hope that’s not too vague? The new magazines that are coming about are not just a cheap way to show pictures, they are about the bookness-the feel of the paper, high print quality, good art direction. A leather wallet today is not a way to carry around your checkbook, that's all digitized. It’s about a statement, it’s about it being a real and beautiful thing. 

 'Light Pack' bag

'Toolbag'

Will there be any new additions to the three Etwas bags coming soon?
Yes we have a beautiful wallet coming out next month, which is our first small accessory, and we have several new styles of bag on the way as well.

You have an interesting statement on your website that reads ‘consider not only the things we are making, but the things we are destroying’ – could you elaborate this sentence for me?

I think it’s important to consider all the products of an industrial interaction. When you buy something you pay money to have it made, but that money also goes to producing all kinds of unpleasant products you don’t see and probably don’t want. Waste, bad working conditions, underpaid and laid off employees, industrial effluent, and ugly corporate infrastructure.

How would you sum up Etwas as a brand in one sentence?
Etwas is about focusing on the whole, the idea that a graceful design comes from making things in a graceful way.

I really enjoyed Etwas’ answers to my questions, and I hope you the reader did too.  I absolutely love this brand and I am really happy to have them featured on my blog. It really does make me happy to be able to feature brands that share similar values and passion towards design, quality and craftsmanship.  Thanks to Will for taking the time out to be interviewed, if you would like to know more about Etwas then visit their website at: www.etwasbags.com