A Fashion Fairy Tale
Sisters Jennifer and Leslie Kale tried their luck at launching an eponymous line of luxury handbags and then watched their dreams come true.
By B.J. Lorenzo 08/01/2009
If you like Cinderella stories, you’ll love the tale of the sisters Kale.
The two lovely siblings, Jennifer and Leslie, left their Texas hometown of San Antonio about 20 years back in search of love and adventure. They found all that in Southern California — and along the way, THEY founded a luxury handbag company that has taken the fashion world by surprise.
The very first retail order for Kale purses came from the blue-blooded Barneys New York. More upscale stores, including Bloomingdale’s and Nordstrom’s, followed suit. Now the Kales’ wares are in chic boutiques from New York to Tokyo. And it all began (and continues) here in Arroyoland.
Of course, high-fashion leathers are nothing new to Pasadenans who sport totes and satchels by Prada, Gucci, Hermes, Vuitton and Fendi. Along with those venerable Old World labels, you’ll now also spot the Sierra Madre–spawned Kales — a homegrown breed of lush leather purses with high-function hardware and sensuous signature linings that zap the eyes only when the bags are open. All Kale handbags have interiors of butter-soft suede in a marvelous (and surprisingly neutral) shade of fuschia.
Anne Riley-Katz, West Coast retail editor of Women’s Wear Daily, recalls the almost immediate popularity of the sisters’ oversize weekend bags and commodious totes. “There were some hobo styles and a modified version of the bowling bag,” she says. “Very classic in style, but some of the hardware and embellishments made them unique. You don’t want to carry what everyone else has. You want something that is on trend and yet has some semblance of individual style.”
So forget for a moment those flashy baggagerie hubs of Paris, Milan and New York. Focus instead on the San Gabriel Valley and its leafy environs — a Glendale living room to be exact — where one day in 2002, the Kale sisters threw a large piece of leather on the floor and decided to make a handbag out of it. They’d each been living picaresque lives, going to school and then building careers that lacked a certain something. Jennifer, now 38, waited tables and sold clothing at Fred Segal while she took courses at Santa Monica City College and studied interior design at UCLA. She followed that with stints in TV production coordination and the flower business in West Hollywood. After that came a dip into shoe importing, the result of a trip to Thailand to hunt for flower vases. For a while, Jennifer imported flat and wedge sandals that were a hit in the U.S.
Leslie, 42, had also studied design, at the University of Texas, before coming to L.A., where she tried on jobs as a wardrobe stylist and art director before seguing into a successful career as a set designer for films, TV, videos and commercials. (She’s currently the design director for hotel and restaurant designer Dodd Mitchell.) But the sisters Kale wanted to do something together, something great, something to call their own. “Something truly creative,” says Jennifer, who moved to Pasadena in 2005.
They’d purchased that first piece of experimental leather at a neighborhood shoe repair shop. “This was before the big handbag craze,” Jennifer says. “We’d both been working for a while, and we realized there weren’t any great work bags to carry all your stuff around in — something to hold your files, computer and the rest of the essential paraphernalia.”
Their initial design was a big expandable tote called the Daytripper. “First we found an importer of the finest Italian leather. Then Leslie found a place locally to make the hardware we’d designed. We found a patternmaker.” After the Daytripper prototype was set to go, they spent nearly a year designing an entire collection around it.
“Our grandmother was an artist and sculptor,” Jennifer says. “She had just died, and we’d been extremely close to her. And her favorite color was fuchsia.” So when the sisters looked for a signature luxury touch for their collection — something unique and truly meaningful — they decided all their bags would have a soft suede lining in their grandmother’s favorite color.
But they still had no idea how to entice buyers at top department stores into even looking at their line — until serendipity stepped in. Jennifer’s husband, Chris Fogel, was a music producer whose manager had a friend whose mother ran a fashion showroom in New York. It was a long shot, but, Jennifer says, “We took some photos of our bags and emailed them to her. She wrote back and said she’d like to see the bags, and us, in person.”
Leslie and Jennifer packed their samples and flew to New York. “Leslie isn’t a big people person. We decided I’d be the front man for our company. I took the meeting, and [the showroom owner] loved everything we had. They loved the character of the [lamb and goat] leathers, the hardware, the styling. They said it was something new in the marketplace.”
The sisters flew home and took their samples to a local manufacturer who produced the collection. Then they shipped one of everything to the showroom in New York. The day the boxes arrived and were being unpacked, buyers from Barney’s just happened to walk in. “They saw the collection — half of it still in boxes — and they bought it right then,” Jennifer says, still sounding surprised.
That first season in business, they grossed $200,000 in sales. “It’s grown steadily ever since,” Jennifer says. Now she’s starting a lower-priced line called Trace, which Neiman Marcus will begin carrying in September. Also that month, the sisters are redesigning their web site, kalehandbags.com. “We also want to open a little Kale boutique here in Pasadena, and we’re going to sell direct from our new Web site as well as in stores, starting this fall.”
And so the Kale family saga marches on. Grandma would be proud.
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