"It's been a wild ride and we are ready for more!"
When two sisters start a handbag company, each living on a different continent 9 time zones apart, things are bound to be interesting. And they certainly have been... it's been a wild ride and we are ready for more!
I founded Charm and Luck sometime in late 2003 by making some handbag sketches and samples, and luckily I was able to quickly enlist / coerce my invaluable sister Christine to join me as partner. Since our "official" start in April 2004, together, unbelievable and quite miraculously, we've grown Charm and Luck into what it is today: a fun-loving handbag and accessories company found in over 1,500 stores in 20+ countries. In other words, we have not slept much since then. I'm sure my nephew knew UPS before ABC. My daughter makes drawings with me carrying Charm and Luck bags - even if there's a dragon chasing me! Our husbands / friends / near and distant relatives have been selflessly photocopying, bar-code inputting, faxing, and loading / unloading shipments. We have a lot of people in our lives to thank for helping us get where we are today.
"A fun-loving handbag and accessories company."
Our past experience in fashion has definitely helped us along the way. I used to work at Vogue magazine in New York
, after which I remained in fashion at a magazine I founded in the Philippines. Christine used to be a management executive at Nordstrom. However, those experiences did not teach us many of the most basic things we needed to know to get Charm and Luck going: how to lay tarp at our trade show booths, how to stand on your feet for 10 hours without lunch (actually maybe Nordstrom helped Christine learn that), how to remodel your infant son's bedroom into a quasi-storage facility. Happily we now have a shipping warehouse so my nephew has his room back!
"Our past experience in fashion has helped us."
Charm and Luck is all about fun and whimsy. Christine and I laugh all the time, even though we're exhausted (perhaps because we're exhausted). Charm and Luck is color, sparkle, fun.. Charm and Luck is for women that already have charm and luck, and probably a lot of it!
