Hobby: Designing womens purses

After years of fumbling with a hobby project of mine, I finally got at it a couple a days ago. I started a little dream, designing womens purses. It’s not important that it is just womens purses, but that particular accessory has a couple of important success criteria.

The most important parts of the idea are:

• The design (minus logo) should be licensed under Creative Commons most open license. Basically: If you copy or build upon my work, you need to attribute the work. You will be able to copy, change, build upon as you like. If you want to license your work under the same license, thats fantastic. If not, I’ll still consider it a victory that others take what I’ve made and develop it further.
• The project should at least go break even. If I put in more money than I get out of it, I need to ajust the course of the project.
• Number of purses produced should be low. Minimum 10-20, maximum 100-500. To develop new designs is important. The design should be made so I can have others producing the parts. Then I’ll focus on designing and assembling.

So far I got sketches for three designs, all with a little unusual choice of materials. Design #2 is the first I want to produce. It’s maybe the least practical design, but will be a kick-ass photo object, and thus the easies to get into fashion magazines. Choice of materials are acrylic outer shell and aluminum handle. The lining will consist of semi-rigid plastic and rubber.

Design #1

Outer shell in glassfiber, handle in steel/aluminum, lining made from some sort of sailcloth.

Design #2

Outer shell mede of acrylic. Handle made out of aluminum. Lining will be translucent plastic and black rubber.

Design #3

Outer shell should be a mix of a steel frame and sailcloth.  Lining made from sailcloth.  Pop rivets will attach the frame and sailcloth.

For all three designs, most of the construction is thought out. What I need to figure out are decorative elements, proportions and misc. technical solutions. The goal is to have a ready prototype at the start of the new year.