Interviewed by Eva Baczynska
With skillful construction, clean, classic designs and personalized function, Vesper Faering’s bags and essentials are changing the travel game. Made by hand to complement your jet setting style, each order is custom tailored and incorporates premium leather with lightweight, yet tough waterproof fabrics, to fit, organize and protect your favorite carry-on must haves. Travelle spoke with co-founder Andrea Drager to learn more about how Vesper Faering makes travelling life a little bit easier and a whole lot more stylish.
Tell us a little about you.
I’m an innovator at heart – I love the challenge of a new problem, and am extremely motivated by trying to solve it in new ways. As a business consultant for the past 10 years, I travelled extensively for work helping clients solve problems, and loved it, except for the fact that I felt I was constantly fighting with a tension between wanting to do meaningful work, and taking care of myself while living a life on the road. I absolutely loved the lifestyle, but after basing myself in 3 different cities (Toronto, London and Paris) and then travelling weekly for work internationally, I realized that it can really take a toll on your mind and body – lots of stress, exhaustion, and also an erosion of connections with community. This is something I saw across a lot of my colleagues and friends, and is a problem I want to help solve.
What inspired you to create Vesper Faering?
I realized that there were really no resources to help today’s generation of frequent travellers deal with organizing and taking good care of yourself while managing a travel-filled lifestyle. So I decided to take a leave from consulting, move to Vancouver, a city that for me embodies the ‘balance’ of the west coast lifestyle, and start Vesper Faering. At our core, Vesper Faering is about making products that integrate seamlessly with your travel life. We make travel bags that solve organizational pain points for travellers, and each of these bags is tailored online by you to fit your organizational and style preferences. Once we get the custom design, we then manufacture the bag in our workshop in Vancouver through a tech-enabled manufacturing process, and ship it directly to you. Our objective is to develop this brand of “conscious” fashion…on-demand, high quality, custom bags that are made with a conscience.
What makes VF different from other luggage lines?
Our ambition is to bring us back to a time when we knew the people behind our products and bought quality that we knew would last. Each bag is handmade, on-demand in our workshop to your specifications, creating a truly unique bag to be used for years to come. We’re not made in Asia, we’re not mass-manufactured, and we’re truly designed based on insights and experience from real travellers. We have a philosophy that is community focused; we’re building a community of travellers who use great products that they can be proud of; a community of artisans who are committed to excellence and able to make a living off their craft in Canada; a community grown on solid business values of honesty, integrity and quality. We live this philosophy by partnering with great suppliers and partners - one of our first production partners is a social enterprise in Vancouver that takes disadvantaged women and new immigrants and provides training and sewing employment opportunities.
Let's Talk Bags.
We started by designing innovative bags crafted based on insights from our travelers; intuitive function, simple and stylish. Our first bag is a toiletry kit designed for someone who never unpacks it. We called it ‘The Sidecar’ .…a necessary staple in any repertoire. It’s super lightweight, incredibly durable and easy-clean, flexible and elegant...we built it off of research from super frequent travellers, and tested and refined it on travels to over 6 continents!
Our second bag (currently in development) is a classic tote designed to be the most effective carry-on companion for the travelling professional woman.
What great things can we expect from Vesper Faering?
We have big ambitions! We’re looking forward to launching our classic tote in the next few months, followed by 2-3 additional bag styles this year, and we’re also working on an online store and subscription service for travel-sized toiletry essentials (so that you don’t even have to think about stocking your toiletry kit or travel essentials). We are also working to create a resource for the frequent traveller - sharing inspiration from likeminded individuals, tips, tricks and good advice from reputable sources on how to manage this lifestyle and take good care of yourself on the road.
We’re also constantly learning about how we can better help manage the complexities of a life on the road and would love to get more inputs from all travellers about what frustrations you might have – connect with us at vesperfaering.com / @vesperfaering on Instagram – we would love to hear your thoughts!