Look out, Gucci and Coach: Here comes Kaufmann '99

At the age of three, Laurie Kaufmann '99 was "the bag lady" to her grandmother, who coined the prescient nickname because Kaufmann loved to walk around carrying handfuls of bags. Looking back, Kaufmann is not sure whether she was carrying her parents' totes or the grocery bags. But today, as her designer handbag company Lorelei starts to take off, Kaufmann is more selective.

Her two-room apartment on Third Avenue is bursting with her bags. They are stacked on couches, draped over doorknobs and lined up on the floor: an evening affair hiding in its own black fringe; the playful white "Paget" — named after a Princeton classmate — with ruched sides and two multicolor bows like pigtail ribbons; a garnet clutch stitched out of shagreen, or sting ray skin; the pink eel skin "Lucia," a favorite of socialite Nicole Richie.

This apartment is a design studio, production office, informal showroom and Kaufmann's home all in one. Although she started just over a year ago, Kaufmann's bags have already graced the pages of Marie Claire, Honey, U.S. Weekly, Teen Vogue, Lucky, The Washington Post style section and Daily Candy, a fashion website.

Kaufmann, with long blonde hair, is unassuming in a pair of jeans and a black sweater, and she laughs about her apartment doubling as her only office. While Kaufmann no longer sews each purse by hand, she is still Lorelei's only full-time employee. From the popularity of her bags and the professionalism of her branding, most people wouldn't guess that is the case.

"I have people emailing saying they want to work for me, and I'm like, it's funny that you think I could actually hire someone!" Her cheerful humor belies how many nights she's worked until four in the morning.

The success of Lorelei is part elbow grease, part luck and part talent. "Lorelei" is the German name for a siren, and Kaufmann chose it one afternoon when she was tossing around potential names with a friend.

"I wanted to use something related to my own name," she said, "'Laura Kaufmann' isn't catchy."

But "Lorelei" is — in addition to the word's aesthetic appeal, she said, the siren metaphor works for both her bags and her customers. "For women, being a siren is a nice idea," she said. Or the product itself could be as alluring as a siren.

On her website she quotes poet Marianne Moore: "Fashion can make you ridiculous; style, which is yours to control individually, can make you attractive, a near siren." Kaufmann's path to sirendom took her through four years at Princeton, two at Calvin Klein doing public relations and a year at the Fashion Institute for Technology.

The seeds of her creative instinct and business savvy were planted much earlier, though, during her childhood in Rye, N.Y. Her mother set a precedent for what Kaufmann is doing today by starting up her own interior design company, and as a child Kaufmann was surrounding by fabrics and her mother's "great sense of design."

Looking back, Kaufmann said she's always been interested in clothes and always stuck to her opinions.

"I've always, as a child, had a strong sense about what I did and didn't like and I wouldn't let anyone tell me otherwise." She laughs, "I guess I still don't."

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Kaufmann majored in English and took many art history courses while at the University. Her living room is accordingly accessorized with the works of Faulkner as well as books on Pop Art and Matisse.

A member of Tiger Inn and the Pi Beta Phi sorority, Kaufmann also worked at the boutique, Zoe, on Hulfish Street. She still keeps a picture of a friend's 21st birthday party at the Peacock Inn in her living room, and several of her current purses are named after classmates.

But that seems like a long time ago, she said, and very far away from what she's doing now. Pursuing her passion for fashion right out of college wasn't exactly an obvious match with what her classmates were doing. "Senior year, when everyone was like banking, consulting . . . I was like, 'I don't fit!'"

A job at Calvin Klein provided the way to "get from Princeton to the fashion industry." The two years she spent doing public relations there were helpful for what she's doing now, Kaufmann said, but that job wasn't her passion, so she quit and enrolled at FIT for a crash-course on accessory design. It was a gutsy and rewarding step.

That year was fun and intensive, she said. The curriculum included handcrafting your own shoes and purses, Kaufmann said, pointing to a pair of black heels with laces that are now displayed on a bookshelf. It was "very refreshing to go to a place where Princeton means nothing, a place where it's all about design and what you actually do."

But the University has also played a part in her success, although it's not her classes or her thesis on Virginia Woolf that have helped Lorelei, but rather, an encounter with an acquaintance at the Reunions P-rade last year. Kaufmann had just gotten her website up when she bumped into a friend's cousin who happened to be freelancing for Daily Candy. Kaufmann was asked about her handbag line and in turn gave the name of her new website. The friend said she would write about it. Kaufmann wasn't sure she would, but a couple of weeks later, Lorelei was featured on Daily Candy.

On that single day — June 27, 2003 — Kaufmann got 60 orders and 70,000 hits on her website, www.loreleinyc.com. Since then, the amount of press coverage her bags have received has increased each month.

"It's incredible how much exposure I've gotten from that one thing," she said. "It's funny how the best things are just random."

During the preceding year, though, Kaufmann had been working hard to put all the mechanisms in place to take advantage of such good luck. Previously, she had been hand-making purses and selling them by word of mouth. She reshaped Lorelei into a business by establishing a professional website and branding, and transferring production to four nearby factories.

"I had to back up and do it in the right order," she said.

When her first orders came in, "I was like, 'What's an invoice?'" That year was scary at times, Kaufmann said, and there were moments when she said she wondered whether or not it would actually happen.

Though she is barely breaking even, Kaufmann expects to turn a profit within the year.

Ultimately, it's Kaufmann's style that has set her apart and attracted notice, in addition to good luck. Her designs balance playfulness, like the bows on the Paget clutch, with sophistication, and she's quick to keep an eye out for practical conveniences like a zipper or a wrist strap.

"Accessories are what really punctuate[s] your personal style and personality . . . they re-emphasize and define your style, mood, or spirit in the details and nuances," she wrote in an email. "The point is that we are in control and have the power to make ourselves feel — the key word — attractive and alluring . . . like a siren."