FORT WAYNE, Ind.--Feb. 17--Patterned velvets, silks and tapestries will join the familiar cotton print handbags at Vera Bradley Designs Inc. for its fall collection.
The new look is courtesy of a new designer, Sonja Benson, who joined the Fort Wayne accessories company this winter. Vera Bradley bought Benson's 4-year-old enterprise, Femtio, a maker of dressy and just plain funky handbags.
Terms of the purchase, Vera Bradley's first acquisition, were not disclosed.
Benson started talking to Vera Bradley's owners, Pat Miller and Barbara Baekegaard, last summer. She was looking for advice on expanding her company, not looking to sell it.
"When Sonja saw Vera Bradley firsthand and we met Sonja face-to- face, our minds started branching out in all directions," Miller said.
"I felt like we all clicked together," Benson said.
Benson's bags have little in common with the traditional Vera Bradley line, except that they're fabric. A former art director and executive with major advertising agencies -- and a seamstress from a young age -- Benson makes bags of rich fabrics with often fanciful trims.
Her bags are shaped as pouches, envelopes and mini-backpacks instead of the traditional, rectangularly shaped bag that is Vera Bradley's trademark.
She's now experimenting with some of Vera Bradley's signature prints in those styles, as well as developing styles in other fabrics for a fall line the company will introduce under a new name.
The acquisition is a first for Vera Bradley, which Miller and Baekegaard began in 1982. It also will take them into a new distribution system, the accessory market, rather than the gift market which has been the Fort Wayne company's focus. Vera Bradley bags, luggage, clothing and accessories are sold throughout the United States and internationally.
Benson didn't worry about distribution at first. She opened her own retail stores, first in Rockport, Mass., then in Port Townsend, Wash., where she moved in 1993. Femtio bags also are sold in boutiques on the East Coast and in Florida and Aspen, Colo.
The retail shops also gave Benson immediate customer feedback, which in turn guided her designs.
Benson began the business at her son's suggestion that she could earn money from her sewing hobby. She had used leftover fabric from the gowns she sewed for her daughter's wedding party to make bags for the bride and her attendants. The raves those bags drew were the basis for her first successful designs.
Femtio -- Swedish for 50 -- came from the 50 friends who invested in the company to get it going.
At first Benson bought fabric at retail stores and sewed all her creations. But early on she began attending fabric shows in New York to order from manufacturers.
She hired an outside sewer when she moved to Port Townsend: "We'd start at 7 o'clock in the morning and sew until 6 and sew like madwomen," she said of their marathon, once-a-week sewing sessions.
She was considering growing her company when, at a wedding last year in Connecticut, she met Baekegaard's son. Learning about Femtio, he said, "You should meet my mother," Benson said.
Benson wanted to discuss overcoming her production limits with the veterans at Vera Bradley last summer. Instead, the conversation turned to bringing Benson and her designs within the Vera Bradley fold.
Vera Bradley had started talking about bringing out velvet or dressier bags five years ago, Miller said, but never followed through. "Fortunately, we found someone who already had developed a beautiful bag," she said.
Benson will devote full-time to design. "This is what I love to do -- and what I'm good at," she said.
"Sonja has unlimited wonderful ideas, and we seem to know how to manufacture," Miller said.
Added Benson, "This gives us both a chance to do what we like to do."
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(c) 1997, The (Fort Wayne, Ind.) News-Sentinel. Distributed by Knight-Ridder/Tribune Business News.
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