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| Feature: It's All In The Family - Interview with Freddy & Ma |
| Sara Langley The Magnes Sisters |
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February 11, 2007
Starting a business with a family member can be fun, challenging and tough – sometimes one, sometimes all. These three handbag design houses shared their personal and professional experiences, along with their passion for fashion!
Freddy & Ma just launched last year, but you wouldn’t know it, as their brand has been everywhere! Featured online, in magazines, on TV, and in the wardrobes of celebrities, Freddy & Ma is poised to become the next big handbag brand. Brother and sister team, Amy and Anthony Pigliacampo answered a few questions about their fabulous familial brand:
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Hauteness: What made you decide to enter the business of designing and manufacturing custom handbags?
Freddy & Ma: We began to notice that companies were starting to introduce custom products into their lines and started thinking about customization as a concept. We both have design experience, Anthony on the product side and Amy in fashion and handbags made the most sense in terms of a starting point. We both love graphic design and textiles and wanted to integrate that into our bags as well. Once we fleshed out our concept, we wanted to get started right away to make sure we made our idea a reality before any of our (potential) competitors.
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H: Where did you come up with the name Freddy & Ma?
Z: The name "freddy&ma" comes from a game that we made up when we were kids. Those are the names we called ourselves and we pretty much imagined every thing around us to be exactly what we wanted. It made sense to name our company "freddy&ma" because our concept is all about making exactly what you want.
H: What inspired you guys to work together?
F&M: We always knew that we wanted to work together, we just couldn't see how we possibly could as our interests and experiences seemed vastly different and unrelated. Ironically our skills, strengths, and backgrounds are the perfect mix for our concept.
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We understand each other in a way that is difficult to explain to other people. We reference the same movies, books, music, we just "get" each other......usually when one of us puts a new thought out there, the other had already thought about it on some level and we end up yelling to talk over one another because we are so excited. We knew that if we could find a way to harness in our ideas and creativity and vision that it would be a winning venture.
H: In what ways does it help to do business with one another?
F&M: Again, we just have an understanding of one another's personality that you wouldn't find outside of a sibling relationship. We know how to fight and not take it personally -- actually, everything is personal and we both care so deeply about what we are doing. It would be hard to find another person that i would trust as much as we trust each other. We are keenly aware of each others weaknesses and we compensate for one another as needed. There is a dynamic where we feed off of one another and make each other better in every sense of the word. Lots of times we get asked if we are worried about people knocking off our ideas and the truth is, unless they can get inside of our heads, they will never be able to be as authentically "us" as we are!
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| H: What do you consider to be one another's strengths as it relates to the business?
F&M: The biggest yin/yang is that Anthony sees the big picture and Amy figures out a lot of the details. Amy’s strengths are my knowledge of fashion, art and advertising and Anthony's engineering and design experience coupled with his voracious reading habit keeps him on the cutting edge of what businesses are doing and what the trends that extend beyond the fashion world are. We were also raised by parents who started and ran a very successful business so we have them as a huge moral support system. Having our own business feels so much more natural and less contrived than anything we've done up to this point.
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H: Whose personal style is a greater influence in the design of your bags?
F&M: Definitely Amy, but Anthony often can look beyond specific styles and colors and recognize things that are missing in the market.
H: What is the biggest challenge you have had working with a family member?
F&M: One challenge is that we are both very stubborn and always "right". As very opinionated people, we frequently disagree and will argue with each other. Our biggest challenge is actually geographic -- I live in New York and Anthony lives in San Francisco area where he runs another company that he founded so juggling 2 coasts is challenging. There are times that it's actually an advantage as Anthony covers any dealings in Los Angeles.
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H: Do you ever get designers block?
F&M: Yes, all the time. To get rid of it, I put in an inspiring (fashion-wise) movie, often my favorite Breakfast at Tiffany's, thumb through boxes of magazine cutouts and then I start to draw. The first few pages of sketches are always terrible and then something starts to happen and by the end of the day I get to a better place.
H: If you weren't handbag designers, what would you be doing?
F&M: Amy would be doing something else fashion related, working in design, and often entertains the idea of becoming an art teacher. Anthony would be working as a product design consultant. Working as a designer is always so varied and interesting we cannot image not being involved in it in some fashion.
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H: What's in your bag right now?
F&M: Tons of business receipts to be filed!! Lots of lip-gloss, sunglasses, an iPod, mittens and a digital camera.
Visit Freddy & Ma for more haute handbags!
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