Pull tabs, pop tops or "the aluminum doohickeys that open soda cans" - call them what you may, but those ubiquitous little pieces of metal that seem to exist for only one purpose have a life beyond the beverage container as far as Barbara Aylesworth is concerned.
Aylesworth, a North Vancouver resident, recently launched Eco Design Chic, a new business through which she sells handbags and accessories made from recycled pop tops. The idea for this venture was planted four years ago when she was on vacation in the U.S. and purchased a handbag made of pop tops from a shop in Atlanta, Ga.
"I'd never seen anything like it before. If I'm going to spend money on anything, I want it to be unique and different from everybody else," she says. When she returned home and started carrying her new acquisition around town, it quickly became clear that she wasn't the only one who had never before seen a pop top purse.
"I brought it home and whenever I would wear it people would come up to me and say 'Where did you get your bag?'"
Aylesworth saw a business opportunity. So she tracked down the San Francisco-based company that designed her bag and started bringing pop top accessories across the border for sale in North Vancouver. This past spring, she began holding regular trunk shows in her home where she could display the imported change purses, wallets, evening bags, handbags, totes, messenger bags, belts, necklaces, earrings, broaches and bracelets.
Each piece consists of some 200 to 1,000 post-consumer pull tabs. Though the accessories are designed in California, they are manufactured in Brazil by more than 100 artisans, most of them women, in three different co-operatives. The artisans bind the tabs together using a traditional Brazilian crochet technique. For a personal touch, each piece comes with a tag signed by the person who made it.
Prices for the accessories range from $20 for a pair of earrings to $415 for a large hobo bag. Aylesworth says her target market includes just about everybody - from the 16-year-old girl who wants an edgy addition to her outfit, to the mature woman with an adventurous sense of style. In fact, Aylesworth's 86-year-old mother owns a pop top necklace, bracelet and messenger bag.
"Wherever she goes, people comment on it. So it's for anybody who is fashion forward and who wants to make a statement with their accessories."
Since 1997, Aylesworth has run A Stroke of Genius interior design company. Working in an industry that requires frequent trips to muddy construction sites, she says the idea of hosting Sunday afternoon trunk shows where she could sell her products while exchanging creative ideas with other women in the community over tea and cookies was appealing.
Her next trunk show is Sunday, Nov. 16, 1 to 4 p.m. at 978 Hartford Place, North Vancouver. Email [email protected] or phone 604-319-4074 for more info or to RSVP.
