Badass Backpacks is excited to announce our newest bag collaboration – code name: Oil Spill. We’ve been working with the amazing Eli Halpin on this newest bag concept, and it’s been an amazing journey so far – huge shout and huge Thank You here to Eli! … and we’re just getting started. This new bag won’t be ready to sell until later (2017). But in the meantime, I’m excited to start sharing some behind the scenes insight into what we’re up to with our next bag production (“6 things“). Eli has created some beautiful new paintings that we’ll be featuring on the bag, Rusty and I have been heads down in Photoshop – cropping, resizing, reconfiguring, and reworking the artwork layout for the initial prototype bags. We’ll keep sharing more here as this collaboration marches onward.
Where did this bag concept begin? And why is our chosen code name “Oil Spill”?
My friend and former cube mate (Blackbaud), Allison Asbury Summers, discovered some amazing artwork by Eli and she excitedly shared that with me earlier this year. Allison’s mother had purchased some of Eli’s art, and it is really beautiful … so I was more than a little thrilled that when I reached out to Eli to ask her about collaborating with Badass Backpacks – she agreed to meet with me. Thank you Allison for making connections (connections in general and also specifically for making this connection)!
The conversations that have unfolded in recent months with Eli have been really meaningful. She and her chief collaborator and partner, Mike, have met frequently with Rusty and me, and they’ve been joyfully inviting us into their space. (In addition to frequent meetups at Eli’s studio, I also attended a special event with Eli at The New Movement theater earlier this year where she used her paintings and her stories to fuel an improv team on stage – it was fun and inspiring! (And yes Andrew, same place.)) All of this means that I have pages of notes in my sketch book, and even more layers of notes in my thoughts about where we’re headed with this new bag — but the first thought to share is a very simple one: I am learning that I have a tendency to overthink things. I want so badly to search and to search and to search in hope of finding something that I might be looking for … and sometimes when I stop, and let go of everything that I’m holding onto: I find something beautiful staring me in the face. Pause. Let go. Look closely at what is. One thing that Oil Spill is about: Finding beauty in strange places, by letting go of preconceived ideas. [Or maybe it’s just about beauty. We’re still having the conversation. :)] Eventually this bag will get a proper name and I can’t wait to start sharing more of the collaborative conversation, as well as the artwork that Eli as created for this project. For now, here’s a close up slice of an amazing painting that she created (This is a tiny snippet. The full painting is massive in scale at ~80in wide!) — I’ll zoom out further to show more as we start sharing more about all of this.
Badass Backpacks in collaboration with Eli Halpin — here comes our project, code named: Oil Spill.
I’m pretty excited. Big smiles.