The Chalo Project: From a Hard Shell Carry-On to a Full Range
Threadworks
Chalo & Co. build bags, pouches and gifts around illustrated city artwork. Seattle skylines with an octopus in them, Mt Rainier, the northern lights over Alaska. Most brands working that territory are souvenir businesses. Chalo is not, and that is the fact the rest of this project hangs on.
Their DNA is colourful and playful, and at the same time well made and built to last. A Chalo bag gets bought because of where somebody was, and then it stays in use for years. That is not how souvenirs usually behave.
We have been working with Chalo for more than three years. The question at the start was how to widen the range without dropping either half of that, the joy or the durability. We began at the demanding end and worked outwards.
Starting with the travel pieces
The first group was a hard shell carry-on, a travel duffel, and a half size carry-on, the one sized to go under the seat.
Starting an expansion with hard case luggage is an unusual choice, because it is the least forgiving thing a soft goods brand can take on.
What changes going from a printed tote to a hard shell is not the thinking. It is the industrial reality underneath. A different factory, since the companies that mould and assemble hard cases are not the companies that sew bags. Different tooling, with the cost and the wait that comes with it. A different prototyping route, because you cannot cut and sew your way to a first look at a moulded shell.
The design process transfers intact. Brief, references, sketches, tech pack, sample ladder, pre-production approval. The steps are the same ones we would run for a backpack. What changes is the money and the calendar. Longer lead times, heavier costs, and much less room to change your mind late.
Those are the things that catch a brand out when they turn up halfway through a project. That is not what happened here, largely because they were mapped before the first sketch. Knowing where the expensive decisions sit is a good part of what a studio is for.
Reading the DNA before extending it
The obvious move for a print-led brand is to put the print on more things. That tends to flatten a range, because the artwork ends up doing all the work and the products underneath it become interchangeable.
The brief from Chalo was more interesting than that. Keep the DNA, the prints, but use them differently.
So the first task was separating what the DNA actually is from how it had been expressed so far. The illustration is the signature, the way a grille and a headlight line let you recognise a car before you read the badge. But the durability is DNA too, and so is the playfulness, which exists independently of any particular print.
What the range became
Working out from the travel pieces, we expanded the classics, with more complex versions of the tote, the crossbody and the lunch box. Then came groups that took the brand somewhere new:
A quilted puff collection, softer and more fashion-led. Interchangeable straps, developed as their own category for a strap shop, so the strap becomes a purchase rather than a component. Summery silhouettes in raffia. A kids collection, simpler to build but properly practical rather than a shrunken adult bag. A toiletry bag sized to be carried around on its own, closer to a men’s pouch than a wash bag. A youthful group in ripstop.
Each group answers a different question about the brand. Who carries it, when, how often, and at what price.
Three years, eight groups, and the process underneath
The harder part of this was not drawing bags. It was building a design and production process that could carry the work as it became more complex.
Eight new groups, three to five silhouettes in each, and most of them introducing fabrics, hardware or trims the brand had not worked with before. That is a lot to hold at once, and over a three year collaboration the risk is not that a single product goes wrong. It is losing the thread across all of them.
So a real part of the engagement was the way the work moves. How a brief gets written before sketching starts. How comments are consolidated into one set per sample round. How information reaches the supplier in a form they can act on. What to expect back at each stage.
Chalo already had a working relationship with their supplier. What we added was structure around it, so that the fifth group did not cost more effort than the first.
None of that shows up in a product photo, and it is usually what decides whether a range this size reaches production at all.
If you are a print-led brand thinking about widening out
Name your DNA properly before you extend it, and be honest about how much of it is the graphic and how much is everything else. If the artwork is doing all the work, a wider range will show that up quickly.
Consider taking your signature off the outside. Moving the print inside gave Chalo products that travel further, and it pushed the brand elements underneath to get stronger.
And build the process before you multiply the products. Most expansions do not stall for lack of ideas. They stall because there is no structure to develop that many ideas properly.
If you are somewhere in that, the structuring is the part we enjoy most, and we shape the engagement around what each brand actually needs.
Need bags?
Drop us a message
