Diana’s Dreams: Designing past the 9-5pm

Now, what does it really take to juggle two pre-pubescent teenagers and maintain a full-time job? As a mom of two active, sporty, and creative kids, Diana’s life almost ten years ago followed a pretty consistent pattern. Drive the kids to school. Pick them up. Drive them to soccer practice. In general, free time would really only come in the form of short fleeting moments, such as in the peace and quiet when the kids headed to school. It was almost enough to find solitude.

Until the phone rings.

While her day-to-day was constantly interrupted, none of this stopped a passionate and hardworking mother like Diana. Coming from a Kaufmannsfamilie (a German merchant family), with a previous job as a retailer and designer, Diana started her company, Heart Entry, in search of the flexibility she needed to both work, and be a mother. Although her company today focuses primarily on jewelry, this story tracks the production of one of her earliest products: a Dirndltasche.

In Munich, the celebration of Oktoberfest dates back to the 1800s and the marriage of King Louis I to Princess Therese von Sachsen-Hildburghausen. Since then, this practice has evolved into a three-week-long festival located at Theresienwiese that consists of a lot of drinking (beer mostly), dancing, and rides.[1] It was at this festival that Diana reflected on how monotone everyone’s bags were. She decided she wanted to design her own.

With a constant eye on the lookout for opportunity, Diana started brainstorming how to skillfully blend tradition and design into a trendier and more unique handbag for the female Dirndl (the classical attire). Growing up with the know-how of outsourced supply chains, her approach led her to contact and to travel to small craftsmen across Italy and Germany. Of course, this approach requires significant time and money investment to test various designs. Diana would find herself taking long drives to Italy and spending long hours on the phone with suppliers. She would also attend several fairs such as the CPD in Düsseldorf, Supreme in Munich and Tracht & Country Fairs in Salzburg to market the bags and sell to third-party retailers. Eventually, she ended up working with a small producer in Bergamo, Italy, and engaged traditional curtain suppliers for German castles to embroider the lace for the bags. While this approach relied on outsourcing for its production, the producers and materials remained local.

Coming back to our theme of Home as Factory, the fact that most of the production was outsourced to local producers meant that that the only space in the house that was in fact used was the garage. A curious place right? In Garage, Erlanger and Ortega Govela remark how the garage operates as "a threshold between the heteronormative space of reproduction and the productive spaces of the city, a semi-domestic chamber away from the emotional pressures of the private familial realm and the social demands of professionalism.”[2] Perhaps as a result of its somewhat flexible use (you just need to park outside and you have a deprogrammed room!), Diana was able to convert her garage into a storage space. Over time, hundreds of bags would be delivered to her home in Munich, Germany before they were sold to third-party retailers, friends and family. The home became a pitstop in the production chain of the Dirndltasche, if just as a quick deposit spot before moving on.  

So, why did Diana let the production chain of Dirndltaschen come to an end, and move on from bags to jewelry you might ask? In our interview in January she mentioned, “I remember one morning I unexpectedly got a large shipment of bags from Italy and they arrived straight to my house. But it was so many, they just didn't fit anywhere anymore! What I love about jewelry is that it is smaller, requires less storage, and I don’t have to worry about moving my car anymore.”[3]

Image of some of her current products from www.heartentry.com

Sources

Written Sources:

[1] Redaktion, oktoberfest.de. “The History of Oktoberfest.” The History of Oktoberfest • Oktoberfest.de - The Official Website for the Oktoberfest in Munich, Oktoberfest.de - Die Offizielle Website Zur Wiesn, 31 Jan. 2021, www.oktoberfest.de/en/magazine/tradition/the-history-of-oktoberfest.

[2] Erlanger, Olivia, and Luis Ortega Govela. Garage. The MIT Press, 2018. p.3.

[3] Interview with Diana, January 2021.

Image Sources:

[1] Instagram Post @heartentry

[2] Personal visual-network analysis of production chain

[3] Photograph from www.heartentry.com