"Her designs injected refreshing originality into the accessory industry which resonated deeply with women. Later, other fashion giants caught on, including Macy's and Bloomingdale's, and her company ultimately sold to Coach (now Tapestry) in a $2.4 billion deal.īloomingdale's CEO reminisced on Spade's debut at the store: "Bloomingdale's has a long history and friendship with Kate Spade extending back to the early days of the brand," Spring said. Spade's designs not only caught the eye of American women just as she was about to give up the company, Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus discovered Spade's bags, quadrupling her business and taking her platform to large-scale retail. Spade brought the handbag back into focus after the trend dipped in the '50s she was the first to bring color and function to American accessories, making even the diaper bags fashionable to carry, Clark said. Spade's brand became known as the symbol of the quintessential American woman she re-vamped what most women simply glanced over, according to Parsons Fashion Studies Professor Hazel Clark.
Besides having a strong creative vision, Kate Spade understood the business of fashion." "She was a hands-on designer who understood the nuances of what was involved in actually making bags-how the selection of fabrications, the balance of the designs, the structure and engineering of the bags affected their ultimate quality and appearance. "As a woman entrepreneur, in an industry that still has glass ceilings for women in its leadership positions, she was one of its pioneers," Fashion Institute of Technology Professor Eileen Karp said. She didn't make profit for the first three years, and when the Barneys and Fred Segal retail chains found her at a trade show, the first batch of bags were exported from crammed cardboard boxes in the Spades' Tribeca loft. She scoured Yellow Pages and became a de facto apprentice to a homespun pattern maker, using supplies of clipped sheets of paper and fabric samples to practice designs. But Spade wasn't always a big player in the handbag industry-she began designing handbags after quitting a magazine publication and finding herself scrambling for income.
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