Slim Vin

Wow. Love these.

Big bags are a necessity in my business. As a journalist, I'm constantly lugging around a mishmash of computer cords, recording devices, notebooks and miscellany.... Pens, tape, thumb drives, chapsticks, you name it.

All this makes the purses and totes from the Brooklyn-based company Skinny Vinny seem like a fashionable investment. Founder Vincent Lai is a 2006 graduate of Carnegie Mellon. He spent time at a design consultancy in Soho before launching his own line.

"I wanted to combine my product design education with the soft goods and pattern-making knowledge I gained growing up in a garment factory," he said.

Lai, who named the company after a teasing nickname, makes the product samples himself. They are then reproduced at a small factory in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Hooray for handbags!

Meow!

Asics teams up with Sanrio’s Hello Kitty to create one heck of a pair of sneakers. This info comes via Highsnobette, which reports these shoes will be available starting Nov. 1.

(Sure, I'm grown, but I admit I was a wee bit enamored with the Hello Kitty store while at the Taipei airport earlier this year. So many memories of childhood!)

This is also a good excuse to post the *incredibly* artful stop-motion origami video about Asics. I was searching for a how-to on origami flowers a while back and this came up. Now, it's definitely one of my Vimeo favorites.

Origami In the Pursuit of Perfection from MABONA ORIGAMI on Vimeo.