November 1st, 2023, three years after Dunsel's was founded with a simple tote bag, we are back with the launch of the Pinhook Tote! We started with a tote bag because, quite frankly, it was easy to make, and I had only started learning to sew two months prior. This tote bag resembles more than a way to carry your life's essentials around. It is a means to save the planet, reduce your individual impact, express your funky style, live a minimalistic life with less stuff overall, and support a business trying to do good on planet Earth.
The Pinhook Tote combines three years of experience designing and producing goods up-cycled from marine textile waste. Years of listening to customer feedback, prototyping, building a supply chain, and learning how to run a sustainable cut-and-sew business. Check out the Pinhook tote on our website, available in 9 different colors.
Another massive piece of the puzzle that created the Pinhook tote was collaboration. Never before had I let others in to help design one of Dunsel's products. The creation of the Pinhook tote was a valuable lesson in the value of working with others to debate the design and functional aspects of the product. A big thank you to Daniel Summers, who is an industrial design student at DePaul University in Chicago and was a design intern this past summer with Dunsel's. We met for weeks to discuss what we were trying to achieve and look over the finest details, from thread color to closure systems and bag shapes. The most essential part of Dunsel's is our production team in Tallahassee, who put the rubber to the road when it came to working through our up-cycled fabric inventory and getting our first batch of bags cut and ready to be sewn. It is incredibly labor-intensive to use fabric scrap and fabric from the waste stream. Veronica Dalton, a master's student at Jim Moran College of Entrepreneurship in Apparel and Textiles, and Reece Chibnik, an undergrad in commercial Entrepreneurship at FSU. Reece and Veronica allow Dunsel's to stay open and produce outstanding products.