Portland Made: Cipriano Design

Monday, October 19, 2015

Portland Made Contributing Writer Peggy Acott, GoLocalPDX Contributor

Photo credit: Aaron Lee

It was November 2014, in the midst of the holiday season rush, and the unthinkable happened: A broken water pipe flooded Nicole Cipriano’s studio workspace, grinding her production of leather bags to a sudden halt and destroying thousands of dollars’ worth of inventory and supplies. Cardboard boxes full of custom-dyed leather that were sitting on the floor were ruined.

At that point, Cipriano wondered if she should just pack it in and close her business. So she dusted off her resume, applied for a few jobs. But it didn’t take long for her to decide that her heart still lay in design and sewing and printmaking, so she became determined to get the business back on its feet.

“It forced me to regroup,” Cipriano says. “I took it as an opportunity to invent myself again.” She moved her workspace into her home, which necessitated that she scaled back her production. In the gap following the flood, she lost over half her retail clients because she had no inventory to sell them – in fact, she couldn’t do any wholesale business for the next several months. “I felt like I was starting over,” she says.

A Portland native, Cipriano had been active in the Alberta Street craft scene for several years, mostly doing printmaking. At one point she started doing block prints on leather bracelets, and people started asking her for bags. Cipriano didn’t know how to sew leather, but decided to learn, intrigued by the idea of making what she saw as “functional art,” and possibly be able to move away from the craft fair circuit into a realm of more specialized and custom fine leather goods.

Photo credit: Aaron Lee

The enforced hiatus from the flood enabled Cipriano to refocus and discern what was and wasn’t important. “Tragedy creates a growth you can’t put into words,” as she explains it. She took the time to try some new things, revisit and revive some of her long-standing creative passions, and she feels like the result of this time is a new line that is “a breakthrough - the best-crafted ever.”

She has sourced a new supplier of leather on the west coast, has a hardware supplier in the Midwest. Trying to obtain materials as close to home as possible, she is growing the business again slowly and deliberately. For now, she delights in seeing all her stations of production – cutting, gluing, stitching, riveting, printing – laid out with bags in the works. “I am meticulous with my work. Every stitch, everything on each product, is made by me.”

“I am so lucky to be a creative person in Portland,” says Cipriano, citing the supportive retailers she has encountered over the years, the encouragement, guidance and invaluable resources that she has found from the free business development programs at PCC and PSU, from collaborative businesses like Spooltown. “It’s so important to have those relationships,” she says.

And she’s glad she stayed with it. “When someone looks inside a bag and sees the hand-printed lining and says ‘oh my god, I didn’t know it would look like this on the inside!’ or to walk down the street and see someone carrying one of my bags – it’s the best, so satisfying.”

For more stories about Portland Makers visit portlandmade.com

Portland Made is a digital storytelling platform and advocacy center for Portland's Maker Movement. We do 2 features a month on Portland Makers; connect makers with more local, national and international markets; connect makers with local professional and manufacturing resources; advocate for makers with politicians at all levels of government; work with PSU on an annual survey that captures the economic power of the Maker Movement; help makers find real estate; and promote Portland makers with local and national media.

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