Women's Hardware: Bag Clasp

While most of my work for Tumi this summer was with their Men's department, the team worked very closely with the Women's department, sharing office space and collaborating on themes and styles. This being the case, I was given the opportunity to help out with some of the Women's designs as well, although it was mostly just for hardware designs so the gender difference didn't really play a large role here.

I was given three initial ideas in sketch form (Illustrator and free-hand) from Pam, an incredibly dedicated member of the Women's team, of which two illustrated a concept for a lock or clasp to put on the closure flap of a bag or backpack. The third is a logo plaque, which I will detail in another post. Below, within the red boxes are the two different clasp concepts.

My task was to render up versions of these ideas on SolidWorks so that we could send a 3D pdf along with the 2D sketches to the manufacturers. It might be a little difficult at first to notice the difference between the sketches on the upper left corner to the one on the lower right. The sketch on the lower right shows just the clasp and the hinge, without the thick casing you see around it on the upper left.

Here I will only show pictures of the design with the casing because if you wanted to instead make the simpler version, you would just forgo the casing (which is separate) and replace it maybe with a flat ring around the opening. Here are three images of the rendering I did for the clasp with the casing.

So as you can see from the two different angles of the images, the part with just the casing and the opening would be fastened to the top flap of any bag or backpack and the actual clasp piece that goes through the slot would attach to the main body of the bag and then fold over to lock. Next, I'll talk a little bit about the other hardware piece I did, the logo plaque.