Zipper Pulls

This project was one of my final ones during my internship and truly one I am very proud of because these zipper pulls were 100 percent designed and prepared by me. I was approached by my boss, Victor, with the problem that the zipper pulls currently on the market had issues with fraying and warping over time and that Tumi needed a new design to add to their accent kits, which allows customers to change the colors of some of the features on their bags such as monogram patches, luggage tags, and, yes, zipper pulls.

The old zipper pulls were basically just a thin strip of leather that you could knot onto the end of your zipper. The one I was asked to design would be a loop-through style, leaving only one "tail" to pull instead of the two that were left from the other style. 

First I drew up several different loop options on Illustrator:

Then I showed these six designs to Victor and he left his comments:

Unfortunately the photo got a little cut off but hopefully you can see that he liked the oval shape, the rounded square shape and the shape with a semicircular top, although he wanted to make the bottom curves a little more subtle. He also wanted to add an option that was a triangular shape with rounded corners.

So I fixed what I needed to and drew up a new one with the triangular design and then put those four onto a spec sheet to plan out the dimensions. This part was actually more fun than one might thing making a spec sheet should be because I had to use a caliper to measure the thickness of the leather in order to get the dimension of the opening in the center and then scale everything from there. 

I was struggling to get everything proportional at first so Victor taught me a fun little trick, which is using paper. He said that if you use real materials like paper and scissors to get a preliminary feel for what you're doing you can make real adjustments and then measure from that. So I cut out the shape I wanted in paper and then cut it down to the size I needed before taking the measurements. Here's a look at the spec sheet (notice my name next to the 'designed by' section!!):

After all the proportions looked good we sent this off to the manufacturers and a week or so later... voilà!

These are the first raw samples that came into the office. I say raw because they'll probably finish them off with edge painting or something to make them look more polished. Here are a few close ups:

It was a real accomplishment for me to have thought up, designed, and had manufactured my own product that's going to be sold to actual people. While I've made plenty of things, I will always consider this to be my real "first". Here's to many more to come!