The history of Radley bags according to Shanev :)

Brrrrr it's cold here today. We had the first touch of snow yesterday and it looks like the snow that already fell has frozen up.

Today was not a day to go outside so I've spent it online browsing at different websites.

As you know I'm a massive fan of Radley bags and so I decided to look into the history of the company and see how they all started and this is what I found.

Radley are a British company that was started in the 1990's. It was the brainchild of an Australian woman (so maybe not a 100% British company after all) called Rachel Harder. Rachel was an architect by trade and moved to London to start a new life. She got a little bored with the work and looked at other ways of making a living.

She hit upon the idea of making handbags and this is where Radley bags started from.

She opened up a market stall in London and started selling her handbags from there.

The orders started to flood in and she was soon struggling to keep up.

She's never looked back and although she's no longer at the head of the company she can be proud of the fact that she is credited with starting the whole Radley handbags phenomenon.

I love stories like this as it proves that someone with nothing can become someone with something. One woman's vision and love of design led her to create the best selling handbag brand in the UK.....how inspiring !!

When I was reading up on the history of Radley I did get a little confused as there was also mention of a woman called Ruth Pinnock. It might be that Ruth became the head designer at Radley but that's something I'd like to find out about later. If anyone knows more about Ruth's role in Radley then please let me know.

What I do know is that Ruth Pinnock left Radley to start her own handbag company called Ciccia but instead of using dogs as the logo she uses cats....neat eh ?