They met at a tea shop. Before the down economy forced a lot of small businesses to close, Janam Tea on Grove Street in Jersey City was a popular gathering place for a certain kind of creative clientele.
Liz Long was a tea server there and Holly Tienken was a frequent customer. It was on a bench in front of the shop that they hatched their plan.
They were going to create Bag the Habit, an online store for reusable bags.
Unlike a lot of small businesses, after five years they’re still going strong.
Long, 27, recalled last week, “I was serving tea behind the counter, and Holly came in every day. She had a thing for hot beverages, and I would make her tea.”
“We like to think about mood. Our goal is to be an everyday accessory.” – Holly Tienken
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What they wanted to do
“I had this idea in my head,” Long said. “I had become very passionate about reusable bags, and I wanted to create a brand, an identity.”
Though she said the concept had “become a huge thing,” she acknowledged that more people need to be enlightened about the environmental benefits of banishing the ubiquitous and disposable plastic bag.
A National Geographic article cited a statistic that 500 billion to a trillion plastic bags are consumed each year worldwide. While some are reused, many are discarded, and it can take hundreds of years for them to decompose, releasing toxins into the soil and waterways.
“Look outside the window,” Long said. “Most people are not carrying reusable bags even though they’ve dramatically increased and continue to do so.”
The plastic bag menace is deep seated. “A lot of people think about plastic bags as litter blowing around and ending up in landfill,” Long said. “But that’s just the most visible problem. Our focus is on the life cycle which starts with the drilling of oil to make plastic [for the bags].”
Bag the Habit was launched in 2007.
“We started with very little,” Long said. “We started the entire business with a loan of $50,000.”
How they make a bag
Long, who studied communications in college, said she went “straight from the tea shop to doing this.” Tienken, a graphic designer, was the perfect partner.
“We start out creating a design,” Long said. “Holly will come up with something and create the structure or shape, and I will go out and look for materials.”
Those materials include yarn, fabric, zippers, and padded handles, and the women are very particular.
“One hundred percent of our fabric is eco textiles,” Long said. “We don’t just purchase off a line or rack. We have 100 percent recycled yarn.”
Twenty percent of their products are manufactured in Minnesota and the rest in China.
How does a communications major and tea server know all this stuff? “Asking a lot of questions,” Long said. “It’s a learning process.”
And the design process? “Holly creates all the textile prints,” Long said. “She has a long background in graphic design. I can’t imagine working with anyone else.”
The designer
Tienken, 35, in fact has the perfect background for a lady in the bag business. After graduating from college with a degree in communications design, she worked as a designer for Bloomberg L.P. for seven years, at the same time completing an MFA at the School of Visual Arts with a focus on the designer as entrepreneur.
She also comes from a family of small business owners. Her father, a mechanic, owned a gas station, and her mother owned a deli in Sussex County, N.J.
How does she account for the success of Bag the Habit?
“The online business is scalable,” she said. “We reach many demographics, not just direct to consumers but we also make custom bags for retail clients.”
She cited Lexus, Guess International, and Pangea Organics. “We work with them to design custom colors and sizes,” she said. “I never thought I would be an industrial designer.”
Indeed, their first bag was stapled and glued together. “We let people know that we don’t know how to sew,” she said.
That first bag turned out to be the ideal prototype. “It was the perfect size,” Tienken said. “The pattern was stylish. It wasn’t too cumbersome but it could hold a lot without looking like a duffle bag. It was stylish but functional.”
Who’s buying them
When it comes to customers, “We like to keep everybody in mind,” Tienken said. “We like to think about mood. Our goal is to be an everyday accessory with a flexible palette. We try to have something that will complement a lot of different people.”
They have everything from luxury totes to produce bags in solids and prints with zippered pouches ranging in price from $7 to $42 for single bags.
Tienken said that women often go for the luxe tote but the produce bags are more gender neutral. “We’re working on a men’s line,” she said. “It’s more masculine with more structure. But a lot of our male friends carry our bags around.”
Helping charity
The company also teamed up with Donna Karan on a project known as Urban Zen’s Hope Help & Relief Haiti to supply fully stocked tote bags to Haiti.
“We gathered things to send — shoes, condoms, flashlights, things that would protect them in an immediate way,” Long said.
It was thrilling to get the call from Donna Karan. “They said they loved our bags,” Long said. “Aside from the great partnership it was fun to think about the bags going out into the world.”
Though it’s an ongoing partnership they are no longer doing the one-for-one sale, with one bag going to Haiti for every bag sold. But they would like to do more charitable projects. “Holly joked that if we could give things away all day, we might. It’s the favorite part of what we do.”
The partnership
“Liz and I believe in each other and are very trusting of each other,” Tienken said. “We’re also open people and our discussions are very honest. If we don’t agree we always come to a compromise.”
“In any relationship,” she went on, “business or personal, you have to have respect for one another.”
The two have an office atop Tia’s on Grove Street and employ two other women to help with such things as shipping and accounting.
“We’re right across from City Hall,” Long said. “We’re working with the mayor’s office and Councilman Fulop on plastic reduction strategies.”
One area they might branch out into is education.
“We’re developing school programs to change the mindset around disposability,” Long said.
“Lecturing can only go so far,” Tienken said. “We don’t use scare tactics.”
Instead, they “want to make an emotional impact,” Tienken said. “We don’t believe people make change out of fear but out of want and love.”
Visit www.bagthehabit.com.
Kate Rounds can be reached at krounds@hudsonreporter.com..