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While Gandhi was working for Club Monaco, Mash, who had been working for Coach at the time, started to come up with the idea for Dagne Dover. Mash says customers would constantly complain about their handbag organizational problems and she saw an opportunity.

\"I saw that there was a huge opportunity for a new brand that was digitally native, that was well-priced, performance-oriented in terms of being an awesome aesthetic but also a ton of really organized thoughtful pockets,\" Mash said.

Both Mash and Gandhi each eventually found their way to The Wharton School, and it was there that they started to bring the idea of their handbag company to life. Mash searched the Parsons School of Design website to find a creative person to design the product.

She sent a cold email to Jessy Dover, who was designing footwear at the time but was most interested in designing handbags and accessories. In her senior year at Parsons, Dover had won the Coach Accessories Design Competition.

“It catapulted me into handbags and accessories, and I was like, ‘Wow, this is something I'm good at, I'm really passionate about it,’” Dover says.

\"PHOTO:
Dagne Dover
PHOTO: Jessy Dover, Co-Founder and Creative Director, Dagne Dover.
>

The two planned to meet. Dover, who would become the creative director, said that she and Mash “just hit it off,” and shortly after their meeting she quit her job to work on Dagne Dover full time. The company launched in 2013 and has been thriving ever since, something that Gandhi, in part, credits to their choice of funding.

“We've had situations where if we'd had venture capital money, we would have probably had to make the wrong decision for the long term of the brand and I can't guarantee that the business would be where it is today.”

Dover adds that having “patient capital” is also important to the design process as it allows them to “ take the time necessary to create every product.”

“We're not sitting in a room [saying] ‘okay we have 24 hours to come up with as many products as we can to launch next season.’ It's more, ‘okay let's sit back. What do we see people need? What do we need? How can we survey them and talk to them and figure out what things that they want?’ And then create a product around what their needs are.”

Hear more from the founders of Dagne Dover on ABC Radio’s “No Limits with Rebecca Jarvis” podcast.

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