Freja Factory Tour | Founder Series

Happy sustainability month <3 For this month’s founder series, I wanted to focus on what sustainability means to us. Between our materials sourcing, manufacturing ethos, and brand mission, we have always tried our best to approach every business decision upholding our core principles of intention and transparency. 

For this week's installment, I wanted to share a tour of our factory based in Guangzhou, China. We’re working on some fun updates and wrapping up batch 28 which includes some of our newer bags launching this summer, so I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to stop by. I visited our factory team yesterday and am currently writing this on the plane back to NYC.  

THE TEAM

Our founder, Jenny, with our core factory management team! Meet Yu, Phoebe, Zhong (the owner), and Florina. Florina is the one who greeted me 4 years ago when my dad and I did our factory tour :) She’s my main point of contact and probably the person I communicate with the most on a daily basis, even more that family and friends. She’s a mother of three and the most hardworking, organized person I know—truly Wonderwoman! I’m so lucky to have had her on our team since the beginning.

We now have a 20-person factory that is dedicated to crafting only Freja bags. 

THE PROCESS

A few steps of the 35~ step bag manufacturing process. Here you see the Caroline Bag and the Mini Chrystie (the magnets are in our new color, sage) being made. 

THE VISIT

For this trip my main priorities included:

1. Inspecting our new custom packaging (!!) that we’re aiming to launch by summer. It’s been a goal of mine since day one to pack and ship each Freja bag in its own gift box, but we haven’t had the budget to do that until now. 

2. Setting up a hub for fufilling international orders. Currently we pack and ship everything out of our warehouse near Milwaukee, WI, but it’s cost ineffective and quite slow for our growing international base. It’s a bandaid solution until we can find something better, and with our new packaging and Hong Kong base we’ll be able to better serve our international customers.

3. Visiting and saying thank you to everyone who works so hard on our products and our brand :) They are the foundation of the brand and I like to visit at least twice a year to just say hi and thank you. I also wanted to get some content this trip so I could share more behind-the-scenes with you.

I hope you enjoyed this peek into where it all starts!

PS - if you have any specific topics you'd like me to cover, reply to this email <3