Renowned upcycled bag brand LPOL moves its design to west Kent and its production to Margate

Driving to the coast of Kent to check on the production of the new Dinky Zero Waste Handbag is a hell of a lot nicer than heading back to the ‘Belly of the Beast’.

Husband-and-wife team Katy and John Maskell Bell left London for the borders of Kent to find a new home for their brand. Renowned for using waste materials and turning them into high-end products, LPOL (@lostpropertyldn) relocated to a studio just outside Tunbridge Wells. Having had collections sold in iconic retailers like Liberty in London and Bloomingdale’s in New York, LPOL has moved much of its production to Margate and into the hands of their brilliant maker, Hannah Cope.

Creative director Katy and brand director John met in 2004 while studying at Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design, where the passion for textiles began.
“For as long as I’ve known Katy , she’s always had this drive to use pre-existing materials,” says John. “Anything that is lying around, that is of good quality, is deserving of giving a second or even a third life. ll of her college work was about upcycling, so in a way it’s in her DNA. You know, 13 years ago, it felt a little bit out there to be doing that sort of stuff, but that’s what obviously got us noticed. And now it’s becoming much more prevalent.”

“I was meeting more factories, more warehouses, that had all this leather sitting there”

— Katy Maskell Bell

The launch of the Dinky Zero Waste Handbag, which will be stocked at Margate’s Turner Contemporary, utilises surplus, offcut and end-of-line dead stock leathers by incorporating multiple colour panels. They’ve been launched alongside a collaboration with artist Seraphina Neville - a limited collection of 12 framed original artworks made entirely from offcut and surplus leather and recycled paper.

The journey towards zero-waste products started back in 2009, when the company was founded as Lost Property of London.

“I took my portfolio of ideas to Liberty, which had an open day,” explains Katy. “I’d seen there was a gap in the market within an eco-conscious alternative to the handbag world and totes, which is what I was focusing on at the beginning.

“I went along with a shopper tote bag that I had made from coffee-bean sack material as the shell and then I had used vintage Liberty print for the inside. It was actually reversible. They loved that… and ordered 250 bags. That was the birth of the brand.”

The first Made to Last Collection set the precedent of what the brand would become, remaining stocked in Liberty for four years. New products included the use of items like salvaged boat sails for the St. Ives Collection, which included larger luggage and waterproof bags.

“I knew I wanted to bring leather into it,” says Katy. “That was another angle of sustainability that made complete sense. It also broadened our horizons in terms of materials and where we could take the brand.”

Leaving its retail space in Kings Cross during Covid, LPOL has its own online store and plans to work both as a retailer and wholesaler to other stores, starting in Margate. Once the team learned that Hannah Cope, who they’d worked with in the past, had moved to the coast, it made sense to begin a production hub in the county, too.

“It made sense to go straight away,” says Katy. “We had a chat and then almost picked up where we left off.”

John continues: “When Katy took the idea of the Dinky Collection, Hannah immediately got it. She’s a really good creative partner we can look to, as brand owners and designers to say ‘We’ve got this idea’. She’ll help us develop and fine-tune and problem-solve.

“It was a serendipitous moment, with us moving from London and Hannah reaching out to us saying she’s based in Margate now. Because one of the founding principles of the brand is to make sure that we manufacture and produce everything as locally as we possibly can. So we moved away from London and, even though that’s technically still quite local, we really loved this idea that we would get the majority of our collections made on the Kent coast.”

Katy says the Dinky Collection was a case of asking ‘What’s next?’ as a business.

“More and more, I think, customers are asking more questions about the provenance of things. And it made sense to just keep going down that road, keep challenging ourselves to only use what is in existence already. And from that came this really fun, probably most joyful, collection yet.”

The Dinkys are made from repurposed leather, as Katy explains: “In the early days, it was about only sourcing vegetable-tanned leather, which is still true.

“So it was about trying to be the most eco-aware we could with the leather that was being used and, I might add, it’s a by-product. That meat was being used for the meat industry, and then to me, because the skin is a by-product and a waste material.

“But then I was meeting more factories, more warehouses, that had all this leather sitting there. So we honed it a bit more to say ‘Well, hang on, what are you doing with that leather? Can I buy that off you if it’s just sitting there?’. We still use both. So it’s vegetable-tanned leather if we’re making something new. But the zero-waste collection, it’s all about using from other companies and also using our own leftovers from core collections. Using absolutely everything.”

By its very nature, the Dinky Collection is limited-edition, with about 80 bags across five colourways, but as the leftover materials change, that does mean more colourways are likely at later dates.

The Turner Contemporary will stock the Dinkys from the end of October and LPOL is hopeful of growing the presence it has with the gallery and Margate as a whole.

“That’s going to be really exciting because we can tell people to come and see them in the flesh, to go to this wonderful place,” says John. “We’re hoping we can develop that relationship with Turner Contemporary, where we might be able to do some workshops, pop-up in there, talk to customers, maybe even do some personalisation.”