Luxury brand Duanmu combines natural materials with Chinese aesthetics to create exquisite handbags

Gu Mingxi, 26, from Beijing, works in finance. She works long hours and her job is stressful, so she rewards herself by spending almost half her annual salary on handbags from international luxury brands. Last week, she bought a wooden clutch from a local brand, which cost her as much as a Gucci leather handbag.

Duanmu, the Beijing-based brand is named after a Chinese compound surname listed in the Song Dynasty (960-1279) classic text, Hundred Family Surnames.

Its handbag was selected to be an alternative national gift for the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in 2017. In the same year, one of its blue ash burr veneer handbag with an inlaid floral motif was sold for 45,000 yuan ($6,698) through Christie's auction house in Shanghai.

Qi Tian, the founder of the brand, also suggests people understand the name of the brand as "decorous wood", based on the literal meaning of these two Chinese characters.

Not surprisingly, wood in various kinds and shapes is the main material of most of the company's products.

"Wood has strong vitality, it has better resistance to the erosion of time than leather and fabric", says Qi, explaining his preference for the natural material, adding "it grows warm, glossy and smooth to the touch through frequent use."

Born in 1983 in Beijing, from an early age Qi was interested in painting and handwork. As a result, he later chose to study architecture at Tsinghua University and the University of Pennsylvania, with the major providing a combination of both of these two hobbies.

Collection, his third hobby, led him to his current career path. He started to buy and sell ancient Chinese coins at college, and he discovered that there were not many nice packing options for valuable objects.

"People packed museum-quality pieces, worth tens of millions of yuan, into whatever was available, such as a shoebox or a moon cake box," recalls Qi.

In 2011, Qi established Duanmu and started to design and produce storage boxes for both collectors just like him and for organizations like Christie's auction house.

"See the broad annual ring and the light color, this tree enjoyed a year of good rainfall and exposure to the sun; while this kind of grain is caused by a thunderbolt," Qi pontificates as he paces through the warehouse, speculating on the life of the freshly-cut trees by reading their patterns like an expert.

It's a talent that Qi developed out of necessity.

In the beginning, he positioned himself as just a designer, but he soon realized that no foundry or factory could deliver his idea perfectly.

Through trial and error, self-study and learning from experts, he became a skillful carpenter.

"Actually, I wasn't eager to position our products as luxury goods-I was just immersed in the pursuit of quality," says Qi.

By 2015, he had sold over 1,000 pieces, made for more than 10 types of collection, including jade, bronzeware, calligraphy, paintings, dark red enameled pottery and Buddha statues.

It was around then that a thought struck him.

"Many collectors keep my creation in a dark drawer and show nobody else, I felt that they have been used like one-off consumer goods," says Qi.

"I wanted our experience and design to be seen, touched and used by many more people than just the collector community that tends to be a relatively closed circle."

He decided to focus his efforts on creating a mass-market product-a handbag.

To maintain the pureness of the wood and the integrity of his creation, Qi is never afraid to go the extra mile. To make the pattern on all of his products, he refuses to settle for printing or painting, which consume much less time and money. From the eye of a horse to the hairs of a deer or a rabbit, he insists on building up each inch of the pattern with improved, Tang-Dynasty-style wood inlaying techniques, which have an accuracy to the nearest 0.1 mm.

"That's the only way to avoid spoiling the material," says Qi, "It allows the wood fibers to breathe, and maintains the wood's unique luster."

It takes 15 pieces of wood to make a flower with six petals-each as big as a thumbnail. The finished floral bag consists of 758 pieces of inlaid wood, and it has been through 22 technological processes, with 194 sub-processes.

Luckily, the effort he puts into his creations is appreciated. Last month, the brand won the China Design Power 100 Award in the category of Traditional Craft Design. The award is sponsored by the organizing committee of the China Art Power List and co-sponsored by Chinese newspaper, Reference News, and the Forbidden City Gallery-a training and educational institution.

Qi is not only a craftsman who has benefited from the old techniques, he's also a designer inspired by the traditional culture of the earlier Tang (618-907) and Song dynasties.

Taking the floral handbag as an example, the pattern inlaid originates from a lute cherished by the Royal Family of Japan, which was the gift from the Chinese Tang Dynasty.

As well as reproducing the historical, he also introduces modern elements to his design.

For instance, a product line launched last year followed the trend for round-shaped bags. Named Chasing Deer, the pattern on the series of shoulder bags and handbags was inspired by images of the ancients hunting with archery on horseback, with the figures and landscape presented in a cartoon style.

Silk brocade used to be the second core element of the brand, the fixed lining material of all bags and also its jewelry boxes. At one point, it was even included in the brand's name as "Liangjin", understood as "quality silk brocade". However, Qi is now extending the selection of materials the brand offers.

"I found that brocade is not an international material-when we held exhibitions in Europe, the attendees showed little enthusiasm for Song or Tang brocade. When we tried to explain that brocade was among the first group of goods that traveled to Europe on the ancient Silk Road, they merely nodded their heads."

Qi also complains that for traditional materials like brocade, the variety of supply is very limited, and the overall production quality is poor. As a result, he was forced to go to Japan to find well-made brocade, where the fabrics-which originally emerged from China's Tang Dynasty-were better persevered.

From the last quarter of 2018, Qi started using leather, as there are many kinds of leather, in a lot of colors, and which use various tanning techniques.

He says, "In order to grow the brand's customer base and make it acceptable to a more diversified group, we never stopped exploring and experimenting with fresh materials and fresh processes. Leather has been widely used among luxury goods, so accepting leather should give our brand a fairer chance when competing with incumbent luxury brands on the global stage.

"The brand will carry with it the original spirit and some original features, but it will also absorb more and more concepts that help us build elegance and beauty," says Qi.