From Designer in the Car Industry to Handmade Bags

When I was a child, cars meant the world to me. Whenever I sat down behind the wheel I felt passion, in the lines, the materials, and most of all when it came alive. I could sense the engineers and designers who had poured something of themselves into it. I didn't have a word for it then. I just knew some cars had it and some didn't.

I started drawing cars at school. My papers were full of them and my mind was even fuller.

So I followed the dream. I studied Transportation Design in Pforzheim — one of the renowned courses at the time — and learned the craft. But design school taught me something else. It was about the sketch, not the product. It was about the expression of movement, the shape you wanted to capture, the theme. The best visualisation won a competition. Perfecting your presentation mattered more than solving anything real.

I never wanted to make car art. I don't even like drawing much. For me a drawing was only ever a way to communicate an idea — to get something out of my head and into someone else's. I specialised in interior design, because I favored the interaction of human and machine, and because it felt closer to making a product than to making pictures.

I began my career at the Volkswagen Design Center in Potsdam (the one that designed and engineered the XL1). I worked on many projects and learned an enormous amount from people far more talented and better adjusted to this situation than me.

My favourite project was a seat concept I designed and developed together with a fabulous team — a fully flexible, active, 3D-knitted, ultra-lightweight seat meant to work as a communication device between human and machine. After our first hand-built prototypes and a few patents, Volkswagen Group Innovation and Porsche picked it up, and I led it through four years of iterations.

It never blossomed. The work our team did — souls poured into matter — ended up in the bin. I learned the hard way that trying to change the supply chain too much and too fast, doesn't work on a tanker carrying 650,000 people (VW Group worldwide).

That's where my dream started to crumble for real. The industry changed, our studio changed, and the reasons we were making cars got vague. A bright future was replaced by fear, lost identity, and greed. I felt betrayed by a dream that promised something which just isn't reality anymore. For a while I told myself I was born too late for the golden age of car design. Now I know it was simpler than that: I just didn't want to play the game.

I started stepping away by founding an internal storytelling agency inside the group. I used my love of film and some experience of screenwriting to make project videos. I learned things from the ground up, was responsible for both vision and execution. At the same time it shielded my mind from the crumbling around me. But the most important experience was to not having a boss above me.

That crumbling manifested itself at the end of 2024, when they closed our studio and laid all of us off. I'd worked there more than ten years, but I felt fine. My subconscious had been living with this reality for years, and it came as relief. I count myself lucky actually — I don't know if I'd have had the guts to quit on my own.

That's what life can be: torn from the comfort of that Volkswagen mother tit and thrown out of her house. Until then I'd enjoyed a trouble-free slide — good parents, good friends, good education, a well-paid job. That's privilege. Thank you for that, by the way. Seriously.

So my subconscious handed me a finished mould, and I knew immediately what to do. I wanted to be my own boss. I wanted to put my two halves — product designer and storyteller — into one thing. And I needed a new challenge.

I started out running the entrepreneur-productivity-bro playbook: read everything about business, money, outsourcing — while trying to keep the toxic side of it in check. I went for bags, because for some reason I obsess over them, and obsession felt like a good place to begin.

I also wanted to learn to sew. I wanted to build my own prototypes, so I'd actually know what I was talking about when I sat down to negotiate with factories.

Then everything changed yet again. I found pure joy in making bags by hand. Those first prototypes — merely another way to communicate an idea — turned into finished pieces. I'm a perfectionist. I obsess over every detail: how the bag behaves in use, how it's built to last, and most importantly how it feels in the hand. I was so fuckin proud to hold something I'd always wanted and never found anywhere.

But the real game changer for the process is that I'm not only crafting them. Craft usually means only the making of the thing. But where does the pattern come from? Where do the ideas come from? Design is every choice that leads to a finished object — and normally, in the industry, those choices travel through a chain of people. A designer draws detailed instructions for a pattern maker; both then guide a factory toward what they pictured. At every handover, something is lost in translation.

I don't have that chain of people. I can draw a single line, understand exactly what it means, and walk straight to the sewing machine. Nothing leaks out between the idea and the object. That’s total control and I love it.

And I believe the person who carries the bag will feel that. The same way I felt it as a child behind the wheel: that someone was here, that someone cared, someone poured themselves into it. That's the whole point. That‘s what I want to do.

I'm a bag maker now. I make for those who want something personal — made by hand, in a small workshop, at home, in Potsdam.