Dec. 12th, Palo Alto, California 29.10.09

If you will be in Palo Alto around the middle of December, please make sure to check us out at the “Winter on the Runway” fashion show produced by Aspiring Couture. Karl Ivan is proud to be a part of this upcoming event.

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The making of Tingo 07.10.09

Tingo, one of our largest bags, was inspired by the need to carry a large volume of objects but have alternative options in how to carry the bag. I wanted this bag to have a lot of complementary metal to the abundance of leather as there is close to 20 square feet of cow leather used in the construction of Tingo!
Like all of our products, Tingo started with a sketch. I prefer to hand draw a concept first and then refine it in Adobe Illustrator. For products that require a little bit more depth, I’ll export the paths into Photoshop and add some shading to give it a more three dimensional feel.

Following conceptualizing, I made a sample of the bag in Polyurethane (PU), which is essentially fake leather, to test the 3D form. Following a series of marks on the bag itself, an initial leather sample was made with stock metal pieces. We initially sourced a Brazilian cow leather that be seen below. Although the leather was of good quality, we found it be a bit dull, stiff and heavy.





Again, some tweaks were made to the first sample, leather logo stamp and custom logo stamped metal pieces were put onto a lighter Italian cow leather with higher. The result was exactly what we were looking for and the refined Tingo was born.

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In the beginning… 07.09.08

We’re often asked how Karl Ivan began. Well here’s the story…
A Swedish native, Alex Ekberg, and Canadian native, Ryan Brady, are the two founders of Karl Ivan. Alex and Ryan met in Hong Kong as exchange students, both not quite sure what to expect of Asia. Captivated by the energy and hustle and bustle of it all, it was not long before they set-off to explore more of this foreign land. First stop: Thailand.
The trip to South-East Asia was incredible. The group which consisted of a variety of wide-eyed foreigners arrived in Bangkok and then traveled to the exotic beach of Sihanoukville, Cambodia via a variety of painstaking transportation methods including a 12 hour school bus ride on unpaved dirt roads and being burnt to a crisp on the top of a 5 hour jet-boat down the Mekong River.
Ryan and Alex continued to travel to Thailand every year thereafter as part of an annual ritual. It was in the airport lobby of Bangkok a couple of years later, waiting for a delayed flight and watching cargo containers being loaded, that the two brainstormed the concept of Karl Ivan.

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