If you buy a duffel bag from Hamilton Perkins, you’ll be fashionable.
You’ll also be recycling almost 18 plastic bottles from Haiti.
Perkins, 31, is a Norfolk-based entrepreneur with a mission. As the founder of the Hamilton Perkins Collection, a line of bags made from recycled bottles, he is targeting customers on the go who might study in one part of the world and work in another.
“We kind of talk to global citizen,” he said in a recent interview.
Becoming an Entrepreneur
Perkins, a 2014 graduate of the Raymond A. Mason School of Business at the College of William & Mary, got his start in sales at a young age. He sold candy. He sold sneakers on e-Bay. He worked in retail, including a Sunglass Hut in Virginia Beach.
After graduating from Old Dominion University in 2008 and working for about a year as an independent consultant in Washington, D.C., he gravitated back to Norfolk and into commercial banking at Bank of America. But retail wasn’t out of the picture for long.
Perkins started a leather-goods business in 2012, selling handmade pieces, including custom briefcases. In 2013, he enrolled in the Mason School’s executive MBA program. His classmates became his customers.
“He was really very good at networking,” said Lawrence Ring, a marketing professor and retail-strategy expert who taught Perkins in two classes. “It was just a hard market to break into.”
Tapping Recyclables
In 2015, Perkins pivoted to what he saw an an underserved market: recycled plastic bottles. To the extent the market is served, it’s with products that come off a factory line, he said.
That gave him an opening for a line of environmentally sensitive bags.
Perkins reached out to Thread International, a Pittsburgh-based fabric maker that links manufacturers to responsible textiles, while fighting poverty and recycling plastic, according to its 2016 Impact Report. Thread aligns with independent designers and brands such as Timberland, according to Kelsey Halling, director of impact and sales.
At the center of the partnership is a textile.
Through a multistep process, Thread transforms plastic bottles, primarily collected in Haiti, Halling said. The bottles are washed, ground and melted into liquid polymer, then made into fiber, spun into yarn and knit or woven into polyester fabric.
About a yard of Thread’s canvas is used in each of Perkins’s bags, according to an email from Halling. That means each duffel repurposes 17.5 bottles, she added.
Plus, the bags are assembled in Haiti, according to Perkins, and their interior vinyl lining is made from used billboards, so no two bags are alike.
“He has developed an amazing product,” said Dawn Edmiston, a marketing professor at the Mason School who has worked with Perkins. “You can carry this bag and feel good about carrying it.”
Managing Success
Perkins did a soft launch at Norfolk’s Work|Release in the fall of 2015. Last year, he set a goal of raising $10,000 on Kickstarter. He met the target in less than a week and Kickstarter featured his line as a project they loved, he said.
“We planned for success,” he added. “But I didn’t expect it.”
For now, his bags are something of a niche commodity.
Orders have come from Virginia, the East Coast, Silicon Valley, the San Francisco Bay area, London and colleges such as William & Mary, UCLA and Princeton, according to Perkins. Customers are finding the brand on social media, including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter.
Going forward, one of Perkins’s challenges is to figure out the scale of his business, according to Edmiston.
“Timberland doesn’t have that concern,” she said.
When he’s ready, Thread is set to expand with him.
“Absolutely,” said Halling. “We are excited to see his business grow.”
Hamilton Perkins Collection bags are available here in colors such as black, navy, burgundy and green. Prices range from $95 for a duffel to $295 for a duffel that doubles as a backpack.
