Founder Story

I'm Brianna Tell, founder and designer of Les Tells. Living between countries taught me to watch from the outside. I started paying closer attention to small things, including the bags people were carrying.

It became clear on a small side street in Paris. I was watching people pass, and after years of quietly trading comfort for style, I noticed it in their bags too: beautiful, but stiff. Their straight silhouettes did not sit right against the body. I kept asking myself, why were we making room for bags that didn't make room for us? 

My foundation began on a horse farm in Pennsylvania, where I grew up surrounded by leather saddles and bridles, and the daily care of things made to last. Saddles had to adjust to the body of the horse, but also to the rider. There was a harmony in that. A useful object could still be beautiful.

That appreciation followed me to Florence later in life, where I began to understand craft differently. It was not only the Italian leather or the history around me, but the pride of the people making things by hand. One afternoon, I stopped outside an artisan's shop and could not walk away from a single bag. It was the hardware that held me there, metal doing its job while becoming part of the beauty of the object. I did not know it then, but I was taking notes.

Over the years, I stayed close to that pull. In Milan, I shadowed artisans in a family-run workshop producing leather bags for luxury houses. I watched sketches become three-dimensional forms, leather selected and cut, and experienced hands shape each bag into its final form. Later, working in watches and jewelry, I learned how something hard and rigid could be designed, shaped, coated, and finished into something people want to wear. That changed how I saw hardware. It did not need to be only a clasp or connector. It could carry function and feeling at the same time. 

But it was my dad who saw it before I fully did. I had carried the idea for years before I committed to it. He believed in my vision and pushed me to finally begin.

And so I did. Back in my studio, the idea was still a hypothesis. Smudged sketches turned into trial-and-error paper versions of the bags. I spent hours studying the forms, holding them against my own body, watching the proportion in the mirror. Clay pieces began to look like hardware as I attached them to the paper models. I wanted them to feel like jewelry, designed for someone who left the house and forgot to put on earrings.

The development phase was slow, by choice. Working with a family atelier in Scandicci, near Florence, began a two-year process of studying, shaping, challenging, and testing again. The hardware took its own path, too, moving from one maker who didn't see it to one who did. It was there, outside Florence, surrounded again by leather and the daily care of things made to last, that the bags finally moved from an idea into a finished object.

As an American living in Europe, I have found that slowing down and observing gives me a more complete perspective. It made me notice how the body meets the objects we carry. Les Tells is my answer to that: Italian leather bags shaped around the body, made in small runs near Florence, with hardware I designed from the same place. After all those cities, the body is the part I am surest of.