Bags to Riches

This is the good life. The great life. Toni Ray’s vivid green lawn unfurls to 150 feet of waterfront on the Chesapeake Bay. Her gardens bounce with hundreds of tulips, pansies and bluebells. In the side yard grow five beds of vegetables, another glorious excess of tulips and an arbor topped by grapevines.

She has a baby grand piano overlooking her 80-year-old Japanese maple and the glittering nighttime lights across the bay. And throughout her thoroughly renovated beach cottage in Annapolis, Md., are a sumptuous collection of Chinese antiques and bold, eccentric finds from flea markets in Bogota, Colombia.

It all belongs to the woman who twice has been at the center of Washington, D.C.-based fashion triumphs. Ray’s first success came with Georgetown Leather Design. Her latest is Hobo International handbags, whose clutches have been carried on the red carpet by Eva Longoria and Hilary Duff, and whose “Athena” bag just appeared on Sarah Jessica Parker’s shoulder in “Failure to Launch.”

And while this 65-year-old grandmother has always had a great eye, the real secret behind Ray’s business success has been fear – stomach-churning, knee-bending fear.

Her husband had left her. Taking off on his motorcycle – the one that reminded her of their discovering Bob Dylan together – he took up with a folk singer with long red hair.

Forty years later, Ray still visibly recoils from the memories. It’s hard to say what makes that time so especially raw, whether it’s the heartbreak of his leaving or the facts of what he left behind:

She was pregnant.

She had no one to lean on. Her parents had died, and she had grown up an only child in a California home where, she says, “We were really, really poor.” Her father was an opera singer turned B-movie actor. After he got a job with the Census Bureau, the family moved to the Washington, D.C., area. Ray graduated from the University of Maryland but couldn’t find a well-paying job. It was a time of “stone fear,” she recalls. “That’s when I knew I was in trouble having an English degree.”

But she could work. And work more. And work harder. So she did.

“I had to make it,” she says.

In 1968 she arrived at Georgetown Leather Design, a sandal shop where owner Mary Vinton was looking for a new partner. Ray took over the merchandising and buying, bringing in Frye boots and making garment-leather handbags and coats in the store’s basement.

The store became a destination: Back then in D.C., remembers photographer and author Allen Appel, “There were no places that the hip people would buy things.” But Georgetown Leather, that was worthy. The city’s hippie artists would, Appel says, “save … money, or sell some dope, or do something to get enough money to go.”

GLD eventually employed 10 full-time seamstresses and four sandalmakers and expanded to 10 regional stores. By 1984, when it was sold to William McCormick Jr., the stores had achieved annual sales of $7 million, and McCormick knew he was getting something special.

“I go to cocktail parties,” he says, “and people say, ‘Oh, I still have my handbag from Georgetown Leather.’ It was the Coach before there was Coach, if you think of that fashion position. They really had a niche.”

He grew the business into the Midwest, expanding to 30 stores. Ray signed a four-year contract. She stayed for five. McCormick sent her around the world to find leather, factories and labor. He sent her to seminars at Harvard Business School. She was often miserable – “different philosophy,” she says – but “he taught me everything I know about numbers.” She calls her time with him “boot camp.”

And then, at the end of summer 1990, he decided to let Ray go.

“Fired,” she recalls. “How do you get fired from the only job you’ve ever done, and you spent your life building the chain?”

She was “fat and 50.”

The fear was back.

In 1990, corporate America was telling her – this woman who’d reached that certain age that often renders women invisible – that her 20-year loyalty was as outmoded as she.

So although friends such as Barbara Gehring have always described her as “a really, really hard worker,” Ray found herself, at the end of that summer, lying on her Annapolis porch “watching the shadows go by.”

She studied for a real estate license, “like every old woman does when she gets fired,” she says. But “the real estate market was in total collapse.” She accepted a job at a deli, only to immediately reconsider.

“Totally devastating,” she calls the experience. Finally, depressed and on Prozac, she decided, “I better do something I know a lot about, and the only thing I know a lot about is leather.”

So she called her daughter, Koren, the baby girl who by then had just graduated from Northwestern University: “You have to come home, and bring that … thing I bought you for school.” She was referring to the computer.

Ray had sketched some handbag designs for a freelance job in Bogota, but at the last minute the company decided to do only briefcases. Already at the factory in South America, Ray hated to see her handbag designs thrown away. Cashing out her $60,000 IRA, she got the designs made, too, and when she flew back with her first batch of bags, she and Koren sat at the gate in the Miami, “admiring our samples – admiring and admiring, and so in love that we missed the airplane.”

Hobo was founded in 1991, and in the early years the company was so deep in debt that its only asset was a 1976 van – one they’d rescued from the woods behind a friend’s house. Koren’s future husband, David Brewer, put new tires on it and welded a padlock for the back doors. For back seats, they used folding lawn chairs. In that van they ferried their bags to the New York trade shows.

Hobo bags developed a reputation built on pockets: secret pockets, and pockets within pockets, plus extra nooks and hooks that offer women the same delicious promises that an old house with second staircases and hidden rooms offers to imaginative children.

It took five years for Ray to pay off the loans secured by her house. A year later, she hired designer Martha Radford, who had worked for her at GLD. Radford helped push the bags beyond their well-organized roots and into something with more capital-F Fashion.

Today, Hobo’s line of 180 bags and wallets comes in shades such as sky, verde, espresso, cognac, lemon, coral, aqua, sage and sea glass.

Lucky magazine and Real Simple have featured Hobo, and Women’s Wear Daily called it one of the country’s “fun and funky” accessories firms. In March, the company expanded beyond its Los Angeles and Atlanta showrooms to include a penthouse on New York’s West 33rd Street, complete with views of the Empire State Building. It’s been 15 years since Hobo was created. That first year, in 1991, Hobo’s sales were $400,000.

Last year: $21 million.

“Fear,” Ray says. “It’s a driving force.”

In March, Ray sold the business to her daughter and son-in-law, and she has officially, sort of, retired. Finally, the house whose porch floor drops two inches where the boxes were stacked for years and years has become again her own.

And on her first day of retirement, she crowed merrily about what comes next:

“I have books to read, a garden to grow, grandchildren to raise – lots to do.”

She thinks maybe she’ll write a book, a guide for men she will call, “How a Man Can Judge a Woman by the Handbag She Carries.” It will include tips like, “If she’s carrying a big sack bag, she’s artistic. If she’s carrying Gucci or Coach, she’s very into status, and how much is that going to cost you in life?”

She plans to start a foundation to help women go into business. “It’s time. It’s time to pay back for how lucky I’ve been.”

She’s not afraid anymore.