Meet Florist, the Brand Making Underground It Bags

The pattern fell into his lap right at the dawn of a strange moment: a new age of the It Bag. After a number of years when the art tote reigned supreme, women and men alike were falling under the spell of unique, semi-utilitarian luxury bags. Dior saddle bags are ubiquitous on the red carpet and in the Erewhon parking lot; Lil Uzi Vert Instagrams a new purse every other day. Fendi, sensing an opportunity, is bringing back its iconic Baguette Bag (the original It Bag) for dudes, in purse and crossbody form.

Banks was figuring out how to do leather work on the fly, but as he started making Florist bags he realized he basically had to keep doing it. One bag was propagating the next. “All the growth that Florist has seen is literally due to random people I’ve never met before going out of their way,” Banks says. “And it just got more and more traction because every time I sold a bag, that was another bag out on the street.”

Banks picked the name because he wants Florist products to “enhance how you feel, like giving or receiving flowers,” he says. “I want Florist products to be less ‘I’m super cool’ and more like ‘I’m happy,’ you know what I mean?” The coolness of Florist’s products is not incidental, though—the brand has leaned into the yee-haw spirit of Florist’s signature cow prints and rough-riding leathers, with shearling accents and rhinestone-encrusted bridle buckles accentuating new models. Florists’s signature embroidery is all done by Banks, who creates trippy smiley-face flowers and garden scenes in psychedelic shades, doing it all freehand.

Now, Banks’s backlog stretches weeks, and he estimates he’s sold several hundred Florist bags of all shapes and sizes. Making a few bags each day (it takes him three hours, give or take) has allowed Banks to constantly tweak the design to his liking, and he recently upgraded his primary material to a super-thick bridle leather. If he was sewing ready-to-wear clothes, this approach might feel weird, but when it comes to creating bags the desire to iterate is an extremely good one—each one is unique. (Banks is working on unisex clothing, too, which he says will be a cross between military officer uniforms and Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo & Juliet.)

Recently, Florist made its biggest move yet: it moved out of Banks’s Instagram inbox. The brand now has a website, and Banks has moved into a new studio and hired an intern so that he can fulfill orders in a week or so. (For those who prefer instant gratification, the bags are available at NYC popup store Café Forgot for the month of August.) And if you want a custom bag, you can still hit up Banks, though he now prefers email to DM. He knows that the in-person handoff on Canal St. is still central to the Florist brand: “I like how if you see one of my bags, you’re like, ‘Ooh, that person’s had the same experience that I’ve had.’”