Designer to Watch: Ja9

At the age of seventeen, most girls are daydreaming about graduation and university. Janine, however, spends most of her high school days thinking about organic fabrics and patchwork – meticulously planning her next creation for what is now Ja9. Cleverly taken from her name Janine, Ja9 (pronounced Jay-nine) is a line of unique, one-of-a-kind, handmade canvas tote bags designed and created by the seventeen year old herself. Her decision to launch a line of bags stemmed simply from her love of sewing and crafting her own creations. When people started to like what she was doing, it got her thinking – Why not create her own company? “I kind of just went on from there,” she tells me. “It was a really slow process and once I got into it and had the time, it really went along.” It may have started off slow but once Janine started her website, organized a photo shoot, started advertising, and selling her bags in stores  (they’re currently being sold at Ainsworth Custom Design on Granville) her first batch of bags sold out within two weeks. “The owner of the store called me and said, ‘They’re all gone. I need more. ‘I was like, ‘Really?’ And that was about three months ago,” the young designer recalls. Not too shabby considering she hasn’t even graduated from high school.

If you take a look at her debut collection, the pieces are impeccably made. Working with scraps of recycled material and using only organic fabrics, her designs are well-crafted, and wouldn’t look out-of-place next to the kinds of bags that you would see in bigger stores. Impressed, I asked the designer if she ever turned to books or the internet when she first started creating bags. Surprisingly, she played it by ear. Rather than researching, she used her natural curiosity as her guiding source. “.. I didn’t read books. Nothing. I just went along with it, played it by ear – tried to figure it out how to sew the bag right there and then. I’ll look at [a bag] and maybe look at the bags that I have and say, ‘I think it might work’. If it works, it works and if it doesn’t then I’ll try something else.”

Much of her designs come from imitation and studying existing bags. “I’ll study it and I’ll try to see how the manufacturer or company does theirs … and then I can kind of see how it was put together and then imitate it.” Her first batch of bags had a very hippie, Coachella-like feel to it with feathers and strips of leather hanging down from the bags.