| Welcome to Bw Reads, our weekend newsletter featuring one great magazine story from Bloomberg Businessweek. Today we're featuring Amanda Mull's Buying Power column on the utilitarian tote bag that's suddenly the darling of soccer moms, teachers and health-care workers. But getting to $100 million in sales was anything but easy. You can find the whole story online here. If you like what you see, tell your friends! Sign up here. Scan the crowd at any youth soccer or softball tournament in America, and you're likely to find that many of the moms cheering on their kids have brought along a similar array of gear: folding nylon camp chairs, a rainbow of enormous Stanley insulated cups, collapsible wagons with off-road wheels and a menagerie of boxy, bright tote bags that look to be constructed from the same pliable, perforated plastic as Crocs. If you've spent time on the sidelines yourself, you'd likely recognize these totes immediately as Bogg bags. Starting at $70 for the mini version and $90 for the full-size (and most popular) tote, they're stocked at retailers as varied as Bloomingdale's and Bass Pro Shops. For a certain type of American woman—busy suburban moms, teachers and health-care workers, in particular—a Bogg tote is suddenly the hottest thing going, catapulting the company from about $3.6 million in sales in 2019 to a projected $100 million this year, according to Bogg. That growth has come almost entirely from word of mouth, a trend propelled by people rarely credited as trendsetters. The company's recent success is a major reversal of fortune for its founder, Kim Vaccarella. When she first prototyped the bag in 2009, based on her own design, she had no background in fashion and was working as a controller at a commercial real estate lender. What she did have was confidence in her idea: She saw white space even in the overcrowded accessories market for products that catered more directly to the needs of moms like her, who she thought would go wild over a roomy, lightweight, easily cleaned tote bag that sat up by itself when plopped on the ground or in the passenger seat of a car. She had spent years looking for exactly that, with nothing to show for it. Vaccarella pitched the idea to anyone in the apparel industry who would listen. "I was getting all these comments, like, 'It's too utilitarian for a woman,'" she told me. "But it should be utilitarian." Vaccarella and her husband, Rosario, pushed Bogg forward with their own savings, and the company showed some early promise. Her first orders to manufacturers were a few hundred bags each, sold wholesale to a boutique near her family's home in Ridgewood, New Jersey. They sold well, but at first Vaccarella worried that customers, many of whom she knew personally, were just trying to be nice. "You didn't know if people were buying them because they felt bad for you," she says. The bags kept selling, though, and by 2011 they were enough of a hit among local moms that Vaccarella wanted to pitch Bogg to larger retailers. To do that, she made her biggest order ever: a shipping container full of more than 1,000 bags in shades of yellow and lime green—perfect, she thought, for families taking weekend trips to the Jersey Shore next summer. But making such a large order, at a cost of roughly $30,000, almost drained the family's savings. "We weren't, like, killing it," Vaccarella says. "Spending that money was like spending a million dollars to me." When the trailer full of bags finally pulled up outside of the Vaccarella home—there was no business address to send them to—what she found inside felt to her like a sign that she was in over her head. The manufacturer had screwed up the dyeing process, and most of the bags were streaked with black. Figuring out how to recoup money from the factory while paying for a replacement order felt like a problem that the family's finances couldn't solve. "I can't do this. I don't know what the hell I'm doing," Vaccarella says she thought at the time. Functionally, she thought, Bogg was done.  Bogg bags were donated to victims of Hurricane Sandy to carry relief supplies. Courtesy Bogg The damaged totes went into storage, where they stayed until the family finally had a reason to send them down to the shore, albeit for a reason far less joyous than a beach weekend. In the fall of 2012, in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, Vaccarella and her family donated the totes to disaster aid groups who filled them with supplies—granola bars, bottles of water, gloves, cleaning products—headed for people whose homes and businesses had been damaged. It felt like a fitting destination for bags that Vaccarella had always envisioned on the beach; they were, after all, resistant to grime and moisture, and could be hosed off when dirty. It wasn't long before the phone calls and emails started. As people who'd received the donated totes began to push their life back toward normalcy, they kept using the bags and wanted more, and they recommended them to friends and loved ones who wanted their own. Vaccarella put in new orders and started Bogg back up. The business grew slowly but steadily over the next few years, with orders coming in from larger retailers in more parts of the country. The bags proved to be a particular hit in the suburban South, Vaccarella found. Bogg's bright colors jibed well with the region's preppier, colorful wardrobes, and the bag's utility outdoors fit with the abundant warm weather. Keep reading: How Bogg Bags, the Crocs of Totes, Won Over America's Moms | 
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