Before a mini purse ever reaches your hands, it starts flat on a table in Kenya: a length of canvas, a screen, and someone's hands pulling ink across mesh in one firm, steady stroke.
There's no machine doing this part. Every Miriam Bella print is pushed through by hand, pass by pass, until the pattern holds.
The print comes before the bag
Long before the zip goes in or the strap gets attached, the canvas is just canvas, plain and uncut, waiting. The artisan lays it flat, positions the screen over it, and works the ink through the mesh with a squeegee in even, deliberate passes. Too fast and the ink skips. Too slow and it bleeds. It's a rhythm you learn with your hands, not a setting you dial in.
Each colour is its own pass. The floral prints and the bold geometric patterns build up layer by layer, screen by screen, drying between passes before the next colour goes down. It's slower than digital printing. It's also the only way to get the depth of colour and slight, human irregularity that makes two "identical" mini purses never quite identical at all.
Once the canvas is printed and cured, it's cut, lined with organic cotton, and finished with leather accents and stitching, all still done by hand, by the same small team of women artisans in Kenya who print it.
We also make these in small batches, not mass runs. That's partly a byproduct of how the printing works (hand-pulled screens don't scale the way a factory line does) and partly deliberate. Smaller batches mean the print, the stitching, and the finishing all get proper attention, rather than being rushed to hit volume.
What's actually in your mini purse
It's worth being specific here, because "handcrafted" can mean almost anything if no one explains it:
- Outer body: durable printed canvas, the surface all that screen-printing work goes into
- Lining: 100% organic cotton
- Accents and strap details: leather, added for structure and durability where the bag takes the most wear
- The one exception: our Moss mini tote, which is genuine leather throughout rather than printed canvas, for anyone who wants the material story without the print
Why the slower way still matters
A screen-printed mini purse takes longer to make than a bag with a printed pattern rolled on by machine. It costs more in hours, and it shows in small ways: a slightly imperfect line where a colour meets the seam, a print that sits a touch differently on one bag than the next. That's not a flaw to hide. It's the fingerprint of someone's hands actually being there.
If you're choosing a mini purse as the thing you give someone else, that matters more than it might seem. A gift that's genuinely made by hand, by someone you could point to on a map, does a lot of the emotional work for you. It doesn't need an explanation to feel intentional.
If you're choosing one for yourself, to actually carry every day, the leather accents and cotton lining are there because a bag that only looks good in a product photo doesn't survive daily use. This one's built to.
And if you already own a Miriam Bella piece and you're circling back for a mini purse as your next one, you already know what the quality feels like in hand. This is the same standard, just in a smaller, easier next step.
The short version
Every mini purse starts as plain canvas and a screen. Someone's hands do the printing, the cutting, the lining, the finishing, start to finish, in Kenya, one bag at a time. That's not a marketing line. It's just how these are actually made.
Browse the full Mini Purse collection to see the prints, colors, and the one genuine-leather option in the range.