An Accidental Success!
We got into the bag-making business quite by accident, but we're certainly not complaining! We started back in 1997 making costumes for sale at brick-and-mortar venues and then later using online auctions.
We hated seeing all the beautiful scraps of fabric getting tossed in the trash. So on a lark, one day we gathered some up and made a couple dozen drawstring bags to sell alongside the costumes. They sold like hot cakes, and before long we were getting small business owners asking us for special orders on bags to package their items!
So we did our research and found out that almost all the fabric gift bags we found came from Asia and you can't order wholesale without buying thousands of them. We also discovered that the fabrics used in those bags are very flimsy and cheap, while the materials that we used for costuming was vastly superior in quality and aesthetics. No wonder people were excited to find us!
We opened up The Drawstring Bag Shop online in 1998, offering quality custom-made bags without an insane minimal order requirement. We don't have a huge warehouse, so we special order fabrics to fill each custom order. We found that we ended up with lots of fancy remnants this way and so our popular discounted pre-made bag lots was born!
In December 2013 we decided to move our online shop to Etsy, as we felt that our quality hand-made bags and Etsy buyers were a good match.