"Love the bag, well made, hope it last as long as my last one, it's indestructible." - Kath, verified customer review
Somewhere on a construction site, or hauled up off a fishing boat, nylon net is not a material anyone thinks twice about. It's genuinely tough, industrial-grade, and about as unglamorous as materials get. Which is more or less exactly why we like it.
To be clear about where it actually comes from: it isn't pulled out of the ocean or off a job site, it's simply repurposed for a completely different job than the one it was designed for. That distinction matters to us, so we're not going to blur it just because "reclaimed from the sea" makes a punchier story. The honest version is good enough on its own.
Once we've got it, we do something it was never designed for. Every piece is cut by hand, one colour at a time, before any actual bag-making starts. Then comes the part our own brand book calls "magical", and it's more than pinning layers of net together. Each time, we layer different materials by hand to get the exact shade and consistency right. It's slow. We haven't found a faster version of this step yet, and honestly, we're not sure we'd want one.
Once the shade and consistency are right, the material is cut into panels and sewn together by hand, the same way as every Smateria piece, designed and pattern-made in-house from the very start, not just assembled from someone else's pattern.
One more detail worth knowing: the strap itself is kept deliberately simple. Lightweight and minimal by design, comfortable to carry, not padded out with hardware or a mismatched trim bolted on at the end.
Because every roll is layered together by hand, no two come out quite the same. The colour mix, the texture, the way the pieces sit next to each other, all of it is a little bit one-off. Buy a Smateria piece made from net, and you're not buying a print run. You're buying the one version of that colour combination that happened to come together that day, in our own workshop, under someone's hands.
It's not the fastest or cheapest way to make a bag. But speed was never really the point. We wanted a bag that looks like it was actually made by someone, not stamped out by a machine that doesn't care what colour comes next.
This is roughly what it looks like day to day: a genuinely tough material, given a second job, cut and joined by hand, by a team working in our own Cambodian workshop, under Fair Trade certification and PETA-approved standards.
Next time someone asks why your bag looks a little different to the one your friend has, even in the "same" colour, you'll actually have an answer.
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