Sometimes there is no sketch to start from, no fixed idea of where it might end. A design process is not a linear track, and so it was not with BASIL: born out of the ongoing back-and-forth between the TSATSAS leather workshop and atelier, like a ping-pong match between Esther, Dimitrios, and his father, Vassilios, that never quite stops.
It was Vassilios Tsatsas, the master craftsman of the TSATSAS leather workshop, who came across a precisely cut piece of leather draped over the back of a chair, folded almost 180 degrees into a gentle curve. His idea took shape: that rounded bend became the base of a bag, giving rise to a drop-shaped silhouette, and with just two leather gussets added to either side, a new bag design came to life.
And so the name of this bag was born too, inspired by Vasiliko – the tender nickname derived from his own name and the Greek word for the basil herb, the name his mother called him as a boy in the mountains of Greece’s Epirus region.
