MY FOUNDER STORY

DESIGN WAS ALREADY PART OF MY LIFE

Creating things was not new to me.

I started designing when I was around fourteen or fifteen years old.

For most of my life, I have been an independent artist. Through music, I have always created entire visual worlds around what I do.

I have drawn and designed my own outfits for performances, music videos and visual projects for years.

I did not simply choose clothes that already existed.

I would sketch the pieces myself, decide on the silhouette, proportions, fabrics, details and overall feeling, and then work with dressmakers to bring those drawings into real life.

I have done this with many of my stage outfits and costumes.

And especially with my wedding dresses.

My wedding dresses began as my own ideas and drawings. I designed them myself, shaping every detail around exactly what I wanted them to feel like and how I wanted them to move and look on me.

That process of seeing something in my head, drawing it, refining it and then finding a way to make it exist has been part of my life for a very long time.

Design was there long before I ever called myself a designer.

And “almost right” has never been enough for me.

That obsession with detail followed me from music and fashion into handbags.

I DIDN’T WANT TO JUST DESIGN THE OUTSIDE

At first, I could have simply drawn a handbag and paid somebody else to make it.

But that did not feel right to me.

If I was going to put my name on a handbag, I wanted to understand what was happening underneath the leather too.

I wanted to understand why one bag keeps its shape for years and another collapses.

Why one edge feels beautiful and another feels plastic.

How the inside of the bag matters just as much as the outside.

For almost two years, I have spent an enormous amount of time learning the craft from the inside.

Taking pieces apart in my mind and understanding why they were made the way they were.

What began as wanting one handbag for myself slowly became something much bigger.

ANNELLA DESIGN.

THE ATELIER IN DUBAI

Today I am building my own small atelier in Dubai.

And I want it to remain small.

I am not interested in producing thousands of handbags.

I don’t want ANNELLA DESIGN to become something you see on every corner.

The entire reason I began this was because I wanted something more personal than that.

My handbags are made slowly and in very limited quantities.

Some materials may only be available for a handful of pieces.

I want to work with exceptional full-grain calfskin, beautiful goatskin, lambskin and carefully selected exotic skins.

I am building relationships with specialist tanneries and manufacturers who work at the highest levels of the leather industry, because if I am going to make something by hand, I want to begin with extraordinary material.

There is no point spending days creating one handbag from mediocre leather.

FROM ONE WOMAN TO ANOTHER

There is something very personal about knowing whose hands made the object you carry.

With ANNELLA DESIGN, there is not a huge factory hidden somewhere behind the name.

And eventually, another woman on the other side.

A woman who does not necessarily want what everybody else has.

She may already own the famous bags.

She may have the watches, the jewellery and the wardrobe.

She does not need another logo to tell people that she can afford luxury.

Because in many ways, she is the woman I was when this began.

And when I could not find it, I decided to make it.

For another woman who knows exactly what she likes.

THE STORY BEHIND THE WOMAN

ANNELLA DESIGN may have started with a handbag, but the way I build things began much earlier.

I come from the music world, where I have spent more than fifteen years working independently.

Being an independent artist meant learning how to create without waiting for somebody else to do everything for me.

And keep going when there was nobody standing behind me telling me what the next step should be.

I am naturally extremely detail-focused and perfectionistic. For years, that could sometimes make creative work difficult because my imagination often moved faster than the people or processes around me.

With ANNELLA DESIGN, I began to understand that those qualities could become strengths.

My need to understand every part of what I was creating had somewhere to go.

Everything I learned through music is now coming with me into this house.

And perhaps most importantly, the belief that if I do not know how to do something yet, I can learn.

WHERE I COME FROM

Both of my parents are from Kosovo.

They fled the war and moved to Zürich, Switzerland, where I was born.

When I was one year old, we moved to Denmark.

I grew up in a refugee camp in Denmark called Sandholmlejren, where I lived until I was seven years old.

It was a difficult beginning.

And I think creativity became an escape for me very early.

When reality felt heavy, imagination gave me somewhere else to go.

My father died when I was still very young, and much of my life has been about learning how to stand on my own.

I did not have a financial safety net waiting underneath me.

For more than seven years, I worked with disabled people while trying to build my music career.

I saved what I earned and put it back into my own work.

I learned very early that if I wanted something to exist, I had to find a way to build it.

That mindset has never left me.

THE FIRST SEED

For the first time in years, there was suddenly space.

And inside that space, I returned to something that had always been there.

Thinking about creating something of my own outside music.

Thinking about what another creative life might look like.

Then, in 2026, war and regional instability once again affected life in Dubai and disrupted my ability to perform and work in the way I was used to.

It was another reminder that a career built around performances can sometimes be stopped overnight by circumstances completely outside your control.

And I realised that I did not want the next chapter of my life to depend entirely on whether a stage was available to me.

I wanted to build something I could place more directly into my own hands.

Something I could develop slowly for the rest of my life.

I stopped treating ANNELLA DESIGN as something I would come back to when life became quiet enough.

BECOMING A STUDENT AGAIN

So for the past year, I have immersed myself in leathercraft in a way I have rarely immersed myself in anything outside music.

I wanted to absorb as much as possible, as quickly and deeply as possible.

I approached that year almost as if I were trying to compress several years of learning into one.

Not because craftsmanship can ever truly be rushed — it cannot.

But because I gave it my attention every day.

I was not casually learning a hobby on the side.

I was building the foundation of the company I want to spend the rest of my life developing.

And the hundreds of tiny decisions that most people will never consciously notice when they pick up a handbag, but which determine whether the object feels ordinary or exceptional.

I deliberately put myself back into the position of being a beginner.

That can be humbling.

There are days when your hands cannot yet create what your eyes can already see.

But I wanted the knowledge badly enough to stay in that uncomfortable place.

I did not want to create a handbag brand and then have somebody else explain my own product to me.

I wanted to know.

WHY THE HANDS MATTER

For years, when I designed clothes or costumes, I would draw the idea and another person would make it.

That taught me something extremely important.

There is a difference between imagining an object and understanding how that object can physically exist.

Sometimes a drawing looks effortless on paper but becomes incredibly complicated once material, structure and gravity enter the picture.

I did not want that gap to exist between me and ANNELLA DESIGN.

I want my own prototypes to pass through my hands.

I want to know what a design asks from the leather.

Why one reinforcement works and another does not.

Why a certain skin behaves differently.

Why one millimetre can change the proportion of an entire bag.

That knowledge gives me more freedom as a designer.

Because the more I understand the craft, the further I can push the design.

MY SMALL ATELIER

I want people to understand that when they see ANNELLA DESIGN today, they are not looking at a large company pretending to be intimate.

They are looking at something intimate that is genuinely being built by one woman.

That is important to me.

I am not interested in producing thousands of handbags.

I do not want to manufacture something simply because more can be sold.

I want the number of pieces to remain small enough that care never disappears from the process.

Exceptional skins that may only exist in tiny amounts.

WHY DUBAI

Dubai changed the way I thought about what was possible.

That mentality speaks to me because it is how I have had to live my entire life.

Dubai also brings together extraordinary people from all over the world.

For ANNELLA DESIGN, that is incredibly exciting.

I can build a house here that is deeply connected to Dubai while working with extraordinary leather, specialist tanneries, hardware makers and craftspeople from around the world.

And I can remain physically close to the process.

MATERIALS FIRST

If I am going to spend days making one handbag, the material has to deserve that time.

I want to work with specialist tanneries operating at the highest end of the leather industry and with materials made for exceptional leather goods.

Not because a tannery name needs to be printed across the handbag.

But because the quality needs to be felt.

I want the woman carrying an ANNELLA bag to feel the difference before somebody ever explains it to her.

WHERE ART MEETS LEATHER

My background as an artist will always exist inside ANNELLA DESIGN.

Sometimes I look at leather and do not only see a material.

I see a canvas.

Selected pieces will eventually be painted by hand.

Some exotic skins may be developed with unusual colours, finishes or treatments.

I want to work directly with tanneries on special developments.

And one day I want other artists to enter this world too.

A handbag might carry a painting created specifically for one woman.

A skin might be finished in a way that can never be recreated exactly the same way again.

A client may become part of the creative process.

Because bespoke luxury, to me, should mean more than choosing between black and brown.

It should leave room for imagination.

THE WOMAN I AM DESIGNING FOR

The ANNELLA woman may already own beautiful things.

She may have access to almost anything she wants.

And precisely because of that, she does not necessarily need what everybody else recognises.

She does not need to prove that something is expensive by carrying the most recognisable logo in the room.

BUILDING IT ON MY OWN TERMS

Without pressure to turn it into something enormous before it has even had time to become itself.

I am not building ANNELLA DESIGN because I am trying to create something quickly and leave it quickly.

And I want the house to become better every year because the woman behind it became better too.

THE BEGINNING

I am still at the beginning.

And I actually think that is one of the most beautiful parts of this story.

People are not arriving after everything has already been built.

I built a music career without growing up with money behind me.

I spent more than fifteen years learning how to create things independently.

COVID reminded me that life can change overnight.

And somewhere between finally being able to buy the things I once dreamed about and realising that the handbag I truly wanted did not exist for me, ANNELLA DESIGN became inevitable.

A place in Dubai where extraordinary leather meets human hands.

Where craftsmanship still has a face.

Where the founder still touches the leather herself.

Where fewer can mean better.

Where a woman does not have to want what everybody else has.

And where something made by one woman can eventually become part of another woman’s life.

For another woman who knows exactly what she likes.