Di Queen Designs: The intrinsic beauty of a practical product

Involved in every detail…Diana with 1 of her 7 staff members.

Florida, Gauteng, SA – As a handbag manufacturing country, South Africa has a rich and varied source of leathers as its most obvious advantage.
And leather was originally the material of choice for Diana Lopez when she started making handbags in her native Colombia years ago. It remained the material of choice when she moved to South Africa in 2005 (to marry the South African she’d met while working in the United States), setting up Di Queen Designs the following year.

She was particularly struck by the exotic leathers available in South Africa. “I love animals and the African environment,” she says.

Leather would almost certainly have remained her primary material until a lightbulb moment in 2019 when her husband, Lester De Braine, who works in construction, showed her the high-density polyethylene (HDPE) woven plastic fabric bags used to deliver sand and stone chips to building sites, and then thrown away.

Diana Lopez with her husband and son, Lester and Alejandro De Braine.

Her gift was to see beyond the wet, dirty, destined-for-the-tip bags to re-use a product which is durable, light, and available for more-or-less nothing, and which she sources from construction companies, farmers and even landfill sites.
And it’s that material, which now makes up 80% of Di Queen Designs’ production, which gives the business its point of difference in South Africa’s increasingly adventurous and export-orientated handbag industry.

Di Queen Designs employs 7 staff and produces between 400 to 650 units – handbags, shoppers, laptop bags, pet products and various lifestyle items – per month.

The recycled material range is called Manzana, which is Spanish for ‘apple’, and part of its appeal is that it is made from waste material, and therefore contributes to a more circular economy.

“I try to incorporate all the knowledge and experience I have gained through the years, as a designer and as an entrepreneur, to create a range which is functional and economical, with a minimum of decoration, to the point of being plain,” she says. “I try to combine art with functionality, to put my Latin identity into the product.”

The majority of Di Queen Designs’ products are currently sold online locally, but it exports consistently to the UK and Spain, to retailers and end consumers, “and my goal”, she says, “is to become an international brand”.

Di Queen Designs’ Manzana range combines practicality, aesthetic appeal and recycling.