This Designer Left the Corporate World to Make Sentimental, Stylish Leather Purses

Working a corporate job in graphic design had Maxine Young feeling a tech slump that many of us can relate to: “I got to a point where I was looking at a screen all day, every day,” she recalls. The New Zealand-born designer moved to Canada in 2016, and that screen fatigue, coupled with a love for browsing Vancouver’s buzzy craft market scene, inspired her to try a more hands-on kind of art. Three months into leather working classes, she was hooked. “I became absolutely obsessed with it,” she says.

Young’s Gastown-based brand, Mameyo Goods, uses leather that is a by-product of the meat industry, making functional and long-lasting bags, wallets, keychains and other accessories out of materials that would otherwise waste away in the garbage. “I’m quite a sentimental person, so I want to create things that people can have with them for years to come,” says Young. Each piece proves her emotional connection to her craft: the Valerie bag is modelled after a bucket bag her stylish grandma gave her (“She has really gorgeous taste,” Young says); the Bonita backpack, meanwhile, is named after a street she once lived on (“I carried a not-so-good leather backpack,” she remembers with a laugh).

Besides handmade wares, Mameyo Goods offers workshops to further share Young’s love of leather—take her five-hour classic tote bag workshop and you’ll leave the studio with a custom tote of your own (and the priceless pride of a job well done). “There is something so satisfying about making something from nothing,” Young says. “It’s just such a lovely thing to be creative in a way that you’re not usually in your day-to-day life.”