The Diplomat’s Diplomat…plus a new epilogue: “The Real Story”!

You may have noticed some trends in our product names: basically, all our products are named after travel related things. Wallets are named after international drinks, our toiletry cases are tropical beach destinations, and our bags – travel professions. Most names are straight from our twisted minds here at the studio. Others are from nagging friends. The most recent addition to our bag line, The Diplomat Series, comes from the latter.

The Diplomat 13

A good friend of ours here at the studio is a diplomat named Brendan.  And I don’t mean the kind of person who knows how to delicately make a bitter pill taste sweet, I mean the “real” kind of diplomat, the one that has worldwide immunity and negotiates behind closed government doors. Now, Brendan is definitely a traveling professional, both for his work and for fun. He also seems to think that his job is pretty damn cool and doesn’t mind flashing the diplomatic passport every now and again – especially if you happen to be an attractive woman sitting near him on a flight. So, when he realized that our bags were all named after travel professions, yet there wasn’t a Diplomat in the line, it just didn’t sit well with him. Spending a lot of time in government and rubbing elbows with politicians, he has perfected the art of a convincing argument. So when he laid it on us, we didn’t really have much of a rebuttal. And when he kept reminding us that there should be a Diplomat, we finally caved: “Alright, alright, that’s fine we’ll name the next bag the Diplomat. We promise!”

Brendan carried one of our Directors before he switched to the bag that bears his mark. He probably carried that 1st bag more miles back and forth across the globe than anyone else we know. His last assignment with the US State Department focused on U.S. war crimes policy in Africa so he and his Director spent time in Kenya, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Burundi, The Congo, and Egypt, as well as meetings across North America and Europe. His latest assignment has landed him and his new Diplomat in Kathmandu, Nepal where he provides legal expertise to the Nepal government in drafting their constitution. Not all of our bags find themselves in such demanding hands, but at least you know that they are all up for the job.

THE Diplomat and his Director take on Cairo.

It turns out that the Diplomat is an approriate name for a bag that works as hard as it plays. It can jet off across the globe carrying your computer and files for tackling a serious job or it can tote a travel guide and beach attire for your break between meetings.

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“The Real Story” added by Brendan…

You also may have noticed some other trends here in the Double Rectangle studio: the shameless recruitment of their closest friends to do all the hard work – movie making, modeling, custom artist designing, even naming their products. So when the Double Rectangle duo (Gabrielle & Malcolm) needed someone to spend weeks scripting their wedding ceremony, ensuring that it captured the four continents of their ancestry and the full narrative of their lives, and then perform that same ceremony in a thick, draped robe below a blazing hot Jamaican sun, who did they turn to? That’s right. The diplomat-cum-preacher.

And so it’s no surprise that they again needed a little inspiration from their friends in creating their next bag’s nom de guerre. Some initial suggestions I proposed for travel-related bag names included The Roman Polanski, The H1N1, and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. All were names that I felt truly embodied what it meant to venture boldly. What could be more bold than a global health pandemic, or a 76 year-old sexual assault fugitive taunting L.A. prosecutors? Those should be the real faces of the Mojito. But in the end, the two of them insisted on a one-word-only name, and one without numerals. So I was forced to turn inward and a take a long, hard, meditative look at myself. Diplomat, I said, as a weathered United Nations flag flapped overhead. And with that, I gathered up my diplomatic passport, refilled my Ciprofloxacin prescription, and fit them both snugly in my sexy new Diplomat bag. There was a draft constitution somewhere out there, and by god I was going to find it.