Published 7/17/09

If you can wear your heart on your sleeve, why not also wear it on a colorful carryall on your shoulder? Maybe you're in love with President Obama, or your favorite artist, or ballet, or a nonprofit organization or your grandchildren. Put their pictures on a Flash bag and you'll be "carrying a conversation." People will stop to ask you about it. They'll ask where they can get one, too. It happens every day, and it makes Ali Marchildon and Laura Cheney, the high-energy cofounders of Flashbags, Inc, very, very happy.

Since they started making Flashbags together in 2005, Marchildon, 39, and Cheney, 32, both of Burlington, have been having profitable and amusing adventures with former First Lady Laura Bush, The Boston Globe, Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Obama, the Smithsonian Institute, many Vermont artists and a bunch of nonprofit organizations.

As partners, Marchildon and Cheney seem perfectly matched. Cheney is the extrovert, dark-haired and bubbling. Marchildon is more of an introvert, a reserved blonde with an expressive face. When the pair start talking about Flashbags, however, their two energies rise and converge. They finish each other's sentences. If you were just listening and not looking, it might be hard to tell them apart.

Their enthusiasm has won them many supporters.

Ray McKenzie of the Vermont Chamber of Commerce says, "They're a lot of fun to deal with."

Patty Pina of Women for Women International in Washington, DC, says they're "fabulous women who have a wonderful idea and put their heart and soul into their work."

Toby Leith, the marketing director of The Boston Globe, says, "When I think of Flashbags, I think not so much of the product but of the people behind it. They're fun, energetic, motivated and great to work with."

McKenzie, for example, uses Flashbags products at trade shows. At the Vermont Travel and Industry Conference, the bags were made with images of Vermont maps. At the Vermont Business Expo, they had pictures of the City Marathon. In both places, they were a huge draw.

"People were just going nuts," McKenzie said. "They were saying, 'Where can I buy one?' I had people willing to pay cash to get one. It was good to bring attention not only to the Chamber but to help get the word out. Ali and Laura are proof that you can put out a wonderful product and still have fun doing it."

The bags work well as a marketing tool, to give another example. Women for Women International, for example, helps women develop businesses in Third World countries. Their promotional material features colorful photos of smiling women in native dress - perfect images for Flashbags, said Pina.

"It was an opportunity for us to do what they say - to carry a conversation," Pina said. "We get a portion of the price, and have an opportunity to expand our reach. We've gotten tremendous feedback. The fact that they use beautiful imagery and colors, they're attention-grabbing, it's a company made by women, they're made out of recycled newspapers. Our supporters love to show the beautiful faces of our women and tell people about their support for our organization."

Flashbags are unique and not at the same time. They're made of paper laminated with plastic, quilted with recycled newsprint, and with a few metal grommets thrown in for good luck. Their handles are plastic tubing. They're so "crafty" that the technique for making them can't even be patented. Anyone could make one, really, although it takes a sure hand, a discerning eye and an industrial-strength sewing machine to make a good one.

This story begins when Marchildon moved with her family from Hawaii to Vermont and found herself lonely and at loose ends. She started making bags using a technique she developed as an art teacher in Hawaii. At the same time, Cheney was tending bar and floundering for direction. Both women had crafts backgrounds, both were making bags by hand, and both were living in Burlington. When they met in 2005, they clicked.

"I was so scared to meet Ali," Cheney said. "She was several steps beyond where I was. I called her up nervous as all hell, and I went over for lunch and we chatted for two hours. She showed me how she made a bag. I really liked the concept. I love the images. I was drawn by the art. It started to unfold from there."

Working in "a room the size of a closet" in Marchildon's home, the two spent three months making bags to sell as Christmas presents at house parties. Marchildon's husband, Greg, the Vermont director for AARP, provided the financial support; Cheney was paid per bag.

The bags were successful and the business grew from there. Today Marchildon and Cheney are equal partners in Flashbags, Inc (although two angel investors hold 20 percent of the company). They had sales last year of $250,000, and depending on the season, employ between four and 12 people. They have contracts for marketing promotions with nonprofit such as Women For Women International and with for-profits like Redbook Magazine and The Boston Globe, plus a thriving retail and Web business.

Even though the bags are made out of paper, Cheney says they are fairly sturdy. She has carried her laptop, for example, in an extra-large Flash bag for over eight months.

"On planes, to the beach, and I'm still using it happily," she said. "Of course lemons occur, but the bags are generally extremely durable."

Making them out of paper solved four problems at once.

"It helped create a 'quilt effect' because of the layers, it is free, it gives it such durability and flexibility, and of course, it is recycling," Cheney said. "They wear like old jeans when the paper gets worn. We feel great about using something that would otherwise be sitting in a dumpster. And people are fascinated. They draw curiosity and innovation, and start conversations."

In fact, "Carry a conversation" is the Flash bag tag line.

The bags are used mostly by women, but men seem to love them too.

"Men stop you on the streets and in the airports," Cheney said. "They notice Flashbags without a doubt, more than I have ever noticed guys caring about any handbag. They are drawn to the form and the use of images, I think. The wheels start spinning. They like the bifolded wallets. They also love buying them as gifts - the 'keeper' gift. The women love them for it."

The Flash bag product line is growing. It now includes wallets, checkbook covers, bags in many sizes, "bins" (bags without handles that can be used for storage) and wine totes. All the bags are handmade, and as they have refined their production techniques, Marchildon and Cheney have cut production time from four hours to 24 minutes.

There are four lines: Custom, in which the customer provides personal pictures or images; "Buzzwords," or collages made of words cut out of newspapers and magazines which support a theme; Artisan, which uses licensed images by many well-known Vermont artists (folk artist Warren Kimball recently signed up); and Benefit Bags, which are designed as marketing tools for specific organizations.

The strangest design that anyone asked to have on a bag? Sonograms. Cheney said they've done two, one of twins.

"They were not the greatest-looking, but those people loved those bags," she said.

The ugliest picture they ever put on a Flash bag? An old bald man in shorts, sleeping on a bed.

"Not in any way was it attractive, so we figured it was a gag gift," Cheney said.

I was meeting with Marchildon and Cheney in their newest office/showroom/factory, a long, sunlit brick-lined space in the Chace Mill; the Winooski River was rushing by, almost outside the door. Stands of Flashbags were lined up at the entrance; deeper inside were computers, a color copier, tables and three industrial sewing machines; one of them was especially designed to make Flashbags and cost $7,000.

While I was waiting for the interview to start, I met artist Liza Cowan, who owns Pine Street Artworks in Burlington. Her work appears on some of the bags and her store is their only retail outlet. She was there to pick up some merchandise.

"As soon as I saw their bags I knew I wanted to have them in my new store," Cowan told me. "It's a fabulous product. They started to make bags using my images - my painting and photographs. Then I connected them with artists who were showing in the gallery. They pay a commission on sales. Eventually, after a few years, we agreed I would be their retail outlet. They are my best sellers. I sold about $1,300 in December - probably even more than that. And about $1,000 in January and February. People love them for their own use and for presents."

Close to the end of the interview, two young women came in to pick up an order of customized bags. Seeing them, they immediately started screaming, laughing and giggling. Clearly, they were pleased.

"Yeah, they're beautiful," said one of the women, Anne Marie Dubois, who had ordered the bags as presents for her sister's 40th birthday. "We're freaking out here. These guys are great. They're such a good company. And they got my order ready in a couple of days."

BEFORE Flashbags

Marchildon grew up in Portland, OR, the youngest of three children. Her father was a neural opthamologist and her mother a ballet teacher and historian. She has two older brothers who are successful in the computer software industry.

A competitive diver, Marchildon also baby-sat and lifeguarded for money in high school.

"I frittered the money away, as teenagers do," she said. "I was lucky enough to have a grandfather who had set me up with college tuition. I did save a significant amount of money to spend three months in Europe with a girlfriend."

Sewing talent ran in the family.

"My two grandmothers were beautiful seamstresses and sewed their own suits and my mom's tutus," Marchildon said. "My mother taught me to sew when I was very young. I've always been crafty."

Marchildon graduated Evergreen State College with a degree in natural history and environmental science.

"So my degree essentially has virtually nothing to do with what I'm doing now," she said. "But you never know where life will lead you."

She met her husband while she was in college. After they married, they moved to Washington, DC, to find careers.

"During our seven years in DC, I worked in private schools as an elementary school art teacher," Marchildon said. "We decided to move from DC after I got pregnant with our first child, Oliver, who is now 10. We moved to Seattle, but it was during the Microsoft boom and Seattle wasn't actually affordable. Then my husband switched jobs within AARP and became the state director for Hawaii. We decided we would regret it for the rest of our lives if we didn't take advantage of that. So we did, and I had another baby. For a while, I was a stay-at-home mom and got to raise naked babies on the beach by turquoise water, and it was a pretty nice gig."

Marchildon developed the Flashbags technique with a co-teacher while teaching art in the Hawaii schools; she started by using photos of movie stars and surfers that she took from magazines and Rolling Stone Magazine covers; she gave them as presents to her friends.

Hawaii turned out to be less than a perfect paradise.

"We decided to look at the next opportunity that opened for Greg, and two weeks later the Vermont job opened up," Marchildon said. "So I quit my teaching job, packed ourselves up in two months and moved to Vermont on January 5. The temperature dropped 65 degrees in one day. I had a toddler who had been naked for two and a half years and now had to wear wool socks and long johns. He cried for two years, 17 tantrums a day."

Because of the tough transition, Marchildon spent a lot of time at home.

"I turned to my sewing machine," she said. "That's when Flashbags began - me keeping myself busy."

Cheney grew up in Cambridge, NY, the youngest of three girls. Her father was a social studies teacher and the soccer coach at the local high school. Her mother is an English professor at Adirondack Community College in Glens Falls. The family lived a rural kind of life.

"I got a dented toe at age four loading wood," Cheney said. "We would go back in the woods, cut trees and haul them out. We worked as a family. Work has always been something you do because there was always work that needed to get done. It was not about money. So I've always had a strong work ethic. My sisters and I were raised like boys for the most part, playing football in the yard with my dad. We did a lot of travel, camping in an old beat-up van."

Cheney went to St Lawrence College and then transferred to the University of Vermont, where she fell in love with Vermont. She did landscaping in college - "really long, hard hours for pretty good money, but quality of life was always my first focus" - while she took a degree in political science and sociology.

At the same time, she was always sewing or making things out of wood.

"I just liked making stuff," she said. "After college, I started making dresses. People said I should sell them, but I said, 'No, I don't do it for money.' But people kept pushing and pushing."

Cheney started tending bar and managing clubs in Burlington. She coached soccer. She took a masters from UVM in secondary education teaching social studies, but found it difficult to get a job; her timing was off.

"It was just after 9/11, and a lot of teachers who were going to retire decided not to," she said. "Finally I found a job in Brandon, teaching middle school."

When Cheney moved back to Burlington, she continued to tend bar. She also started making bags out of cloth and recycled materials.

"I was knitting, sewing, making jewelry," she said. "I wanted to set up an art center where people could have a relaxing environment and use our tools, rent machines, and purchase or sell the crafts they were producing. Then two hairdressers I was seeing said, 'You have to meet Ali Marchildon. She's making these bags.'"

EARLY Flashbags

Marchildon already had a name for the product.

"I was standing in the bathroom with my mother-in-law, freshening up to go to Church Street, and we said, 'We need to have the right bags to flash,'" Marchildon said. "And we looked at each other and said, 'Flashbags! There it is!'"

Marchildon and Cheney started making Flashbags at Marchildon's home.

"We didn't have a partnership," Marchildon said. "We just said we need to get through the next three months, October to December. And we need to make bags as fast as we can and have some parties and see if we can make money. Then, when things slow down in January, we'll figure out what we want to do. So we worked out a way to pay Laura that we both thought was fair, per bag."

For Cheney, who was still branding, the financial piece wasn't that important.

"It was more important to see if this could go somewhere," Cheney said. "The most important thing with Ali was that I'm always afraid of breaking things and ruining things. And she gave me free rein on her expensive machine to play and make mistakes. There was a comfort ability about it."

The first question was one of copyright. If they were going to build a business, they needed to have legal rights to the images they were using. That left out Marilyn Monroe and Rolling Stone covers. So they started with Liz Cowan, who ordered some bags to sell in her new gallery. One day a reporter from WCAX wandered in, saw one, called Marchildon and asked if he could do a story. Cheney happened to be in Mississippi at the time, volunteering for hurricane cleanup, but she flew home.

"So he came to my house and filmed us working on my dining room table," Marchildon said.

The Next Step

Marchildon decided to take the business to the next level and registered for a business intensive, the Women's Home Business Project, at the Community and Economic Development Office (CEDO). She invited Cheney to join her.

"And I was on the fence," Cheney said. "I'd just had this amazing experience of living in a tent with a community of people doing relief work. But I realized there was something here and I couldn't walk away from it. I believed it wasn't just a fashion piece. There was an energy, something underneath it, that made people smile and converse and connect with each other. I knew this was something that would never come along again."

The CEDO program was a 15-week intensive, but their television appearance was the day the program started. Things started to move quickly.

"People in the class were saying, 'I think I'd like to start a coffee shop someday,' and we were saying, 'We've got to go. We've got to get a Web site. We got stuff coming in,'" Marchildon said. "While we were writing each piece of the business plan, we were acting it out - getting a bank account, finding a Web designer, designing our logo."

"It was a fast track and surreal for sure," Cheney said. "We certainly didn't know what we were doing. The personal development part of the program? We didn't have time to take care of ourselves. We had to work. Ali was excellent at writing copy and finding the narrative. I was somewhat drawn to the financial part and Excel spreadsheets. So we had a nice division of labor. That has remained."

"And we both make bags," Marchildon said. "That's the nice part - to sit and sew."

Capitalization

The partners looked at various ways of getting startup money.

"I knew someone who said. 'I'll give you $30,000 and be a small part owner and it will be hands-off. Let you guys run it,'" Cheney said. "We entertained that idea for three or four weeks. But as it went along, it wasn't so hands-off. In that person's mind, we already had a factory in California and trucks. But we really wanted it to be organic growth."

So they went with tradition and borrowed money from family and friends.

"They all gave us a small chunk at low interest with lots of time to pay it off," Marchildon said. "They then gave us a big smile and patted us on the back. They said, 'Go, girls!'"

They started with $20,000 and a line of credit and credit cards from Chittenden Bank, which Marchildon secured by putting up her house.

"Before that, most of the money was coming out of my husband's paycheck," she said.

Developing The Business

Marchildon and Cheney found that Burlington offered strong support to new companies. The Vermont Manufacturing Extension Center (VMEC), for example, helped them refine their production techniques. Later, with a grant from the Community Loan Fund, they did a four-day intensive with two VMEC consultants to learn how to reduce flow and waste and refine their process even further. As a result, they were able to considerably lower prices.

"When we started it took about four hours to make a bag," Marchildon said. "Now it takes 24 minutes. So we're able to drop the price. They used to run from $88 retail for the big ones to the smaller ones at $44. Now they're $29 up to $59 unless it's a custom bag."

Vermont Teddy Bear kicked in with information about sewing machines and processes.

"We've been so blessed that VMEC and business owners in the community have been willing to talk to us about their growth and their challenges," Cheney said.

"That might be a difference between men and women in business," Marchildon said. "Men don't want to admit what they don't know. We're very willing to admit what we don't know."

"And men are very willing to help the women who admit they don't know,' Cheney said.

In the Fall of 2007, the partners took on two angel investors and invested in professional equipment. Then they had to decide which direction they wanted to take.

The Laura Bush Story

In February of 2007, Flashbags got an order from the Case Foundation for bags that featured images of African children using PlayPumps - the idea is that as children play on a merry-go-round, they are also pumping clean water from a well. The Case Foundation is the umbrella organization for PlayPumps International.

"Our marketing strategies are entirely guerrilla," Marchildon said. "We have no budget. We just put cards in the bags and send them to everyone we can think of. So we sent one to a woman in Washington, DC, and she started ordering. First we did a bag with pictures from her wedding, and then one with these pictures of African kids playing with water pumps. We didn't know the story, but we called her up and asked, 'What's going on in this picture?' She said, 'Well, I work for PlayPumps International, and they raise money to build these pumps that generate water for communities and hold them in tanks so people don't have to walk six miles."

The first PlayPump bag was sent to the company's director, who was in South Africa at the time.

"We had a conference call," Marchildon said. "She said, 'It's an amazing marketing opportunity. I walk around with the bag and people ask me about it and it provides a perfect way for me to tell them about the nonprofit I work for. I'd really like to talk to you about partnering. We can use the bags for marketing and raising funds.'"

Marchildon and Cheney made some bags, put them on their Web site and donated a portion of the profit back to PlayPumps.

"That led to relationships with other nonprofit, and that also led us to Laura Bush," Marchildon said. "She was given one as a gift from Mrs Case of the Case Foundation, right before a trip to Africa. She put in a rush order for as many as she could get in 36 hours. Of course, she was thinking we have shelves and shelves of standing inventory. And we had zero. We stayed up for 36 hours straight and made 55 bags on home sewing machines."

"We called our friends at midnight to ask if they wanted to come in and punch grommets," Cheney said. "We told them we had beer."

They also called a reporter from the Burlington Free Press, Michelle Edelbaum, who decided to write a story.

When the partners finished making the bags, they sprinted with them to Fedex and then retired to a celebratory party. That's when things got interesting.

"We got a call saying that Laura Bush's press secretary, Sally McDonough, was furious because we knew too much about the delivery of the bags," Cheney said. "Michelle had asked us, 'What's the route?' We said we were shipping to PlayPumps, where they would be picked up by courier and taken to the White House. That turned out to be too much information. Like these two women making paper bags in Vermont are going to try and bomb the president's wife! McDonough told PlayPumps, 'Tell those girls to keep their mouths shut.' So the Case Foundation called us and said, 'We will not be picking up the bags. I'm so sorry. We should have told you not to say anything."

Marchildon called Edelbaum at the Free Press and told her there was no longer a story.

"And she's thinking, 'Yes, it's a story,'" Marchildon said.

Edelbaum, now an editor at Eating Well Magazine, said she wasn't sure what she actually told the White House, but the headline she and her editors were kicking around was, "White House Squashes Vermont Entrepreneurship." The story was supposed to run on the front page and the deadline was looming when the White House finally relented and agreed to take the bags.

"It was a great story," Edelbaum told me. "This little Vermont company noticed by the White House. It was a big deal."

"I don't know why they were upset," Marchildon said. "It was the nicest thing ever said about the Bushes in Vermont."

Marchildon and Cheney said they were sorry they had put PlayPumps in any kind of jeopardy.

"It was pretty intense," Marchildon said. "We felt at the end of the day that the White House didn't have control of the story. They didn't like the fact that they were being told what they were doing. They like to create their own press and their own spin, even though it was a totally positive story. Six or eight months later, we got a handwritten letter from Laura Bush saying, 'I love the bag. What a wonderful idea.' We don't really know what happened to the bags. They didn't go to Africa as far as we know. I think the Case Foundation kept them and gave them out."

Marchildon and Cheney started researching other national nonprofits with an eye to finding potential partners.

"We wanted to partner with anything that helps women and children to have less difficult lives," Marchildon said. "We weren't looking for the prostate cancer foundations. That's how we found Women for Women International."

Mistakes Were Made

Doing business on the fly like that, Marchildon and Cheney made other mistakes besides the Laura Bush debacle. Their biggest one was not knowing how to budget.

"When we did get investors, we got a sizable chunk from them," Cheney said. "And we were getting orders - Laura Bush, Mrs Case said she wanted 400 for an event next week. We got these really high-end clients who wanted bags overnight. It was a tease. We hired two full-time people, bought the machines right before Christmas, beefed up, had all this outgoing cash, had a great season. And then it was January and no one was buying bags."

"And the season, on paper, wasn't as great as it seemed," Marchildon said. "Profit was not what we thought it would be."

"It happened so quickly," Cheney said. "We grew way too quickly. And in January, where are the orders coming from? And we had been so busy making bags, we hadn't been working marketing and sales."

"We were very unfocused in what our marketing efforts would be." Marchildon said. "We were trying anything. We didn't have a defined outreach - it was 'the world.' And we were too small to take that on."

"We had to lay people off," Cheney said. "It was a tough winter and we downsized a lot and began to crawl back up from the bottom. We had to define our marketing. We had great leads, but people were saying, 'I want 200 bags,' or 'Love the bags but the price is too high.' They were looking for bulk discounts. We couldn't support that."

The partners went back to VMS to improve their systems, and they refocused their marketing.

"We started working with a business coach," Marchildon said. "We had to figure out what a marketing plan is and how to define our mission and to have real definition. Otherwise we would get distracted and be pulled in too many directions."

"Now, every first quarter, we go back to our business plan," Cheney said. "We use the time to restructure, define our weaknesses and redefine our future focus."

The Boston Globe

As the Boston Red Sox were creeping up on their second World Series win, someone suggested putting the front page of The Boston Globe on a bag if they won. So the partners called Toby Leith, the Globe's licensing director.

"It's quite a story," Leith said. "We had a front page on The Globe with the headline 'The Best.' They wanted to put it on a bag. I said, 'Sounds like a plan.' That was the beginning."

Marchildon and Cheney moved more than $10,000 worth of Red Sox bags in a month.

"We made them a week after the series," Marchildon said. "We sold all the bags in Vermont. Sold a bunch on line. It was a 'Made in Vermont' story and we hit. Everyone was getting ready to buy Christmas presents. That took care of December, but then we had a sales dip in January. We were counting on the Patriots to keep us from diving into an empty pool, but the Patriots lost. So we called The New York Times and sent samples. They loved the product, but they needed to have a guaranteed sales projection. And it needed to be significant. Plus, we had to pay for the license. So it was a huge risk. We've had that same conversation with Life Magazine, National Geographic and The New Yorker. We went to DC to speak to National Geographic. The guy there loved the product. But he said, 'You need to give us a $50,000 guarantee.' And we're like, 'We'll be in touch.'

The Globe didn't require a guarantee, Leith said.

"We have an online store where we sell a variety of products, so we have a lot of experience creating revenue streams out of durable goods," Leith said. "I can't say we've made a ton of money with Flashbags, but it's been wonderful to watch their business spread and grow viral. They create and sell and we get a piece of the action."

OBAMAMANIA

During the 2008 campaign, the partners again called Leith.

"They said, 'Hey, Toby, great picture of Barack Obama. Can we use your photo?'" Leith said. "I said, 'Absolutely not. You need permission from Barack Obama."

So they went looking for a way to legally use Obama's picture.

"The Democratic party was totally all for it," Cheney said. "'Go for it!!' they said. 'Market our image as long as it's in the public domain.'"

This could have backfired. Artist Shepard Fairey, who created several signature Obama posters, is currently being sued by the Associated Press for using an AP image. But this worked out differently.

"Obama was, 'Go! Go! Go! Get my name out there,'" Cheney said. "The second round, we purchased a picture from the AP. We signed an agreement that they were not giving us legal rights to sell Obama's face, but to use the image."

"It's really complicated when you get into celebrities," Marchildon said. "They have to give you permission to make money off their faces. We had to sign a waiver that we wouldn't sue the AP if the Obama campaign came after us. But of course they didn't. And Michelle has the bag, and Oprah has the bag, and Caroline Kennedy has a bag, and the Smithsonian Institution has an Obama bag in their collection. It was a pretty exciting time."

Being part of a grassroots movement felt right to Marchildon and Cheney.

"One of our hardest things is to adopt the profit mind or the business mentality," Marchildon said. "This was one where it wasn't an issue. We were capitalizing on Obama's fame, but it was OK. The people carrying the bags were just wildly enthusiastic about being able to showcase their support. So it was a beautiful way for us to feel that we were not just capitalistic. We were allowing people to support a movement in a very unique way."

The partners couldn't make the bags fast enough to meet the demand. With only 55 days left until the election, they solved the problem by creating a limited edition, numbering each bag, and raising the price.

"It worked," Marchildon said. "People were asking, 'What number am I getting? I want this number or that number.' We made a couple of thousand. We declared we were only going to make 2,008. and we're still making them -- we have a few left. With all Obama merchandise, we sold 2,000 to 2,500 units."

For a while, Leith had the bag on the Globe's Web site. Predictably, it became controversial.

"Within three days we were getting volumes of calls asking, 'Where's the McCain Flash bag? Was this an indication that the Boston Globe was in the tank for Obama?'" Leith said. "I gently explained that the Globe has editorial positions, and we were working with a company that for reasons I can't explain chose not to make a McCain Flash bag. But we pulled the bag off the site because it was getting significant mention. It's an example of the fun involved with this company."

Expansion And Growth

Given that Marchildon and Cheney want to maintain strict quality control, it isn't likely that they'll be outsourcing production to China any time soon. And they don't want thousands of people walking around with identical images on their bags, so that leaves out mass production.

What, then, are the opportunities for small, controlled growth?

"We've had people inquire about 10,000 bags, and we've told them they're talking to the wrong company," Marchildon said. "We know what our sweet spot is. If they're asking for 10,000 bags, they clearly don't know what our prices are. Volume is astronomically expensive when you get into handmade products."

Flashbags is shooting for a market of organizations and entities who want 50 to 500 bags for promotional marketing and branding.

"We just did an order for Redbook Magazine," Marchildon said. "They want their top sales executives to carry a bag to meet with potential advertisers. That's great. We want the targeted special gifted or promotional products. That's bulk wholesale, but with our new priceline we've eliminated the bulk. It takes the same time to make every bag. We can't make them faster. Our material costs are so low, it's a labor-driven product."

Developing more licenses is an immediate goal.

"We just did an order for Graceland," Marchildon said, showing me a bag displaying a photo of the young Elvis on stage. "If you want to sell Elvis products, you have to go through them. We have a license arrangement with the Shelburne Art Museum. We're starting with a small number of paintings."

Maintaining a "diverse" staff is also a priority.

"We want to have a diverse employee base, drawing skills from both the refugee community and the homeless community," Marchildon said. "Through a pilot program with the Community on Temporary Shelter last year, we hired a woman who was in a shelter. She's been working for us since. She now has a two bedroom apartment and has taken on almost a managerial production role in terms of working the floor. She's added a great spice to our workspace. We work with a diverse community of artists, licensing agencies, museums and nonprofits and we want our employee base and the future of the company to reflect that same diversity and that same social commitment."

The partners will be working next to upgrade their Web site to make it easier to purchase merchandise. Then they'll start paying closer attention to "key words" like "wearable art" to ensure that Flashbags come up high in Google searches.

After that, they're not so sure about the future. The truth is, the company has expanded so rapidly that they're still catching their collective breaths.

"The last four years have been an exhausting whirlwind," Cheney said.

"It's been a huge undertaking," Marchildon said. "You think you're going to go a few years and reach some stability and do a 9-to-5 work week, but you don't. Especially with a successful business. It's a long way to get to a plateau. It's been exhausting. The hours keep growing and the responsibility keeps growing. We wrestle with maintaining quality of life and perspective. And for both of us, it's not about the money. It's about growth and success."

"The business has its own personality, and that's very important to us," Cheney said. "We've been resistant to anyone taking it over. When we took on our investors, there was an informal offer on the table within an hour of getting the money. And we said, 'We're sorry, but we're going to keep going.' The potential is so enormous, but we're only willing to grow so fast, and we only have limited resources and time."

Marchildon said that she and Cheney are trying to figure out what the company might look like in the future, but it's all still a gray area.

"Laura and I both share the same vision for the future, but in terms of organizational restructuring and such, none of that has occurred or is defined," Marchildon said. "We're in a long process of figuring out how that's going to go down. But you can say that Laura and I are equal partners and moving forward with the same vision and intention of growing the company to its fullest potential. Flashbags is going to be thriving and growing and grooving on in the same socially conscious and enthusiastic and fun way that we have from day one."

Joyce Marcel is a freelance writer and author from Dummerston. Her new book, a collection of her columns called, "A Thousand Words or Less," is now available. Learn more about her and how to order the book at her Web site: www.joycemarcel.com.