Inside Graphic Image and GiGi New York’s Unique Manufacturing Facility

Arthur Zaczkiewicz

17 December 2024 at 8:00 am·8-min read

Santa’s workshop is real and can be found just east of New York City in the center of Long Island.

Home to Graphic Image and handbag-maker GiGi New York, this unassuming manufacturing facility is also home to 100 employees who painstakingly produce finely crafted and handmade leather goods — from calendar books and photo albums to designer handbags and travel accessories. They even make dog collars and leashes. And, in recent years, have found a profitable niche in creating leather-bound coffee table books.

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Here, Santa is Tom Glazer, president of Graphic Image and GiGi New York. Sans a long white beard, Glazer does have smiling eyes and a go-to attitude that is contagious. During a tour of the facility after the Thanksgiving holiday, WWD found employees busy filling Cyber Monday online orders. The factory floor was decorated for Christmas by the employees, making it look and feel like Santa’s workshop. Working in teams, employees were busy at different points of product production. Some were stamping books while others were dying and shaping leather. No one was idle.

The manufacturing facility also has an outlet store where visitors can see live handbag production. Also decorated for the holidays, the store offers a variety of products.

Attendees of the annual WWD Apparel and Retail CEO Summit will recognize Glazer and his team as the folks who hand out personalized datebooks and journals in the networking area of the event.

Founded by Bennett Glazer in 1969, Graphic Image started out creating diaries for Brooks Brothers. By 1977, Bennett transitioned to running Graphic Image full-time, expanding the business beyond diaries using his leather bookbinding expertise. In the early 1980s, Tom Glazer took over, along with his sister Carol, growing relationships with key department stores. Despite industry shifts and tough periods like the bankruptcies of numerous department stores and the rise of digital organizers, Graphic Image managed not only to survive but to innovate, forming pivotal partnerships with luxury retailers such as Tiffany & Co. and Bergdorf Goodman.

Significant developments during the 2000s included starting to manufacture handbags under the sub-brand GiGi New York and embracing modern marketing strategies like using bloggers. The company also ventured into producing leather-bound coffee table books, returning to its original roots in book design.

Today, Graphic Image is a key player in luxury leather goods, supported by top-tier partnerships and exclusive collections. As the company looks to the future, it seeks strategic partners to continue building on its legacy.

Three Focus Areas

Glazer said that while the parent brand, Graphic Image, was established in 1969, the handbag and ladies’ accessories brand, GiGi New York, was established in 2011. “And there is a relatively undeclared category, which we can call contract manufacturing, mainly for domestically made leather goods. This still comes under the Graphic Image name.”

Glazer explained that “contract manufacturing for the past decade or more has been about our America factory, whether the ‘Made In’ identification was important or not.”

“Tiffany & Co. has been a 45-year customer for custom products we only make in-house,” he told WWD. “In the late 2000s/teens, Shinola enlisted us to create a domestically produced lady’s handbag line, at a time when Made in America was central to their brand. The last time a large-scale contract manufacturing required the cooperation of our Asian partners was the creation of the Victoria’s Secret Airport accessory stores (2009). Custom-made in America is still important to other retail partners, like T.Anthony, but most of the contract manufacturing customers today are simply those who enjoy the convenience of having a custom product made for them locally, without high minimums and without having to go offshore. It remains to be seen if this will change with a new president.”

Regarding the recently proposed tariffs and their impact on the industry, Glazer said he will be solely focusing on custom production for his top retailers and brands.

He said for GiGi New York, the company set out to establish that a European-quality handbag could be made in the U.S. by its factory. “We established ourselves quickly back in 2012 by aligning with a new marketing phenomenon, that the industry was slow to embrace — bloggers [today called influencers].”

Glazer said sales soared with the help of these “unknown advocates,” who were soon to become stars all their own. “When their success put them out of our affordability range, we decided to align with our traditional Graphic Image customer: the premiere department store with whom we never engaged with GiGi,” he said, adding that this was occurring at a time “when these customers were increasingly looking to enlist vendors who could drop ship.”

“Recognition of our quality and experience servicing their websites gained us quick acceptance, even with a store brand as discretionary as Neiman Marcus, today our largest handbag customer,” Glazer said, noting that the performance of the bags, “here, at Saks and most recently at Nordstrom, has delivered on their promise.”

The Art of Reinvention

Glazer is proud to say Graphic Image has been a master at reinventing itself. “GiGi was just one of the steps it took to ensure its longevity,” he said. “For over the last 50 years, one of our date agendas remains the top-selling product in the company. But as a category, a new leader has emerged as the primary driver of sales and that is leather-bound coffee table books. This also includes leather-bound cookbooks and classic children’s books, sold with the promise of sharing with future generations, creating a future heirloom.”

The company president said the Graphic Image business was always a mixture of specialty and mass production. “’Specialty’ because our appeal to the luxury market often involved a level of customization allowing them to call the product their own — like making leather in Tiffany blue for Tiffany,” he said. “And ‘mass’ production in the sense that large numbers of a product are produced, even though they are often broken down into smaller lots. The production of our diaries is like a high-end necktie factory, which, in a day produces many customer’s products simply by continually changing the material on the same production line. While the special-edition books are anything but a mass production process, they all follow a similar path, and it is the experience of the artisans here that allows for an even workflow for production.”

Glazer said before COVID-19, the company was enlisted to run large volumes of custom handbags for specific customers. “Doing this while also managing the production of a variety of high-quality GiGi New York bags proved very challenging,” he said. “We had to pick one or the other and we chose to focus on our brand. This is not to completely dismiss the possibility of one day embracing a new volume opportunity, but it would have to work without disturbing the ‘short-line production’ model of production we have now that allowed our quality standards to rise and occupy a unique niche in the overall market.”

Sometimes dubbed the “day bag” for discerning buyers of elite European brands, GiGi New York has carved out a niche in their closets despite their penchant for pricier labels during evenings out. Recognized for quality and value, Glazer said his bags appeal not only to a broad demographic but now span a multigenerational market.

This holiday season, Glazer said the brand aims to broaden the GiGi customer’s view of our brand, leveraging its unique position in the market with its extension into home and gift products — a space unrivaled by other brands. Originally endorsed by young bloggers, the GiGi customer has matured, he said adding that women in their forties now see GiGi New York as both aspirational and affordable, with an expanding range of offerings. Adding Graphic Image products in various types of leather to the GiGi website has shown promising results, distinguishing our brand further in the highly competitive handbag market.

Forging Strong Retail Partnerships

Glazer said his company’s relationship with retail partners “ranks as one of our most valuable assets.” He said some partnerships date back to 1980, enabling the launch of the Graphic Image handbag line on prestigious platforms such as Saks and Neiman Marcus — achievements rare for new brands. Glazer said existing relationships facilitated effortless expansions to retailers such as Mark & Graham, Pottery Barn, West Elm and Williams Sonoma. In the evolving drop ship era, Glazer said proven execution prowess opens doors for our brands everywhere.

The company president also noted that the mobility of buyers across the industry further enhances the brand’s reach. Initially a primary vendor for Polo Home, the movement of buyers to other companies has led to expansions with Anthropologie and Serena & Lily. “We continuously reinvent and respond to our clients’ needs,” Glazer said, adding that one innovation was special-edition books, starting with a bespoke leather-bound title for Restoration Hardware and expanding to custom collections for Orvis and Neiman Marcus, with the latter also extending collaboration into their top-selling handbag designs.

“Such ventures could not be executed without our in-house manufacturing, giving us a significant advantage that we sometimes take for granted,” Glazer said.

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