Roxanne Swaminathan’s eyes focus on a prototype of a messenger bag. She follows the stiches with her fingers.

Nearby, in the tiny basement workspace across from the 16th Street Bart station, Steve Wong pushes vinyl though a large gray sewing machine. Side strap messenger bags are popular in the city. But Wong’s Lovelife bags are unique and can be spotted swerving through traffic on Market Street, underneath watermarked bars in the Mission district or chilling on a picnic blanket in Golden Gate Park. While some are the entire brainchild of Wong, others are customized to meet the purchaser’s taste and needs.

Wong began his business while a student at SF State. He dumpster dove for material and assembled each bag from his bedroom while still working at REI. But today, he’s ready to move on to a new challenge. At a Bon Voyage Blowout Party held in April, he turned the Lovelife bag business over to Swaminathan, his protégé who has worked for him for about a year now.

These two young entrepreneurs show that graduating students aren’t necessarily doomed to desk jobs or working retail downtown – being a slave to that signature on the bottom of the receipt. But Wong’s success doesn’t just show an alternative way to decorate a messenger bag. It also carries a message that an individual can still start a small, creative business on a shoulder strap. All that is needed is creativity, talent, a thread of luck and the desire to throw the tie to the wind.

The success of Wong’s company is similar to other profitable business plans that give the customer the opportunity to personalize a product the way they want it. The customer sorts through a selection of 300 different fabrics. Wong goes to work with Velcro, recycled vinyl, straps and colored thread. Two to four hours later, with the help of a template, an original bag that embodies both the style of the customer and the stamp of the designer – that increasingly recognizable Lovelife patch – hangs on a hook.

“We are always there to advise them and access what they want and need it for,” Wong says. “I start there.”

Christina Peter doesn’t dig the mundane. She was invited down to their studio to go through the albums of little square fabric samples. She liked all of them and ultimately was unable to decide, so she left the decision to Wong. He presented her with a lovely pink and white bag. Even though the color isn’t her favorite, she wears her Lovelife almost every time she leaves the front door.

Peter and other friends of Wong pay full price for each bag they purchase. Even his parents don’t get a discount. Wong believes that giving freebies is the worst thing a DIY business can do. He says that even though it would be cool to make something for a friend, not charging full-price would be destroying the survival of the business.

Wong has done so well that he has decided to take a break and plans to move to Taiwan for a couple of years to travel.

“I’ve had so much responsibility,” Wong says while running a bag through a sewing machine that he will sell at his goodbye celebration. “It’s just time to be free for a while.”

Now it will be Swaminathan’s chance to work hard and learn the ropes of running her own business. Wong is teaching her all he can in the meantime. She needed to finish 100 practice bags, some of which were sold at the goodbye party for Wong. Soon she will be able to quit her Buffalo Exchange counter job and begin cultivating her own artistic statement through the Lovelife bag business, stitching a name for herself.

CONTACT SEACRIST AT LSEACRIS@SFSU.EDU