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THE BUSBEE BAG
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Juliana Owen living in Chicago, with deep family roots in Seagrove, North Carolina— home to generations of Owen family potters dating back to the early 1700s. Her work bridges sculpture and structure, drawing from architecture and intentional design. The Busbee Bag is her modern expression of that lineage, honoring both her heritage and namesake.
@julianaowen
The Busbee Bag - Juliana Owen
Meet The Busbee Bag, a luxury handbag by Juliana Owen. Its flat design performs structural metamorphosis, folding into a minimalist fashion statement that embodies intentional artisanship and engineering. Designed in Boston and manufactured in Chicago, The Busbee Bag represents each era of Owen’s artistic evolution. It launched on December 2, 2025.
Owen is a 23-year-old designer and founder from Seagrove, North Carolina. She lives in Chicago – not far from her manufacturer – and holds a bachelor’s degree from Boston College. Design is in her blood. She descends from a line of acclaimed North Carolina folk potters stretching back seven generations, and her ceramic pieces first appeared on her dad’s storefront before she was a teenager. Raised next door to her father’s pottery studio, she learned early to think structurally and evaluate objects in multiple dimensions.
In the design of the Busbee Bag, Owen embraces the innate artistry and craftsmanship of the practical, unpretentious objects her ancestors created, which is a habit she inherited from her namesake. Juliana Busbee (1876-1962), after whom both Owen and her bags are named, was a designer whose curatorial and business acumen reignited demand for utilitarian folk ceramics. Co-founding Jugtown Pottery with her husband Jacques Busbee, she hired local North Carolina masters, including Owen’s great-grandfather, to produce wares for her Greenwich Village tea room and shop. Busbee introduced their typically functional salt-glazed pieces to a rapt urban market.
Owen hopes to perpetuate Busbee’s legacy of transformative design. Her handbags convert from 2D shapes to 3D vessels, requiring only a few folds and the active participation of the wearer. She also shares Busbee’s adaptability and market sensitivity, branding her product under the Busbee name instead of her own both to honor her artistic heritage and maintain her flexibility as a creative professional. Appraising herself more as a general designer than a fashion designer, Owen prizes the freedom to pivot her brand to other forms as the market responds to her work – she refuses to limit herself to handbags. To ensure that they can be attributed to their designer, though, each bag bears “Juliana Owen” on the front flap, much like how her ancestors marked their pottery with signature stamps. And she wants her designs, rooted in Busbee's innovation and her family’s structural awareness, to feature in galleries and stores across major American cities.
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Juliana Busbee
The original design of The Busbee Bag emerged under a tight mid-year deadline for Owen’s senior art thesis in architecture studies. She wanted her bag to draw from the shapes and forms of her ancestors’ pottery, but lacked the sewing skills to conventionally animate her vision. Relying on the material sensibility and 3-D thinking abilities her family inculcated in her, Owen engineered the foldable model.
Launching it required her to flex both parts of her newly minted Boston College degree. She entered the Carroll School of Management as a freshman to study marketing, but after a transformative first-semester elective called Urban Design for Complexity and Sustainability revived her childhood interest in design, she tacked on an architecture studies major in the studio art department. Her multidisciplinary coursework honed her diverse creative skillset, which she deployed in her promotional efforts. Challenging herself to daily posts during November 2025, Owen executed a TikTok campaign that garnered 2.8 million views and 154,000 likes before the bag even went live. Her most viral video poking fun at the lab-grown diamond engagement ring trend exemplifies her ingenuity and cheek, as viewers swarmed the comments to respond to her critique and demand details on the stylish bag she’s clutching. “Thank you! I designed it myself,” she quips in a video-reply to a comment asking where it was from.
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Juliana Owen
Owen’s triumph in the Strakosch Venture Competition, which provides equity-free funding to Boston College student-founders developing start-ups, made the launch financially possible. After designing the prototype for her thesis, she spent countless hours refining her product and preparing her pitch to great success – out of ten scrupulously screened finalists, a judging panel of business executives and experts awarded her second place. The $5000 prize helped her cover initial production costs. At the same time, Owen was serving as co-president of the Women Innovators Network of Boston College, which fueled her entrepreneurial spirit by introducing her to inspirational female founders. Some even contributed to the bag’s development.
The Busbee Bag is the physical embodiment of Owen’s artistic lineage, creative ambition, and relentless enterprise. It’s entirely her. Steeped in the pioneering grit of the rural South and enriched by the dynamism of major American cities, it kicks off a design career to watch out for.
Caroline Grimes | carolinegrimes99@gmail.com