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Tami Lange hawks Save the Girls purses on TCS, a Canadian home shopping channel. Lange's company makes purses with a thin plastic screen for easy, instant access to a cell phone or tablet. Photo courtesy of Tami Lange.
Daniel Neman is a retail business writer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items.
BELLEVILLE — Whenever she appears on the QVC home shopping network television channel, Tami Lange figures she will sell 5,000 purses a day.
That's an average day. She once sold 20,000 purses in a single day on QVC, but that was around Christmas when sales are typically higher.
Lange, 54, sees such success on the shows because her purses have a gimmick: Each one has a pocket for a cell phone — larger totes have room for a tablet — with a slim piece of clear plastic for instant access to the touch screen.
You don't have to take the phone out of the purse to use it. It is always ready and available on the back of the purse for immediate browsing or calling.
Lange has a background in marketing, and she knows a good story when she tells one. Still, the tale of how she happened to create the product is too good not to tell again.
It was 2017, and she and her family were in Branson for a family reunion. Two of her daughters, teenagers at the time, managed to lose their cell phones in the same week. In frustration, she complained to her sister-in-law.
The sister-in-law said she never loses her phone. She reached into her bra and pulled it out.
The next day, Lange went canoeing. She used her phone inside a waterproof plastic bag.
"Sitting in a canoe, the lightbulb went on. Why don't we put that in the backside of a purse?" she said.
The idea was the proverbial lightning in the proverbial bottle. She soon put her idea out on Alibaba.com, and the next day she had 17 companies bidding to produce the purses for her.
All the companies were in southern China, within one hour of each other. As soon as she could, she flew to China — she learned she needed a visa in just enough time to get one — and came back with a contract.
Six months later, Lange was at the Academy Awards with her purses. They were included in the 500 gift bags handed out to celebrities attending the ceremony.
Lange, who has the approximate energy of an F5 tornado, founded her company on her 50th birthday. It was a gamble, she said, and before she went ahead with it she asked her family's permission.
She said, "Guys, this is a huge risk. I'm taking your college money and investing it in purses."
"They were all on board," she said.
She called the company Save the Girls, partly because her daughters had lost their phones and partly as a joking reference to the bra that held her sister-in-law's phone.
When she thought of the name, "I laughed so hard. I was just bawling, crying, because I thought it was the funniest name ever," she said.
Her sister-in-law had cancer at the time, and the cancer is now in remission. Lange gives more than 10% of her profits to the American Cancer Society for research on breast cancer.
Two of her daughters, now out of college, work for her, but all five of her children have sold purses. The youngest sold $18,000 worth of purses at a single wholesale show while he was still in high school.
The purses now come in 16 lightweight styles and a multitude of colors. The best-seller is the Captiva, which has an outer pocket for glasses, slots for 12 credit cards inside, a zippered pocket for change and enough room for several small items.
As with all Save the Girls purses, it is made of vegan leather and comes with an adjustable shoulder strap that can be worn across the body. It sells for $59.99.
Save the Girls purses are now available in 2,000 stores around the country, including several regional chains. That number essentially has not changed since the beginning of the COVID pandemic. While the line continues to be carried by new retailers, other stores have failed and have had to close.
For instance, the purses used to be sold at 400 hospital gift shops But most closed because of the pandemic, and many have not reopened. And she was ready to ship to more than 200 Stein Mart department stores on a Monday, but the company announced it was closing on the Friday before.
That was close. As a relatively small supplier, her company does not get paid by large corporations until after the purses have sold.
She was also hit by the shipping problems that have plagued American business over the past 2½ years. She keeps an inventory of 60,000 purses at her Belleville office, so she was not affected by delays, but she did suffer the increased cost of shipping.
It used to cost her $4,000 to bring each container from China to Illinois. Last year, it was $28,000. She shipped 10 containers last year, costing her an extra $240,000.
"So that was bad," she said.
Still, everything is looking up in the world of touch-screen purses, even though competitors are now copying her idea.
Last year, Save the Girls sold 150,000 purses, and a major expansion is imminent. Lange is negotiating with a national chain of department stores to carry the purses. A well-known St. Louis chain — she can't say which one — will begin selling them on Monday. And she plans to be selling them in Australia and Canadian stores beginning next year.
Of course, she already sells them on the Canadian shopping channel TSC. Of course she does.
Canada has a much smaller population than the United States. She only sells 1,500 purses a day on the channel there.
Get the latest local business news delivered FREE to your inbox weekly.
Daniel Neman is a retail business writer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items.
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Tami Lange hawks Save the Girls purses on TCS, a Canadian home shopping channel. Lange's company makes purses with a thin plastic screen for easy, instant access to a cell phone or tablet. Photo courtesy of Tami Lange.
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