We’re a mother and daughter team from Kansas City. Well, initially. Since high school, I, Jennifer, the daughter, have lived in some random places around the world, the most exotic of which was Southeast Asia…and that’s where this story begins.
I was in a tiny store in Hanoi, Vietnam admiring a few wonderful handbags with embroidery on them when a woman came out of the back room, barefoot and in her lounging clothes. She smiled and explained to me that these were embroidered by hand by the women in her family. I asked where they did all their work and she pointed at the ceiling, “upstairs, of course.” I was baffled! You see, this store/workshop/home was about 15 feet long by 8 feet wide. How did these incredible works of art come from a small room upstairs, a room which was also their bedroom, their kitchen and their TV room? I must have had a bewildered look on my face as Dung just started laughing. Dung is now a great friend and, over a number of lunches, has walked me through the art of hand-embroidery and the sacred place it holds in many families who have passed it down from generation to generation.
Well, as you might guess, I bought a number of those handbags and gave them as gifts to my mom, my aunts and my grandmothers. A few months later, my mom called me saying how many compliments all of them had been getting on their handbags and that their friends wanted to know where they could get one. Yearning to figure out a way to remain in touch with Southeast Asia, we both felt that this was a calling and a path we had to at least entertain. We went back to Vietnam a few months later, to that one little corner store, and JL Lane was formed.
