Songmont

Songmont began with a very ordinary design failure. Fu Song, 付崧, needed to carry a 15-inch laptop to early video calls with colleagues in the United States. She was working at Google, and the bags available to her seemed to divide into two unhelpful categories: fashionable bags that could not do the job, and black computer backpacks she did not want to wear.

So in 2013 she drew the bag she needed.

Fu had studied at the Academy of Arts and Design at Tsinghua University. Her mother, Fu Yulan, 付玉兰, was a retired engineer who could sew. Together they spent more than a week making an embroidered emerald-green tote. Fu posted it to her social circle. Friends began asking for their own.

That first tote is the useful origin of Songmont because it contains almost everything the brand would later become. It came from irritation with an everyday object. It was designed around use. It was built through a relationship between two generations of women.

For years, Songmont existed alongside her technology career. Chinese reporting dates the brand to 2013, while Brandstar says it entered major e-commerce platforms in 2018. Fu left Google in 2020, at 40, and committed to the company full time. Her husband and co-founder Wang Jie, 王捷, brought another design perspective — Fu concentrated on products that worked, Wang on translating Chinese aesthetic ideas into a contemporary language.

The early family workshop became a professional bag company, though the family structure did not disappear. Fu’s mother became what the company calls employee number zero. She assembled a group of women from Liwang village in Wanrong County, Shanxi, many of them over 60 and skilled in domestic craft. As production professionalised, this so-called grandmother team moved into repairs and small leather objects.

The Shanxi connection also became more visible. Fu and Wang both come from the province, and Songmont now describes the colours, structures and weathered surfaces of Shanxi’s wooden architecture as part of its aesthetic source. These are later expressions of the brand rather than the reason the first bag existed. The first reason was simpler: a woman wanted a better way to carry her computer.

Songmont’s current language of slowness follows from that practical beginning. Fu told Harper’s Bazaar China that design starts with dissatisfaction and need. Brandstar reported that the Basket bag was still being adjusted four years after launch — reading user feedback, revisiting colour, material, proportion and weight, on the reasoning that even 50 grams a year would matter over time.

That makes Songmont relevant now. Its international appeal can look like the arrival of a polished accessible-luxury brand. Its origin is closer to product design than fashion mythology: identify an unresolved frustration, make an object, give it to people, and keep changing it after they use it.