Songmont Bags 山下有松

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.

Where is Songmont from?

China. The brand was founded in 2013 by Fu Song, who is from Shanxi province in the north, and the Shanxi connection is not decorative — the first tote was sewn there by Fu and her mother. The operating business has since grown well beyond the province, but Shanxi remains where the brand began and where part of the work is still done.

Where are Songmont bags made?

In China. The part that is documented is Wanrong County, Shanxi, where Fu’s mother and a group of older women from the surrounding villages do hand-finishing and repairs — the “grandmother team” the company calls employee number zero. Brandstar’s interview with the company describes that arrangement directly.

Where the volume production happens is a different question, and MEI cannot answer it. No factory names, addresses or contract manufacturers have been obtained, and there is no documentation of which models are finished where. A figure circulating online places the supply chain in the Guangdong delta; MEI could not trace it to a source worth citing, so it is not published here.

Songmont bags: every model and what it costs

Read from the brand’s own US store on 15 August 2026. Prices move, and Songmont quotes different figures in different markets — an EU shopper sees other numbers.

Luna 月弯包 — the crescent

Model	Price
Luna, vegan leather	$219
Small Luna	$329
Medium Luna Hobo	$359
Luna, cowhide	$389
Large Luna Hobo	$459
Extra Large Luna	$569

Yore 循迹 — the commuter line

Model	Price
Small Yore Trunk	$400
Small Yore Duffle	$699
Medium Yore Duffle	$749
Large Yore Bowling	$758
Large Yore Tote	$659
Extra Large Yore Hobo	$689

The cheapest bag in the catalogue is the $219 vegan-leather Luna; the cheapest in cowhide is the $269 Mini Song. The most expensive is the Large Shan Briefcase at $829. Accessories — charms, card holders, AirPods cases — run from about $30 and are not counted here.

Is Songmont a luxury brand?

Not by price. Read on the official store on 15 August 2026, bags run from USD 219 for a vegan-leather Luna to USD 829 for the Large Shan Briefcase, with the cheapest cowhide bag at USD 269. That is contemporary premium — the band occupied by Polène and Coach, well beneath European luxury leather goods.

Those are the figures Songmont quotes to a shopper in the United States. The store prices by market, and a European visitor is shown a different set: the same Large Luna Hobo listed at USD 459 in the US market came back at USD 410 in the Austrian one. The conclusion does not move — it is the same shelf either way — but no single number here is the price everybody sees.

The brand’s own language is about slowness and repair rather than status, which is consistent with where the prices sit.

Is Songmont a good brand?

The most useful independent assessment is Tanner Leatherstein’s, because he cuts the bags apart rather than photographing them. His verdict is split, and the split is the point: the Luna’s leather, hardware and construction came out ahead of its price, while the cheaper Chocolate bag was judged poor material that felt cheap for what it cost.

So the honest answer is that quality varies by line rather than holding across the brand. Buy the line, not the label. MEI has not conducted its own teardown and is reporting his.

Songmont versus Polène

The comparison gets searched because the two brands genuinely occupy the same shelf: soft, architectural, unbranded shapes at roughly the same money.

Polène is French, founded in 2016 by the Mothay siblings, and makes its bags in Ubrique in southern Spain from Italian leather. Songmont is Chinese, founded in 2013, and makes its bags in China. Both sell direct, both avoid visible logos, and both sit in the same broad price band rather than one undercutting the other.

MEI has not verified Polène’s current price range against its own store, so no figure is published here. What can be said is that the choice between them is not a price decision — it is a decision about where a bag is made and which house’s shapes you prefer.

Where to buy Songmont

Songmont ships worldwide from its own international store, which is the only route MEI has verified. Duties are the recipient’s responsibility on arrival. Returns run 30 days from delivery, with return shipping covered for the US and EU and paid by the buyer elsewhere — the FAQ does not name the UK either way.

MEI’s guide to buying Chinese fashion sets out the shipping, duty and returns terms for all six Issue 001 brands side by side.