Between running her namesake brand, spearheading a media and events company, co-hosting a podcast, parenting four kids and—until recently—making time for reality TV, Rebecca Minkoff still manages to clock out at a reasonable hour and log eight hours of sleep. “Sleep for me is a big source of recognizing that I need it to go at the rate I go,” she told Observer.
The 44-year-old fashion designer, who uses a giant paper planner and writes everything down, organizes her daily tasks by theme and urgency, with to-dos sorted into “must finish,” “nice to have” and the inevitable “push to next week.” Mondays through Thursdays are reserved for her role as chief creative officer of the Rebecca Minkoff brand. Fridays belong to the Female Founder Collective, which she co-founded with fellow entrepreneur Alison Wyatt in 2018 to support women business owners like herself. She makes tangible quarterly plans instead of chasing five-year visions. And instead of doing everything herself, she has learned to delegate with precision.
Recently, Minkoff announced her exit from Bravo’s Real Housewives of New York City after a one-season appearance. “Family, friends and brand” are now the focus, she said in an Instagram post in early February.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Rebecca Minkoff brand and the launch of its iconic “Morning After Bag,” or MAB. Among her “tentpole” moments for 2025: the release of her first book, Fearless, a collection of candid life and career advice; a four-part podcast series with the Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell; and the relaunch of the MAB—a smaller, more shrunken version of the original version designed to “fit under your armpit for the girl going out now 20 years later,” Minkoff said.
A success by accident
Today, handbags account for roughly 80 percent of her brand’s total sales, but Minkoff actually started out as an apparel designer. In 2004, when Minkoff was three years into her apparel design career and working as a celebrity stylist on the side to pay her bills, she received a request by her friend, the actress Jenna Helman, to design a handbag for a movie she was working on. Despite having no experience in making handbags, Minkoff jumped at the opportunity anyway.
“In those days, it was all about the Sex and the City lifestyle: serendipitous meetings on the subway, romantic encounters on the street, getting past the velvet rope to dance the night away—and having a handbag with room for your dancing shoes when you headed off to work the morning after a wild night out,” she wrote in Fearless. “And just like that, the idea of the Morning After Bag was born.”
The first MAB, a chocolate brown canvas with metallic faux crocodile trim and a turquoise zipper made by an industry-famous artisan in the Garment District for $1,600, never made to the big screen but later took off in its own right—thanks to Minkoff carrying it everywhere herself. The bag gained traction through word-of-mouth, got the attention of influential fashion buyers, and eventually catapulted the Rebecca Minkoff brand into the household-name status..
However, as fashion trends evolved, so did the needs of Minkoff’s customers. “Nobody had smartphones in 2005,” she noted. “Nobody carries an East West wallet anymore. So, we made the bag smaller but big enough to hold a phone.”
Beyond functionality, Minkoff said her muse has evolved too. “The girl in 2005 was probably a girl who was looking for love and focused on it. I think the girl today—love is going to be part of her life, but it’s not necessarily the sole focus of her life.”
Building a lasting brand in a volatile industry
In fashion, surviving 20 years is a feat, especially for a brand like Rebecca Minkoff, which lands in the “accessible luxury” category—a space that’s not quite fast fashion, not quite heritage luxury, and often vulnerable to trends.
“The most difficult thing is how fast everything is moving,” the designer said. “You can have a trend and it’s gone in a couple of months.” Because it takes about nine months to get a new design from concept to shelf, Minkoff’s approach is to hedge. “While we are trying to participate in trends, we’re not aligning our entire business to them. For us, it’s always about balancing a few trend-driven items with a core that never goes away.”
That “core” includes the brand’s distinctive hardware—celestial studs chunky chain links, and the designer’s signature dog leash clips. “I originally was getting those dog clips at Home Depots around the city or wherever I would be traveling. I’d bring an extra suitcase and buy out the Home Depot,” she said.
Ultimately, it’s less about the silhouette or the aesthetics and more about the woman who carries it. “When you close your eyes, we want you to think about the brand as a little bit casual with a bit of a rock n’ roll edge,” Minkoff said. “As long as you can close your eyes and think that, then we can be either part of a small-bag trend or a large-bag trend.”
Rebecca Minkoff’s customers are primarily Millennial and Gen Z women, the latter of which are rediscovering the appeal of the Y2K fashion that defined their preceding generation. Brand awareness appears to remain strong. The economic side of it, however, is another story.
Rebecca Minkoff bags used to be made in China, in the same factory that produced Kate Spade’s. In 2018, new tariffs imposed by the first Trump administration nearly crippled the business, forcing the designer to move her production to Vietnam and Indonesia.
Then came the Covid-19 pandemic. Factory capacities were down as much as 90 percent. Bag sales cratered. Unlike fashion giants with a global reach and an expansive product catelogue, Rebecca Minkoff was too small to keep assembly lines busy alone. In 2021, Minkoff decided to sell her company to Sunrise Brands, a Los Angeles-based apparel group, in order to stabilize its supply chain. She stayed on as chief creative officer, now with the resources to better navigate black-swan disruptions.
In an age of hyper-competition, where trends are driven more by TikTok algorithms than fashion editors, Minkoff’s philosophy hasn’t changed much: consistency, brand identity and a refusal to chase the zeitgeist at the expense of substance. “I think it’s about really honing in on who your woman is, what she stands for, and the lifestyle she’s leading,” she said.
