Davia Hines
Bag & Pan Handmade
A Little Piece of Jamaica
Only Child, Always Creating
I grew up in Montego Bay as an only child, which means I spent a lot of time in my own world.
But here is the thing about that world: it was never quiet. I cannot remember a single stretch of childhood where I wasn’t making something or completely absorbed in watching someone else make something. Creativity was just the air I breathed. It wasn’t a hobby or a phase. It was simply how I moved through every day.
My mother had fabric scraps, and I used them to sew dresses for my dolls. I customised my own school supplies with markers because plain never felt like enough. My uncle taught me how to thread beads into rings and necklaces and bracelets, and I took to it the way some children take to sport or music: naturally, hungrily, without needing to be told twice. I didn’t know any of this was pointing somewhere. I was just a girl in Montego Bay, making things, because making things was the only way I knew how to be.
What the Pandemic Unlocked
Like a lot of Jamaican businesses, Bag&Pan Handmade was born in the strange, still time of COVID-19.
The world slowed down and I turned inward, back to the instincts I had always had. I started with beaded jewellery, the foundation my uncle had given me years before. Then I noticed polymer clay earrings becoming popular online, saw how the medium could hold colour and shape and personality in a way few other materials could, and looked around for a local artist making them. There wasn’t one. So I became her.
That decision, to fill a gap rather than wait for someone else to fill it, is what turned a lifelong habit into a brand. I was not trying to build an empire. I was doing what I had always done: making the thing I couldn’t find, making the thing only I could make.
The Island in Everything
I love florals. I am obsessed with a leaf print. I would live in the Caribbean Sea if someone would let me.
That is not a casual statement. It is the foundation of every design decision I make. I draw from what I see around me, from the colours and textures of this island, from the specific, particular details of Jamaican life that people who live here know and love but rarely see reflected back at them in what they wear.
My Papaya earrings came from a sign on the road to Negril. My Carry Mi Ackee and Breadfruit earrings became bestsellers because they are honest. They say something true about where we come from without needing any explanation. The people who reach for them already know. They have always known.
I don’t look to major fashion houses for direction. That world has never called to me. I am carving something out of my own lived experience, based on what it actually feels like to be Jamaican, to grow up here, to love this place the way I do. That specificity is not a limitation. It is the whole point.
Organised Chaos
When I am in the zone, the workspace looks like it shouldn’t work and somehow does.
A good series running in the background. A list of pieces I want to finish by the end of the day. From there, the process takes over: new colours suggest themselves, new pairings emerge, a style I hadn’t planned finds its way into the session. I move between pieces fluidly, following what the work wants to become rather than forcing it. Most sessions I forget to stop for meals, which is either a sign of deep focus or a bad habit, probably both.
The work has its own momentum once it starts. My job is mostly to keep up.
What Rejection Taught Me
The hardest part of building something you care about is the rejection.
And it comes. Projects that don’t land, opportunities that close before you reach them, the particular silence of something you worked on and hoped for simply not working out. That kind of disappointment is not small. It is mentally draining in a way that is difficult to explain to people who haven’t built something with their own hands and then watched it fall short.
What I have learned to do is stop. Take a break. Let myself regroup and recover properly before I try again. And I hold onto something I genuinely believe: what is meant for me will never miss me, and what misses me was never meant for me. That is not a platitude. It is a practice. It is the thing that gets me back to the worktable after the sessions that don’t go as planned.
For the Everyday Woman
I design for myself.
That sounds simple, but it is actually the most clarifying decision I have ever made as a creator. I am the everyday woman who wants a pop of colour on an ordinary Tuesday. Who wants something with a little personality, a little whimsy, something that brightens the day and makes an outfit feel intentional without having to try too hard. When I make for her, I am making for every version of that woman, because she is everywhere.
For the woman in the Diaspora who hasn’t been home in years, I want my pieces to do something specific. A Breadfruit earring, a Dr. Bird, a pair of Petunias: I want those things to trigger something real. A memory, a smell, a feeling of familiarity that doesn’t need translation. I want her to wear something from Bag&Pan and feel like an ambassador, not of a postcard version of Jamaica, but of the Jamaica we actually live every day.
Put Yourself Out There
Things Jamaican has brought Bag&Pan Handmade to customers who would never have found me otherwise. Being placed alongside so many talented Jamaican makers has reinforced something I needed to hear: there is real value in creating locally, in telling our stories through our craft, in refusing to make something generic when we have so much that is specific and ours.
Five years from now, I want Bag&Pan Handmade to be a household name for colourful, uniquely Jamaican accessories. Not famous for the sake of it, but sustainable, recognisable, the kind of brand people reach for when they want something that means something.
To the young Jamaican designer who is afraid to start: start anyway. Ask for help when you need it. You will never feel completely ready and there will never be a perfect time, and some of the best things that have happened to me came directly from putting myself out there before I was sure how it would turn out.
The work is waiting for you to begin.
Bag&Pan Handmade is available at Things Jamaican.
