Degalodi was a faint dream in 2012 after going to Paris for ten days.

You see, I’m a Francophile. Have been since I was roughly twelve when a friend’s friend spoke French to me. Being from Texas, I should have learned Spanish. That would have been the prudent move, but after hearing French, I fell in love. After that I only cared about learning French and going to France and maybe spending a few years there, at some point.

I’d been a few times already, but this was my first visit with my second husband. We decided to stay in a hotel with a tiny fridge in the 7th arrondissiment (near the Eiffel Tower) and do our shopping at the supermarché. This would save on time and money, since just about everything French tastes good and even the less expensive wines are transporting.

We had a great time, of course, but I was struck immediately by the lack of single use bags. When you grocery shop in Paris, you have to buy a reusable bag. You can’t fall back on single use bags because you decided to be lazy that day. There is no back up plan, so you bring your own, buy a bag at the store, or carry them in your arms.

Back home in West Hollywood, California there was already a campaign underway to rid our community of single use bags. And it was gaining traction. I really wanted to make a reusable bag, but didn’t have the inspiration until that trip.

Single use bags don’t just not break down and then turn into microplastics that pervade our environment (land, water, wildlife, our bodies), they are extremely lazy. I’ve watched people – who work at the grocery store, mind you – take a shopping cart full of groceries and put each piece of grocery in its own single use plastic bag. They are, in my opinion, the penultimate expression of our careless waste and environmental laziness. And it’s a problem that isn’t going away fast enough.

I made a bag in 2012, but the final version was realized in 2013 when my husband also created the name “Degalodi.” We both have Cherokee in our bloodlines, and deep roots in caring about the land from which we came. It was the perfect name and is a beautiful reusable bag!

Then life threw us a few wrenches. We abandoned our project and moved to North Carolina for almost four years, where we tried to pick up our lives anew and take a different path. We visited Cherokee, North Carolina often and tried to figure some things out, but the call was to go back to California. After eight years I came back to Degalodi and what you see below is just the start of a love for reusable bags that is extending itself to other types of bags – all purely vegan, for I think in this day and age, a love for the environment also means a commitment to using non-animal product. There are so many things that can be used for daily items, we don’t need to kill an animal to have something to put our chap stick, sunscreen and money in.