Vol. 1 · The Archive
About Burnt Totes.
Archive still, uncatalogued
The idea came from wanting to turn our leftover Christmas rotisserie into a chicken salad sandwich to bring along on a hike in Joshua Tree the next day.
That enthusiasm somehow turned into a running bit, which turned into my favorite love language: making whimsical things for people I love.
While I was subletting in LA, I ordered heat press materials — an iron, blank totes, and a very specific transfer paper. I happily spent nights in my lair coming up with a design that could somehow balance kitsch and class for my best friend.
I Uber-couriered the special paper back and forth to someone with an inkjet printer who could print my designs, since LA isn't as walkable as NY and I'm no driving gal — but I was resourceful.
A perfectly lengthy, unnecessarily elaborate process for just another side project I love getting lost in the details of. All for a little joke, a little laugh, and a pretty solid preview of how Burnt Totes came to be.
It became my best friend's go-to farmers market bag. And I thought — why should a chicken salad sandwich have all the fun?
Burnt Totes started with one sandwich, but the idea is bigger than sandwiches.
It's about those oddly specific things, places, and rituals that somehow become part of your personality — the ones you have a strong opinion about for no particularly good reason. The kind that would make absolutely no sense to anyone else, but make perfect sense to you, and maybe a best friend who'd giggle about it too.
A humble bodega menu item becomes an artifact; a routine sandwich becomes a subject. The everyday things we order without thinking transform into something worth documenting, designing, and creating a whole world around.
What got me so excited was the marketing concept — specifically, playing with the idea of "white-glove treatment."
I'm interested in taking familiar visual language and shifting it slightly:
People say I spend too much time on details that shouldn't be prioritized — that I over-index on little things that usually go unnoticed. They aren't wrong. But a lace glove holding a sandwich bag is the whole joke. Cut that, and it's just a tote.
So that's what's happening here.
This project has been years in the making for that exact reason — even if, sure, you could probably make a good sandwich in under an hour.
