Sweetening The Purse

Coach customers like patchwork. They like charms. And they like the Coach logo-print fabric with its pattern of stylized C's, although Krakoff says it isn't a logo at all, which is a bit like having someone say that it's not raining even as you're standing outside getting drenched.

"One of the things we've done with the logo is reinterpreted it with patterns in abstraction," he says. "It's just become a material."

Defining Luxury

In Krakoff's office, which is not on Seventh Avenue but on far West 34th Street in the shadow of the Golden Arches, a black Louise Nevelson labyrinthine sculpture covers one wall. As he speaks, he unpacks a large box containing the components of a stone mantelpiece that has the weathered look of old wealth and grandeur.

It is evidence of Krakoff's million-dollar lifestyle. He owns a Manhattan townhouse, a summer home in the Hamptons and various works of important art.

Krakoff, who is married and has four children, is a tall, lean man with buzz-cut dark hair. He favors slim, dark-washed jeans, oxford shirts and leather oxfords worn without socks. He has a dry wit and is given to the kind of emotionless analysis of the fashion business that one might find in a loan officer. Perhaps that comes from having degrees in both economics and fine arts from Tufts.

He sniffs with skepticism at labels, particularly European ones, that put a price tag of almost $2,000 on a handbag. "Knowing what it costs to make a bag -- " he begins. And then pauses. Disgusted. Some of the cost is based on status, some of it is because of small-scale production. "But we use the same raw materials," he says. He firmly believes that Coach is a luxury brand.

"Luxury is personal," he says. "It's old-fashioned to think that it has to be made a certain way." Or in a certain country. Or by unionized labor.

Luxury is not related to hand-sewing, he says, or a label that says "Made in Italy." "Truthfully, I look at a lot of bags, and it's not where it's made but who makes it. I think the European brands have been pushing that because it's the only way to justify $9,000 for a bag."

Coach's manufacturing used to be centered in New York. The prototypes are still made here, but the production now takes place all over the world.

Krakoff's flights of fantasy, were he to have any, are tempered by a pragmatic nature.

"Intuitively, I was always that kind of person," Krakoff says. "I knew I'd never be a tortured cr?ateur doing couture."

Like most designers, Krakoff trusts his gut instincts. But he does not give in fully to the idea that a designer must tell consumers what they want to buy next. Occasionally, shoppers already know. Coach conducts market research. It organizes focus groups. The company doesn't allow a clutch of homemakers or Type-A strivers behind one-way glass dictate design, but it listens.

The major drawback to focus groups, Krakoff says, has to do with the momentum of a group. "If someone in the group says, 'I don't like it,' there tends to be a gang mentality. If we research winter bags in summer, people say they're too heavy or too dark.

"It's not a science. The research helps us understand better how things are going to do," he says. "The trick is not to be too literal."

Sometimes, the best research, Krakoff says, is "if I walk into a room with a bag and no one says anything. It probably isn't a good bag."

Money Bags

Walking into a Coach store provides an immediate sense of the diversity of the customers. There are professional women looking for work bags, teenagers buying tiny hobo styles and indulgent shoppers choosing a $398 tote for a gym bag.

"They always have pretty colors for the spring season," says Celeste Schreier, a 15-year-old Coach fan in Michigan who favors shades of pink and has a stash of Coach bags in her closet, including a white one with multicolored C's from her bat mitzvah. "I like having a bunch so I have different options."

How many bags can people buy?

In fiscal 2007, Coach net sales were up by 28 percent over the previous year. The company expects sales in 2008 to top $3 billion. And Karen Pierce, the Washington lawyer, has her eye on a new black Hamptons satchel.