I wanted to give you all a quick look behind the scenes of what went into designing and making these lion dance bag charms.

Design Sketches

As with every new design, I started off with research and answering some questions. What did I want my new product to be, what kinds of materials or production process did I want to experiment with? More importantly, what did I want to design and what would look good with a lion head on it, or shaped like a lion head?

So I looked around on google and found these leather keychains. 

A lot of the examples I found were flat and ‘2-dimensional’, in a way. I work very much in the 2D space so I thought this was something I could work with.

As I started sketching my designs, I kept these things in mind:

• It’s going to be small, like a keychain
• It’s going to be made out of leather
• It’s going to be a lion head

In these designs you will see I’ve drawn in stitching. Very early on I knew I wanted to try layering different levels of leather. The mouth, the eyebrows, the pompoms and the mirror were all going to be a second layer of leather stitched on top.

I sat on the design for a day or two, and ultimately, it felt a bit underwhelming. I feel like I’ve done this before with my other keychains. Besides the lion head, there wasn’t anything particularly unique or special about it.

I wanted something a bit more chunky, something with a bit more heft, so I spent several more hours doing research and eventually stumbled upon these cute mini backpack keychains.

These were great! And I loved them!! A mini version of your bag, for your bag. That’s when I discovered these amazing products from Maison de Sabre who make leather handbags, and had created a line of accessories that were the cutest thing. I knew they weren’t going to do it, so I had to make my own lion dance version. 

Concepts + Mockup

These keychains were going to be really small, about 3-4cm wide. An essential part of the early prototyping process is printing out your designs in real life size to see how they would look and feel if you were to hold it in your hands. As I wasn’t sure how big I wanted these to be, I printed out two different sizes, 35mm and 45mm.

Being able to touch them in life size gave me a really good idea of how the final product would turn out. At this point, I felt the 45mm was a bit too big, so I opted for the smaller version. But the design needed some changes. The silhouette of the design felt too messy, especially for something so small, so I went back to the drawing board and reworked the design.

Below, you can see I've simplified the silhouette. There aren't as many bumps around the face and the lines are cleaner. This would work a lot better for this kind of product. Also it makes the lions like chonk and I thought that was cute. 

At this point, I felt like I needed a third design to complete the set. You'll notice in a lot of the products I come out with, I launch them as sets. Really for no other reason than because it feels complete, and everything we do in lion dance and in Chinese culture seems to come in threes. 

If you've followed me on Instagram for a while, you'll know that I've created a few characters around my lions, and one of them is a purple lion called Yao, designed after the traditional Hong Kong futsan lion heads. We have a Hoksan lion, a modern Futsan lion, and now, we will have a traditional futsan lion.

What do you think of our early Yao bag charm? I wasn't so sure. I surveyed a few people, and asked them whether it looked like a lion head to them. I got a few mxied responses. It was hard to tell, even for me. I really wanted to make this traditional Futsan version though, because I quite like the design, and it's different from the Hoksan and Futsan designs from earlier. It just didn't look like a lion head. 

Then I realised, it might be the colours. A purple lion is quite uncommon in lion dancing, and especially after it's been stylised like this, it becomes even more removed from lion dance. What is a more common colour that you would associate with a traditional futsan lion head? It's usually the three brothers, right? Guan Yu, Liu Bei and Zhang Fei. We already had a bit of the Zhang Fei colours in the green Futsan design from above, and Liu Bei as a lion was very difficult to pinpoint a colour. Ultimately, I decided to do Guan Yu, red and black, a very popular colour choice for traditional futsan lion heads.

Yep, this was much better. I liked this a lot more. I did hesitate a bit because the face was red, and the hoksan lion already had a red face. But I liked the design so much it didn't bother me. I was going to make it. 

Design Production Sheets

The next step was to break down the design so it could be understood by a third party. These designs would be going to a manufacturer with designers there that need to understand how the design worked and how I wanted it made. 

As seen in the image below, the first layer of leather would be printed for the eyes, ears, mouth and nose, and the mirror. The second layer would each be separate pieces of leather stitched on top of the first piece. And the last layer would be the pompoms that would be stitched over the first two layers. 

I was so excited to get these made. Now it was time to find a manufacturer. This is an arduous process and can be a very expensive process. There's a lot of trial and error here that can be costly. 

Manufacture

Pictured below is an early test product. This one didn't go well at all. The colours were off and the designer didn't follow my instructions or the design sheet that I had sent them.  The extra pieces of leather that sat on top of the red piece were all glued on and not stitched like I had requested. It's shown in the photo as well that the screen printing process they used for the eyes was already starting to scratch off. Knowing lion dancers, this little charm could be put through the wringer and after a day of performances, all the screen printing would be scratched right off and the glued on leather pieces would be torn off in no time. This wasn't going to work.

I had to look for another designer that would properly communicate to me as they made the product. I asked them a lot of questions up front like what kind of materials do you use, whether they used pantone colour, what kinds of processes they used, how were the sample products made and if they'd be willing to show me pictures during the making of the product. I was quite happy working with them. They had very open communication and their designers were so, SO talented. I was excited to work with them. 

There were a few hiccups down the road. There were some things in the design that they couldn't do because the product was much too small. Eventually we decided it had to be 45mm wide to accommodate all the little stitching details that I wanted. I re-tested the sizing by printing them out again. This is a common process during manufacturing, due to the limitations of equipment and processes, compromises like this need to be made, which I was happy to do.

The first sample had a few mistakes in it. The colours were wrong and stitching details were missing from various parts. That was okay, that's all part of the process. Round two went a lot, lot better.

These were the very first photos I got from our designers. I was so happy with them, I couldn't wait to get them delivered to me so I could start taking photos. 

And so, that's how these SO CUTE little bag charms came to life!! I hope you enjoyed the journey! All up it was about a 4-5 month process. It is a very long process getting products made from design to manufacture but I'm so happy with how these came out. We've decided to work with this manufacturer for production. I am really impressed with their designers' work, they are such talented leather workers, and I KNOW you will love them too!!

Why make this?

As a lion dancer and a designer, I got sick of seeing the same generic lion dance products in mainstream merchandise. This is the whole reason I started The Seventh Lion. All those lion dance puppets and toys you see at Chinatown, on Temu, they all lack any kind of authenticity or understanding of what lion dance is and what it means to those who practice it. These products make lion dance feel oversimplified, misinterpreted, and stereotyped, and I didn't feel good owning any of them. I wanted products that made me proud to be a lion dancer, something I was proud to show people and tell people about. That is why I do this and will continue to be the reason I do this.

- Cai