Exclusive: Mai Cojuangco’s Demetria Returns After Four Years

Once the face of fashion billboards and magazine covers, Florence-based creative director Mai Cojuangco returns to Manila to launch her 44-piece bag drop for Demetria.

The dining table is nowhere in sight. Its surface is inundated with towers of boxes upon green boxes with a polaroid taped onto each one; visual indications of which bag you might find inside. Off to the side, neat stacks of supple bag straps are wrapped in delicate paper. Of every item here, there is only one of each.

“Whatever is here, this is it,” confirms Mai Cojuangco, the creative director of her bag brand Demetria.

Casually dressed in a white t-shirt and olive midi skirt, Mai opens up the boxes to reveal what she and her team have been working on for years. First come the bordeaux Semprina and off-white Bloom, a pair of luxurious handbags in rich hues. When we unwrap a dozen leather bag straps, which are accented with printed silk inserts, our multimedia artist France gushes, “I love the smell!” To which Mai laughs, “I wish you could take a picture of the scent!”

The bag designer is in town from Florence, Italy, where she has resided for the past 20 or so years. She’s in the thick of preparations for a trunk show next week, where guests are invited to experience Demetria’s newest 44-piece release in the creative director’s ancestral home. She makes it clear: “I don’t do full collections, I do drops.”

Demetria launched in 2017 in collaboration with Idée and Silverlens, followed by a second release in 2022 with Idée and Filip + Inna’s Len Cabili. This forthcoming drop, Cojuangco says, is the first that she developed entirely on her own. In the last four years, she routinely spent her days preparing lunch for her daughter Demi, then driving to the studio to work on the bags with her business partner Simona. “Margarita!” Simona scolds Mai, whenever she pitches an outlandish idea. When Mai floated the idea of cutting up a silk scarf to sew into the lining of what would become the Bloom bag, Simona sighed. “Sei pazzo,” she told Mai. You’re crazy. But Mai only recalls these moments with fondness.

At minimum, a single bag takes six to eight months to make. Each one is crafted with painstaking precision by a workshop of four, consisting only of Simona, her husband, and occasionally, an employee or two they hire if the volume of orders requires it. There is a separate craftsman who handles hardware and accessories, and Mai has worked with all of them since the beginning, allowing their relationship to evolve beyond a strictly professional one. 

“I love the fact that we are all creative,” she reflects. “Not just myself, that draws and develops and chooses the leather, but even the people who actually make the bags. They begin what they begin, and they’re the same people that end what they’ve begun. There is a certain humanity and huge satisfaction in being able to do that as an artisan, as a person who produces things.”

Together, they devote their time to details that are practically invisible. Their Bloom bag for instance is a refined bucket bag lined with double-faced scarves, and metal inserts to keep the leather upright as it softens with time. “They look very technical, and you can see the support. They’re like little buildings inside,” Mai describes. Or their Monette clutch, which comes with a fringe charm that reveals gold-dipped brass studs beneath a flap, and striking contrast leather linings on the Sempre and Semprina handbags. “Maybe someone will see, maybe no one will see. But it gives us satisfaction to do that.”

Other design elements have weightier implications. She recounts the story behind their first creation: “I had a really beautiful bag, one of the more popular ones which didn’t even have a zipper. This must have been 2002. My uncle had just passed away, and he was this really dear uncle to me, so I was so happy to have his messages on my cellphone. Long story short, I lost the phone in the overhead bin.”

And so was the genesis of the capacious Sempre (meaning “always”), a carry-all handbag kept secure by a zip closure.

Intimacy informs Demetria’s language, to the point that even their online boutique feels like a considered one-on-one experience: each product page includes a voice note from Cojuangco explaining the process behind each bag.

As a one-woman team, Mai’s highly personal approach to every aspect of the brand is intuitive, and everything about it is tied to memory and emotion. Her calling came when she was going through a divorce, and she wished to turn her focus to the act of creation, centered on women. It’s precisely what’s behind Demetria—the name of Mai’s grandmother, passed on to her, and now her daughter.

“As life goes, you never know,” Mai muses. “I finished psychology [in college] and I ended up doing handbags.”

In the span of six years, she enrolled in a state-funded school in Florence before working as a handbag maker. She learned how to work leather, how to shave it and remove the backside with a machine. “But I was only able to touch the iceberg. To do that properly takes decades, but it helped me understand construction, and how to do certain things and how to turn things around.”

Mai’s long road here has been riddled with endless explorations within and beyond her Florentine studio, and these excursions continue as she shows up daily, to wonder what might come from new executions and materials with Simona. She wishes to scale up the business someday, and wants to do so in a way that doesn’t give up their formula of creating things slowly, with intention, and with joy.

“The lesson about this whole journey for me is that if you continue on your path and you don’t fold, eventually the right people will find you. Because so much of it is about compromise.” When you support the label, Mai explains, you’re not just buying a Demetria bag. “You’re buying a story, buying truths. Buying a way of working that is humane and human.”