MERLOT COLLECTION

The Merlot Collection: Wine-Toned Vegan Leather Bags by La Baggio

There's a shade of red that never has to raise its voice. Merlot is that shade, deep, warm, and quietly self-assured, and it's the color story behind one of La Baggio's most-loved lines of vegan leather bags for women. La Baggio is a women-owned Indian brand founded in 2019 by Bhavna and Nikita Belani, and every piece in this collection is cut from plant-based leather made from agricultural crop waste, PETA-approved, and finished entirely by hand in our atelier in Kolkata. We see these as vegan leather sustainable bags in the fullest sense: three decades of leather-making know-how, redirected toward gentler material and a better source.

Wine tones read differently depending on the hour, which is exactly why this line has stayed in near-constant demand since we launched it. A merlot-toned bag looks composed next to a laptop at ten in the morning and just as at home on a dinner table by eight at night. Nothing here was designed around a season or a trend. It's built the way a genuinely good bag should be, to be carried for years, not just one wardrobe cycle.

Inside the Collection

The Merlot Muse is the line's everyday anchor, a structured handbag built to move from a nine-to-five into whatever comes after it without a second thought. At 44 x 37 x 10 cm, it works well as one of our vegan leather laptop bags, roomy enough for a laptop and the rest of a workday, with an interior designed to keep everything organised without adding bulk. Styled as a vegan leather office bag for women, it holds its shape through a full day of meetings and still looks considered heading into dinner after.
The Merlot Blossom Clutch takes the same wine hue somewhere less practical and more occasion-worthy. Among our vegan handcrafted floral bags, this one carries floral detailing and a signature tassel, built for weddings, dinners out, and the kind of evening where the bag is meant to be noticed. Like the rest of our floral print handmade bags, each piece is finished individually rather than mass produced. It holds just the essentials, phone, cards, and whatever else fits in a clutch that size. Worn alongside the Muse across a single day, the two pieces make a full day-to-night wardrobe out of one color story, and either one, on its own, makes a considered gift for someone who already owns enough black bags.

The Craft Behind Every Merlot Piece

Every Merlot bag starts as something that would otherwise be burned. Across North India, farmers burn millions of tonnes of crop residue every winter, one of the region's most stubborn pollution problems each season. Crop residue collected from farms across India is processed into a soft, durable leather alternative, with no chrome tanning and no virgin plastic involved, giving farmers a small extra source of income from waste that used to have none. That process is what sits behind everything we build under the name eco-friendly vegan leather bags, including our eco-friendly floral pattern bags and everything else in this line. From the fields, each bag is cut, stitched, and finished by hand by women artisans in our workshop, guided by three decades of craft refined for a new material, the same team that trained in leatherwork long before our family business shifted toward vegan materials. It's a slower process than sourcing standard PU, a trade-off we're happy to make in exchange for calling this genuinely sustainable, not just leather-adjacent.

More to Explore

Merlot isn't the only mood we make bags in, and it isn't the only thing La Baggio carries. Our wider range includes a vegan leather tote bag roomy enough for a weekend away, vegan leather work bags for women built for the boardroom and the commute in between, and a Vegan Leather Wallet edit that includes our eco-friendly leather wallets and a premium leather wallet finish that rounds out the everyday edit. Compared with a wallet or bag cut from actual animal hide, ours is built to age just as well, no compromise on how long it lasts, only on what it's made from.
Whichever piece you land on, the standard stays the same: plant-based leather made from agricultural waste, PETA-approved and animal-free, handcrafted in India rather than mass-produced anywhere else. That standard has earned recognition beyond our own customers too, including honours from FICCI, the Indian Leather Products Association, and India's MSME Ministry, along with a selection by TiE Kolkata to represent the region at the TiE Global Pitch in Dubai. If you're after the best vegan leather handbags in a shade that never has to raise its voice, Merlot is already waiting. If you're still deciding, every other line we make is built on that same three-decade foundation, just dressed in a different color.