Queen’s favourite handbag brand owner reveals he’s making Launer creations lighter for her

The owner of the Queen’s favourite handbag brand has revealed he has modified the design of his latest creations to cater for the monarch. 

CEO Gerald Bodmer, who purchased the British company in 1981, told how he’s been making his recent designs lighter to make them ‘more comfortable’ for Her Majesty.

The Queen, 94, has carried near-identical versions of the very same bag for more than 60 years – and the accessory is prominently on display in the latest series of The Crown.

Margaret Thatcher, played by Gillian Anderson in the Netflix hit, was also a huge fan of Launer bags and is regularly seen clutching a neat black leather tote in the show.

Speaking to the Daily Telegraph, Bodmer, 88, said he’s thrilled to hear his bags are enjoying a piece of the limelight.

‘That’s so good,’ he said on hearing they’d been heavily featured, adding that the Queen in reality ‘doesn’t have that many but they’re all very good quality’.

‘Lately, I’ve made them a bit lighter to make them more comfortable for her,’ Bodmer added.

Bodmer explained that Her Majesty’s dresser Angela Kelly orders what she needs every year, and pointed out that’s very important to both women that her trademark bags are made in the UK. 

He previously revealed the monarch ‘doesn’t feel fully dressed without her handbag’, admitting: ‘If the Queen doesn’t like what we’ve made her, she won’t wear it. She definitely knows what she wants. 

‘We tend to work on a bag we already have, then personalise it with what Angela knows the Queen wants, or for specific engagements she may have.’  

The Crown’s costume department reportedly visited the Launer showroom to handpick four styles for Anderson and Olivia Colman’s characters to carry in the show.

Viewers see Thatcher entering 10 Downing Street for the first time in 1979 carrying a black Olympia, as she did in real life, while the Queen has a Bellini on her arm while watching Diana Spencer select her engagement ring. 

The latest series spans the late Seventies and 1980s, during which time the brand’s priority was to ensure the Queen and Thatcher never had the same design.

‘Years ago, I met a guy, a small manufacturer, who did designs for The Queen… and he told me once that Mrs Thatcher and the Queen had the same item and Mrs Thatcher was furious. Luckily, we didn’t have that problem,’ Bodmer told the publication.

He recalled how Launer cemented its status as a household name when Her Majesty carried a customised version of its Lisa bag to the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge in 2011. 

Having seen it dip in popularity, in the weeks after the nuptials sales rocketed by 60 per cent.

‘That really set us off, it completely lifted us,’ Bodmer said, adding that it also saw a 53 per cent boost driven by nostalgia when Thatcher died in 2013. 

The late prime minister’s style of choice was the £1,450 Bellini — or, for smarter occasions, the £1,550 Adagio. The brand ended up naming a bag after her, the Maggie, in gratitude for her loyal custom. 

Since then the brand has attracted a new wave of younger fans around the world – aided by its website and new array of colourful designs – though its classic black remains the Queen’s favourite. 

‘Twenty years ago, if we had anyone under 55 buying we thought we were lucky,’ Bodmer told the Telegraph. ‘But we’re getting a lot of younger people buying now.’

Its most popular style is its Traviata, made from calf leather and finished in black patent, priced at £1,900 – incidentally the Queen’s favoured style, and carried by Colman in white in the Netflix series.  

The Queen paid a visit to the Launer factory in Hackney in 1991, before it moved to Walsall in the West Midlands, and spent an afternoon watching the bags being made.

Camilla Parker Bowles has been to the brand’s new base, while the brand is also a go-to for Prince Charles when he’s shopping for wallets.

Founded in 1941 by Sam Launer, a Jewish refugee from Prague, Launer started life in a workshop in the heart of Soho.

The brand soon acquired a reputation for exquisite craftsmanship and Harrods began stocking his bags, while the firm also made leather goods for design houses such as Gucci. 

The Queen Mother bought her first Launer bag in the Fifties and gave one to her daughter, who found them to be the perfect size to loop over her arm during walkabouts. She bestowed the Royal Warrant on the company in 1968.

But despite continuing royal support, Launer’s fortunes began to wane — it simply wasn’t modern enough to attract new customers. It wasn’t until Bodmer bought it in 1981 that it came back from the brink of collapse.

Bodmer, a classical clarinettist turned leather salesman, had set up his own company in the late Sixties, supplying bags for Russell & Bromley and Mappin & Webb. Dressed in a Savile Row suit, with a smart documents case under his arm, he set about deploying his charisma to woo a new clientele. 

When war broke out in the Falklands, Bodmer spotted a cartoon depicting Baroness Thatcher whacking Argentina with her bag. He sent it to her, along with a new handbag. ‘She wrote to thank me,’ he says. ‘And a few weeks later, her shopper appeared in our showroom.’

Indeed, it is thanks to Baroness Thatcher’s love of Launer that the word ‘handbagging’ entered the modern lexicon. The late Tory MP Julian Critchley coined the term to describe a Thatcher-style dressing down.

During her time in office, she alternated between just four of the company’s bags and repeatedly eschewed offers of more.

The Queen is similarly thrifty, owning 30 or 40 which date back decades — and even some that belonged to her mother. She likes their practicality — simple designs in classic colours with a solid frame and easy-access clasp — as well as their quality. 

The secret to their longevity is their ‘turned’ edges, a process that involves moulding the ends of the leather so they are attached on the inside of the bag. Each of the Queen’s designs is, as one might expect, bespoke.