Quick note to shoppers and returning customers: Nic Norman Accessories is not producing and selling products at this time.  The website herein is a portfolio and pickings from past collections as reference only. I am currently on hiatus and designing for clients/designers/manufacturers.   Send me an email if you want to be notified when and if  we return to selling products again. Thanks for visiting! nicole @ nicnorman.com

Raised in the San Francisco Bay area, I had a lifelong love of fashion and design.  Although my education was in Fashion Design and Merchandising, like many of my contemporaries, I succumbed to the mid '90's lure of Silicon Valley and, putting my fashion training on hold, launched a successful career in the world of Internet startups.

Working at several different organizations on the technical side, I was forced to wear multiple hats due to the limited budgets and head counts. I developed other skills - where my interest in design  stood me in good stead as I became a web and graphic designer and eventually moved out of geek mode and into marketing where I could express my creativity rather than play with numbers and databases. Here I got my real business training as I learned the good, the bad and the ugly about starting new businesses in a wildly competitive environment where creativity and the entrepreneurial spirit ruled the day.

During this period, I gained invaluable experience but discovered my true love of design was not going to be truly expressed in this context. Simultaneously, the Internet industry went bust, companies went under, venture capital money dried up and my huge stack of stock options turned into scratch paper. It was clearly time to go back to the drawing board and start over.

After a long vacation, some traveling and had exhausted my last employment check, I realized that my real inspiration lay in accessories.  I think of them as objets d'art where the sky is the limit as far as creativity is concerned. Working for various designers - the most prominent of which was Sarah Shaw Handbags, I had acquired enough experience on both the business and now design side to go it alone.  I developed a small line of belts, lugged them into Fred Segal, got an order on the spot and with an awesome publicist at my side, Nic Norman Accessories was born. Those 6 belts turned into 6 years. During that time, the line, which expanded into other products, was carried in over 250 boutiques around the globe and in Nordstrom department stores. 

As I pondered my next move, I kept getting persistent inquiries from other companies on sharing my custom belt buckle making process. Being the unrelenting entrepreneur that I am, I saw a big opportunity and took my unique process for creating graphics based belt buckles and developed a manufacturing kit for other designers and retail stores to make and sell them. I also created a spin-off company that created a pre-made picture frame belt buckle for license and distribution to mass retailers.  So in short, I sold off my business in pieces and retired the line.

Developing my line of graphics-based accessories and apparel had been, for me, creative and inspiring, however, I yearned to work with other designers and manufactures purely on design.  Textile/Surface design makes my heart go pitter patter and the opportunity to pair my designs with other's products feels very collaborative, creative and freeing from the drolls of running a products-based business. I just want to do what I love and do it well.  So as I close a chapter, I'm starting the next one and I look forward to working with all the fine people who are in need of my design services.