BRANDONCMAR IS LIVING TWO LIVES
BORN AND RAISED IN METRO DETROIT, THE PHARMACEUTICS PH.D. STUDENT'S PASSION PROJECT HAS BECOME A BUSINESS OVER THE LAST 12 MONTHS, AND PRODUCTION IS ONLY SPEEDING UP. GABRIEL WINTER SITS DOWN WITH THE DESIGNER TO DISCUSS BUILDING A BRAND BETWEEN THE LAB AND THE STUDIO.
Written by Gabriel Mealor-Pritchard
Photography by Lawrence Atkin
By day, Brandon Mar designs synthetic G-protein-coupled receptors intended to be installed on immune cells to make them better at annihilating cancer. By night, and increasingly by every other available hour, he makes handbags finished with shed deer antlers. "I consider myself kind of a multifaceted designer in that my design goes through two channels. I design novel cancer therapeutics as well as small leather goods," he tells me as we sit down and chat, with the evenness of someone who has stopped finding the pairing strange. The PhD student, studying Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, frames the two practices as parallel rather than competing. Explaining that both begin with a constraint, a molecule or a material and proceed by seeing what it will agree to become.
Founded last May, BRANDONCMAR now operates across New York and Madison, with Mar splitting his time between the two as he scales production and builds out his team. The brand's breakout, the Antler Bag, actually started with something far more personal. "In the late winter of my senior year of undergrad, I really wanted a skinny leather belt, almost cord-like. So I bought some leather cord online and started prototyping and experimenting with it. That was my start." From there, the Fasten was born. Worn crossbody or as a cinching tool, the belt acts as a true accessory, prioritising neither form nor function over the other.
"I don't have conventional training in fashion design, and that's really informed how I approach it. I often refer to it as materials-guided design. I usually start with the material and let it pull my ideas from there." That instinct—letting the material lead—is what carried Mar from a length of leather cord to the object that has, over the past three months, transformed his operation.
The bag arrived almost by accident. "I was seeing a lot of bags online using bones in unconventional ways, charms, handles," he listed, "I remember one bag that used a whole spine as the handle." References to the Tom Ford-era YSL Mombasa, recently revived and chased through the resale market, kept surfacing alongside them. Mar wanted in, but on his own terms.
He landed on a shed antler, small, naturally discarded by younger deer, the shape sitting cleanly against the shoulder. "All the antlers we make our bags with are cruelty-free, just found on the ground," he says. They're sourced through contacts in Michigan, Idaho and Montana, including one supplier the brand now considers a collaborator.
Mar is quick to place the bag in a longer lineage rather than claim novelty. "We're not the only people making bags with antlers and horns; there are so many. And for all of human history, indigenous people all over the world have been using horns and antlers as instruments, in fashion, as bags. I know I'm not the first and I won't be the last." He also resists the easy reading that the Mombasa's return signals a broader return to nature in luxury. To him, it's a moment being recycled rather than a movement being born.
What sets BRANDONCMAR apart from the houses he admires, like Rick Owens and Helmut Lang, or the structural austerity of late-nineties Margiela, all of which he collects, is the economics. Roughly 90% of the brand's volume is upcycled. Vintage bag bodies pulled from thrift stores, wholesale secondhand lots and online second-hand platforms, then reworked by hand and fitted with antler hardware. "There are hundreds of thousands of bags floating around in circulation that are more likely than not going to end up in a landfill," he says. "If we can pull bags out of existing supply, rework them into something with current use, and save them from going to landfill, that's really what we like to do."
It is a quiet but pointed inversion of the luxury accessories playbook, in which margin is generated by manufactured scarcity and freshly minted hardware. Mar's margin, such as it is, comes from the opposite direction. Existing supply, hand finishing and a piece of material that costs nothing, all because a deer dropped it in a forest. Fully bespoke commissions, made in collaboration with Chicago-based maker Julián Franco, take around three weeks and remain a small fraction of output.
The growth has been almost vertical. Until January, Mar was making every bag himself, moving four units a month at most. Today, the brand sells more than fifty a month, with a team of ten, made up of students and young creatives. Stockists now include Grainline in Minneapolis and MarcoSqrd in Chicago, with a Berlin retailer joining the list this spring. London is on the radar, though Mar is cautious. "I'm still thinking about whether now is the right time for even more new retailers."
But that caution is somewhat deliberate. After a quarter in which nearly every metric of the business has multiplied, Mar has put a freeze on new collaborations and is repeating the same word internally, starting with maintenance. "We have to maintain this pacing," he says. It is an unusually conservative posture for a designer riding a wave, and perhaps the clearest signal yet of how the lab informs the studio.
The visual diet behind the work is broader than the finished objects suggest. Mar cites Iris van Herpen's 2019 couture show as a reference point he returns to often, alongside Schiaparelli and Robert Wun, houses whose organic, fantasy-leaning silhouettes look little like a leather crossbody finished with bone. But the link, for him, is method rather than aesthetic. It's the willingness to let a material dictate a shape. The other, less visible input is New York's queer techno scene, where Mar spends much of his time outside the lab.
The test he applies to a new piece is partly practical, partly atmospheric. Can it be worn on the dance floor? Can it survive the carry? (the slang for staying out from one party to the next across a full weekend.) "Staying awake all night does something to the body and the mind," he says. "It has this certain raw energy." This is replicated through the design of his oh-so-adored products
But for now, the plan is to hold the line. More retailers will come. And in so, presumably, will more bags, more materials and more accidents that turn into products. However, the next few months are about absorbing what has already happened rather than chasing what's next. "Things have grown in ways I couldn't have imagined," Mar says. In a category built on manufactured scarcity and relentless newness, choosing to pause may be the most distinctive thing he does all year.