For people who know anything about fashion, Italy is often cited as the original home to the majority of popular fashion brands of the world. Mandarina Duck is no exception. Known primarily for their high-end luggage and travel accessories, Mandarina Duck is headquartered in Bologna, Italy, and has also stretched as far as Barcelona, London, Dusseldorf, and Paris.

Instead of fashioning a name and logo after the names of their founders, a mandarina duck is actually a real breed of the fowl that lives on the Ussuri River on the border of China and Russia.

Mandarina Duck didn't start out as a high-end luggage producer. The founders, Paolo Tento and Pietro Mannato, childhood friends, were once in the market of producing head-sealed produced. In 1976, after a decade-long design stint in the heating front, the duo decided to form Mandarina Duck.

They took leatherworking to new heights, impressing the field with new innovative shapes and colors that were previously considered undoable with leather goods. This spark of fresh talent immediately catapulted Mandarina Duck to the forefront of the leather-goods market.

One of their most famous products to date, the Utility Bag, was designed and released in 1977. It's a highly functional and fashionable, simplistic bag to look at; however, the amount of original detail and innovative leatherwork needed to make each bag was a cue to the fashion world that Mandarina Duck was a force to be reckoned with. The duo incorporated a multiple array of colors, plastics and textures into each product they released. A simple bag challenged what most people knew at the time, and hence the Duck made a big splash.

1981 was the year that the duo released a high-tech and high-performance line of bags with the Eva and Cordura. Not only was the look of these bags bold and fresh, but their durability was unparalleled. For the first time in fashion history, a brand of luggage and travel accessories was considered to be technically superior to the fashions of the day. Of course, the clothing designers would eventually pick up the pace, but for the moment, Tento and Mannato had a strong claim on innovation.

The duo opened a Mandarina Duck mono-brand store in 1984, one of the world's first. Much like a think tank, the store was a chosen place where renowned fashion designers, architects, and other unconventional thinkers could work on their new designs. This “dare to be daring” atmosphere produced a long line of MD accessories that quickly flew off the shelves.

The brand did it again in 2000, shattering conventional wisdom with the release of their Frog line. With travel at an all-time high around the world, these luggage and accessory items were ultra-modern, sophisticated, and like everyone has come to expect from Mandarina Duck, cutting-edge. The colorful, half-in-half (hard and soft) line is the exclamation point on an impressive collection that spans three decades. Mandarina Duck still continues to produce the most high-quality luggage and travel accessories in the world.