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A few weeks ago (heck it might be a few months ago now, I honestly can’t remember), I saw something on one of the many organizing blogs I frequent about The Butler Bag. What is it? It’s a really, really organized purse. I did a little research and decided to order one, and that’s how my Butler Bag adventure started. This post is a general summary/review of the Butler Bag products I have seen and owned.

First a little background: you can read about the history of the Butler Bag here on the main website. Basically, it was invented by this Jen Groover chick who’s kind of an inventing/entrepreneurial genius of some kind. The idea with the bags is simple: inside, instead of just an empty space where your purse’s contents mingle in chaos, there’s an organizer. The organizer is like what you might use to organize a drawer or your makeup collection. It can be hard-sided or soft, depending on what kind of purse you’re looking at.

(All pictures used in this post are copyright Jen Groover and the Butler Bag; I am using them for illustrative purposes only. Please don’t sue me!)

The first bag I got was a Hybrid bag in Red Licorice. It looks like this on the outside:

As you can see, it’s a slightly-shiny red leather bag. The quality of the leather is actually very nice, although it’s kind of stiff (that fact comes into play later). Here’s the best part though, here’s what it looks like on the inside (imagine it in red, not black):

I know…wow! Now, even though I didn’t cram mine quite as full as this one is, you can see the advantages. You could pretty much dump anything you wanted into this bag and find it again in seconds, without having to go digging around in the bottom, in the dark. (Part of the appeal, I have to say, is the very wide opening of the bag, which makes it easy to see where every little compartment is located.) I dropped keys, sunglasses, cough drops, pens, thumb drives, whatever into the bag and could locate them again easily. SUPER organized, and I loved it!

Except…there are some drawbacks.

1. The bag is very large (which doesn’t bother me so much) and WIDE (which does). Meaning that it’s very bulky sitting under your arm. Now if you were only going to carry it by the straps in your hand, it wouldn’t matter, but I like to carry my shoulder bags on my shoulder.

2. It’s also hard, because of the hard-sided organizer inside and the rather stiff leather. This can make it a little bit painful to carry on the shoulder.

3. The worst problem by far was the straps, which are just as stiff as the rest of the bag, and constantly fell off my shoulder. SUPER ANNOYING and really the only reason I’m not still carrying this bag every darn day.

Overall, I like it for keeping organized when I need to carry a bunch of stuff. But you have to keep the drawbacks in mind, also. I wonder if I might have been more comfortable with the smaller, “Classic” size rather than the tote-sized “Hybrid” that I picked. In any case, both are available at the main site linked above, or you can buy from the sample sale (which is how I bought mine). Prices at the sample sale site are a lot more reasonable (only $95 for the large Hybrid). It mentions that samples may have small imperfections such as scratches or inconsistencies in the leather, but mine seems pristine.

The next bag I bought was from the limited edition styles site, a small tote in black. You can see it at that link – I got the small tote, not the croco one. It’s PVC, not leather, but very nice. Much softer than the leather bag, and even though I’ve only carried it around the house and not actually used it yet, I can tell it will be more comfortable. The organizer insert is a little softer as well – it doesn’t feel so much like heavy, fabric-covered pressboard as the organizer in the Hybrid bag. However, the opening on the tote is nice and wide and the organizer still works great to keep track of everything.

Finally, I did some research on, but did not buy, the Butler Bags that are available at KMart. You can see them here. I went and looked at them in person at a nearby KMart store. The store I went to didn’t have the “straw” styles but it did have most of the others. I have to be honest – I didn’t think they were very nice. They were all manmade materials, of course, but also the organizer insert is soft-sided and not much more useful than one of those fabric purse insert things you can buy (see here, or here, or here, or here). They certainly wouldn’t be as helpful in keeping me organized as the more sturdy inserts in the two Butlers I did buy.

As far as aesthetics, I don’t like either of the genuine Butler Bag purses that I bought as much as I like my Kenneth Cole Reaction purple hobo (which I can’t find online ANYWHERE, or I’d link it), or my new Guess Chance Hobo (which I really love, and you can see here), or either of the B. Makowsky bags that I bought last year. All of which had me scheming…I decided that maybe I should buy one of those cheaper Butler bags at KMart, forcibly remove the organizer from the bottom, and use it in my favorite bags from other brands! Brilliant idea, except that the cheaper bags, as noted, don’t have the sturdy organizer. They have a soft-sided and sort of useless organizer thing that wouldn’t really stand up well to being removed and repurposed.

I guess if I get crazy enough, maybe I’ll tear apart my Hybrid and re-use the organizer. Not sure if I feel quite that crafty yet though.