Margaret Coleman
“I'm 57. Nobody had ever asked me about anything I own.”
Eleven years of buying the same bag without noticing, the four things I checked before I ordered, and what turned up on the Tuesday.
On the way out, Tuesday morning.
I had a system, and the system was rubbish.
Every eighteen months or so I'd buy another bag from the same place at Waurn Ponds. Beige, then black, then beige again. Fine for a winter, then the corners would go soft and the whole thing would fold in on itself in the boot, and I'd tip half the shopping into the footwell and swear at it, and buy the next one.
Eleven years. Seven or eight bags. I never once asked why.
What changed it wasn't a bag. It was a woman at the checkout at Coles who asked me where I got mine. She wasn't asking about mine, she was being polite. Hers had a black cat on it, asleep on a stack of books.
I stood there holding my beige one and thought, oh.
I asked where she got it. She said two sisters in Ballarat.
Here's where I'll be honest with you, because I think you'll have the same thoughts I did.
“It's a printed tote. They're all the same.”
That's what I assumed, and it's what I'd been buying for eleven years. It isn't the same. Theirs are quilted, not printed onto flat fabric, and that's the whole difference. A quilted one holds its own shape. Mine sits on the passenger seat instead of folding over on the first roundabout. I didn't know that was a thing you could buy until I had one in the car.
“60% off. What's the catch?”
I emailed and asked, because I've been caught before. Sophie wrote back the same day. She's 64, her sister Millie is 61, they've been at it since 1997 and they're winding down. Fewer days at the machines, more days in the garden. She said there's a room out the back full of finished bags, and that at 60% off they're barely covering what it cost to make them. She told me that unprompted, which is not what someone hiding something does.
“Will it actually last?”
This is the one I couldn't answer myself in February, so I went looking at what other women had written.
Third one I've bought now. The first is still going strong after a year of being lugged about, and the colours haven't gone anywhere.
Robyn T., Warrnambool VIC
Mine are only a few weeks old. Ask me in 2029.
“What if I hate it when it turns up?”
Thirty days, money back. I checked before I ordered, not after.
Sophie and Millie, from their website.
Mine came on a Tuesday. The cat one, the same as the woman at Coles.
The first thing I noticed wasn't the cat. It was that when I put it on the passenger seat it stayed where I put it. I sat in the driveway for a second thinking, well. That's all it ever had to do.
Three weeks later a woman at Chemist Warehouse asked me where I got it.
Then my physio.
Then a girl on the checkout at Kmart who can't have been twenty-five.
I'm 57. Nobody had ever asked me about anything I own.
There are three of them on the bed in the spare room now.
The black cat on the books first. Then the dragon with the teacups, which my grandson picked and which I pretended to buy for him. Then the big gold cat face, because by that point I'd stopped explaining myself.
That is not a sensible number of bags for one woman. I've made my peace with it.
Sophie said in that email that a woman who carries one usually comes back for another pattern. I'd like it on record that I lasted three weeks.
The cat, the dragon, and the one I didn't explain.
About the writer. Margaret Coleman lives in Geelong, Victoria. She bought her first Sophie & Millie bag in February 2026 and owns three.