You might think that Valleys-themed merchandise consists of simply local rugby club jerseys and bobble hats, but thanks to one incognito Rhondda artist, wearing a piece of home has become a little more diverse than just donning our favourite sports teams' kits.
For Rhondda's Bagsy, who started off secretly dropping his sketches of local, recognisable faces and places in shopping trolleys during his weekly shop with a hope they'd be shared on social media, the designs and valley-themed skews on famous logos have immortalised many images and colloquialisms you wouldn't be able to buy elsewhere.
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Five years down the line and Bagsy, who didn't particularly start out hoping to be an anonymous designer, or was even trying to be Rhondda's answer to that famous rebel artist from Bristol, is still the valley's best-kept secret. Or worst, if you know, you know.
But his designs have moved from bags for life onto T-shirts, hoodies and tote bags - and from this month onwards those bags will be designed and made exclusively in the Rhondda at a new sewing studio on the site of the former Polikoffs/Burberry factory.
Keeping it local is a big thing for Bagsy, right down to the colour of his products - they only come in 'Rhondda grey' other than the odd special - and the support he's had from customers near and far has fuelled his passion for his work.
I visited his studio, which has grown from a relative's garage to a local workshop space in the middle of the Rhondda to find out where the creativity and inspiration behind the hyper-local designs with a lot of heart, originated.
"I really wanted to get back into drawing as I hadn't done it since my Master's degree, I'd done more online projects," he said, explaining how the carrier bag portraits got going. "I thought 'do I have anything here so I don't have to go out and get a pad' and it just happened that me and my wife were getting rid of a load of bags in the recycling and I thought 'I'll just use these.'
"And I could never find a way of doing art about the Rhondda, it was always other stuff, and there was a lot of negativity around MTV The Valleys, and there was no positivity coming in about the Valleys, so I just thought I'd try and get some positivity going.
"I think the anonymity just came from me being kind of a parody of Banksy, in that there's someone going around and drawing on carrier bags anonymously. It's probably like the Rhondda's worst kept secret and I often forget four or five years later, that I'm even anonymous. I was half expecting people to name drop me within the first two days, but no one's ever cared, I think they like that they're part of the joke."
He says his supporters are so bought into the Bagsy anonymity that even though they have chatted over the years the idea of catching up over a coffee isn't on the table for those who love the mystery.
It's almost as if the Rhondda, or valleys people who love Bagsy have bought into the fun and creativity because it's something special that's just theirs. The way it captures identity cannot be underestimated and that identity has been flung far and wide, with customers taking their 'Rhondda Athletic', 'Twp Mun' T-shirts and more to the likes of Antarctica, Alaska, Ghana and the tops of the Welsh mountains, of course.
Can he believe how far his Bagsy business has come (and travelled)? It's not bad for someone who was made redundant from two zero-hour jobs and had to use the same screen-printing screen for umpteen different designs at first, because he couldn't fund more.
"I wouldn't have believed it at the start," he admits. But he added that his designs have taken off through a mix of two things - sheer determination and support.
"I also have the support of an audience who must be the most patient people in the world, they have been there from the start and through my journey of starting a business and everything that comes with it. Failing at times and making up for it.
"It was interesting, the departure from doing the drawings to then making sustainable business for the Rhondda no one was making stuff about the valleys really, now we see so many local companies embracing all aspects of handmade products from products like mine to gifts, homemade candles or food products - really embracing what the Valleys have to offer."
In practical terms, Bagsy's has a lot to thank his other half for, for pushing him to follow his passion for art and design, something he studied at university, as after he was made redundant it was she who said: "You can either just mope around and feel sorry for yourself, go on the dole or you can actually do what you want to in life."
From there he printed actual tote bags with his designs on, learned how to make his own hand screenprinting gear from YouTube and with just a month's worth of money, gave himself that four-week limit to make or break whether he would go forward with the Bagsy business we know now.
"I made my own press with my wife's great uncle, who was a design teacher, and I made the exposure unit," he said. "If you can make a screen you can print anything.
"I remember I put my first few bags on eBay, because I didn't have a website then, and they blocked my account! I posted that I had just 15 bags and sent everyone to eBay and the traffic closed my account. I thought then 'there's a need for this'.
"Then in early 2020 people had started asking me for T-shirts. I thought if I was going to do them, I'd do them quite unique and I said I was only going to do them in 'Rhondda grey'. A kind of Henry Ford thing, you can have any colour as long as it's black," Bagsy laughed - he does have a good laugh, as much as his online videos sound pretty low-key.
And while the pandemic of the past two years put paid to the bag drops, orders started coming in thick and fast and the time allowed his business and marketing skills to develop.
"Not as much obviously, in the pandemic, but the bags originally went all over the world, like every country you can think of I probably have a photo someone has sent to me from there," he revealed. "And now the T-shirts are starting to pick up again. We'll send to America, Australia and New Zealand and I've also sent them to Europe as well. On Christmas Day, a bloke sent me a photo, and I thought it was Photoshop first of all until I read the caption which was 'hello from the Antarctic.' It was cool."
For such a specific collection of Valleys-influenced designs, Bagsy reveals that around a third of his sales come from the area, another third from around Wales and the rest from all over the world - firmly answering his critics who thought his business would soon run out of customers.
"When I first started thinking about it more as a business, the initial response was, 'there's not enough people in the Valleys, they won't buy that and you'll lose interest after a while. There's not enough people for you to maintain the business.'
"But they didn't realise the amount of like ex-pats we actually have all over the world. A lot of people would say a lot of the phrases are sort of Welsh general or south Wales general as well, and can be branched out across like south Wales and even north and west Wales.
"One of my dreams when I first started off as a business was, you know when you're on holidays and someone's got a Welsh flag beach towel. I wanted it to be kind of like that.
"And then when people were first allowed to go on holidays I had a message which said, 'I went to Tenerife and I was wearing my Bagsy when someone came up to me because they were from the valleys as well.' They could identify them as from the Valleys because of the T-shirt. That's enough for me."
The sense of increased 'hiraeth' throughout the pandemic has helped reconnect many of Bagsy's customers to their birthplace and he loves the feedback from customers, including one whose 100-year-old-mother who had dementia, perked up when she saw the Llwynypia mining family statue emblazoned over a shopping bag, so how does he feel about remaining the hidden creator behind an increasingly beloved brand?
"I've had the luxury of being able to develop things creatively. But at the end of the day, I don't think any of this stuff is about me, I haven't got my face to anything. A lot of my T-shirts don't even have my logo on there," he explained.
"I think it goes back to being anonymous. A lot of my friends say 'the project's got really big now you must be famous.' But I still walk down the streets and I just live around here, I can enjoy the Valleys without feeling any different to anyone else.
"So I feel that part connects me to the Valleys because I am just like the bloke down the street sat quietly print bags, T-shirts and hoodies for a very good price!"
Find more on Bagsy, here.
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