This Chick Slays Big Snakes

FLORIDA — Growing up in Indiana, Amy Siewe found herself drawn to everything creepy and crawly.

“I’ve been into snakes and reptiles my whole life. I’ve had this crazy fascination since my dad took me to a creek and taught me to catch crawdads and fish and snakes,” she said.

This love for serpents and other critters continued into adulthood. For years, she bred snakes and led various educational programs about them. For Siewe, it was a passion, not a career.

“It was more a hobby than anything else,” she said.

To pay the bills, she worked as a real estate broker in Indianapolis for about 13 years.

Eventually — and unexpectedly — she found her way back to her first love: snakes. Now a Florida resident, Siewe hunts pythons in the Everglades for a living.

She also found a kindred spirit in Gretchen Bauer, whose own winding career path took her from interior decorating to running BSWANKY, a high-end women’s handbag company based in Sarasota. Through a unique partnership with Bauer, Siewe harvests snake skins for the brand’s luxury python collection.

Siewe didn’t even see her first Burmese python until about two-and-a-half years ago, though, after she read about South Florida’s python problem. The invasive species has taken over the Everglades and is killing the native animals that call it home.

There’s anywhere from 100,000 to 300,000 pythons in South Florida right now. There’s no way of knowing exactly how many, she said. And they lay, on average, 20 to 40 eggs each year.

“So, it’s a pretty big problem,” she said.

In January 2019, Siewe booked a three-week vacation to Florida. During her visit, she connected with renowned python huntress Donna Kalil, joining her for a python hunt in the Everglades.

“We caught a python, and I was totally hooked,” Siewe said. “I knew I had to figure this out. I was going to hunt pythons.”

Women Empowering Women

A native of the Philadelphia area, Gretchen Bauer moved to Sarasota about eight years ago. The longtime interior designer quickly established her business in Southwest Florida and began taking on clients there.

Since moving to the region, she has also donated her time and talents to various nonprofit initiatives, including Wine, Women & Shoes, a fundraiser for Forty Carrots Family Center.

It was nearly four years ago, while decorating a home for the charity wine dinner, that she first met house painter David Rodriguez.

As they got to know one another, he told her about the women in his family who design and make purses in Texas. He even showed her one of their creations.

The more they talked, she learned about his family members, Mexican Americans who, essentially, worked in a sweatshop and were mistreated by their employer.

“They were working for a handbag company in San Antonio, working from their homes, fabricating the bags, assembling the bags and paid by the factory,” Bauer said. “They had been working in the factory but asked to leave because the conditions weren’t great. And they were paid by the piece — $17 a piece — that’s less than minimum wage each hour. The bags retail for more than $200.”

She added, “More than 70 percent of garment factories are categorized as sweatshops. You think China or India when you think sweatshops. No, it’s going on right here. They were paid by the piece, not given breaks. It’s criminal what was going on.”

Rodriguez asked if she could help his family start their own business. At first, she turned him down.

“I’m an interior designer. What do I know about making bags?” she said.

But Bauer couldn’t get the family’s story out of her head. She wanted to help them break free of their employer and decided to take a chance. This is how the BSWANKY brand of accessories was born.

She hired a designer based in Orlando and partnered with “these incredible women” in San Antonio to launch her first purse, she said.

She gave basic instructions for what she wanted the purse to look like and let them take it from there.

“I wanted something nobody else had, something I knew was beautiful and was also functional,” she said.

They came up with “the trapezoid iconic shape (that) people can identify from a mile away” as a BWANKY design, "a piece of art," she said. The unique Sophie handbag also converts into a backpack.

Bauer built a facility in San Antonio for the women to work in and purchased the equipment needed — leather presses, skivers and other tools — to produce the handbags.

For six months, she flew back and forth between Florida and Texas every week, also driving regularly to Orlando.

She launched BSWANKY in November 2017, selling 35 handbags the first night. She knew immediately that the brand would fill a void in the luxury handbag space.

Despite the success, the distance was a challenge for Bauer. So, she moved operations to Sarasota.

She didn’t abandon the women she had been working with in San Antonio, though. She gifted them the equipment and tools she had purchased so they could launch their own company and build their own success.

“That was so important to me,” she said. “I left these women empowered and with everything they needed.”

Setting up shop in Florida, Bauer had a plan to similar to her Texas facility. She hired talented immigrant women to collaborate on her creations, paying them a fair wage and giving them a say in the company’s direction.

­­­From realtor to python huntress

After Siewe's first visit to the Everglades, she knew she belonged in South Florida.

“I went back to Indiana, where it was negative 30 degrees with the windchill,” she said. “I was back for a week when I told Dave, my fiancé, ‘I have to go. I have to go down there. I have to figure out how to become a python hunter.’”

He supported her dream and assured her that he’d join her in Florida as soon as he could.
Within two months, she was renting a room in Miami, uncertain where to start.

“I didn’t know anyone but (Kalil). I had no experience with (pythons) in the wild. I didn’t know where to go to catch them. I didn’t have a job,” Siewe said. “On paper it looked ridiculous. Why did I do this? But I trusted myself.”

Falling back on the skills she picked up while working in real estate, she decided she’d try similar tactics to break into python hunting.

“I networked my way all over the place,” she said. “Who do I need to talk about this or about that? I connected with the right people, and they connected me with other people, and I just figured it out.”

During her first months in Florida, the state agencies hiring python hunters weren’t accepting applications. By the time they were, she had connected with multiple experienced local hunters, several offering her glowing recommendations.

Today, she’s contracted with python hunting programs through two agencies: the Southwest Florida Water Management District and the Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission.

“When I first got here, I didn’t even know the difference between them,” Siewe said.

Though she’s gone herping — the technical term for searching for amphibians and snakes in the wild — much of her life, she quickly realized that experience is nothing like hunting pythons in the Florida swamps.

Siewe said she “always had an eye for spotting snakes." But up north, “usually, when I found snakes, I’d admire them and let them go,” she added. “Here in Florida, this is the only time I’ve ever killed a snake and it was hard for me to get used to.”

Pythons are “gigantic” compared to the “little rat snakes” she typically encountered back home in Indiana, she said. “When you see a 16-footer cross the road for the first time, it’s amazing. It’s still amazing. It’s an adrenaline rush. You see this huge snake, which is the coolest thing, and then it’s like, ‘Ok, how am I going to catch this thing?’”

The best time to go python hunting is in the summer during the months of July through September.

“That’s when the moms are coming out of their nests. The babies are all hatching. Everybody’s eating,” Siewe said.

During the winter months, the snakes are harder to find.

“They’re not moving as much. They’re way far back in the woods, so you have to go to them, and you need to know where they hide," she said. "If you just start walking through the woods and the swamps, you’ll never find them. They’re so good at camouflage.”

Even during the summer months, when the pythons are more active, they’re difficult to find, she added. “A lot of time you’re out in the field sometimes with zero return. It’s an average of 12 hours in the field per python you catch.”

Though she doesn’t have an exact number, Siewe said she’s caught more than 200 pythons since she started. And the killing doesn’t get any easier, even when done humanely, but she knows it’s necessary.

“It’s awful. It has to happen. It’s not their fault they’re here and we have to do it,” she said. “This is a huge problem. They are the apex predator eating all the animals and birds in the Everglades and we have to get rid of them. It could absolutely change the way the ecosystem works, and we might not know what they even look like for a few years.”

Within their first three years, pythons grow as long as 10 feet. Along the way, to get to this size, they each eat about 200 mammals and birds.

“When you look at it like that, with each python we catch, you’re saving a bunch of lives,” Siewe said.

In the last four years, python hunters have caught and killed about 9,000 snakes. She’s aware this is a drop in the bucket compared to the potentially hundreds of thousands of pythons that have made the Everglades their home.

“That’s nothing in comparison to what is out there. That’s one of the big controversies right now. Is this effort worth it? Is our work going to make a difference? If you look at the 10,000-foot view, now it looks like we never will,” she said. “We may never eradicate them, but we can bring the native mammals (numbers) back up. (Pythons) will always be part of Florida, but maybe not in as big of numbers. It’s about conservation and preservation.”

‘Think Outside The Bag’

More than once, Bauer has heard BSWANKY referred to as “the Louis Vuitton of Sarasota.”

“I take that as the biggest compliment,” she said.

While these types of accolades are nice, her biggest motivator is seeing firsthand how the brand's accessories impact the lives of the women who come through their shop.

“It’s like a badge of honor. It gives them a little boost of self-esteem,” she said. “That’s what drives me. Once the bag leaves the building, we know it’s never coming back, and hopefully, it elevates the life of the woman it goes with.”

Numerous customers have told her that “they get more compliments carrying a BSWANKY than any other accessory they’ve ever owned,” Bauer said.

From the beginning, she and the women on her team have been obsessed with perfection.

“Everything that comes out of the building has to be exceptional. It just has to be,” she said.
With BSWANKY’s iconic first handbag making such a splash, she began thinking about how her team might elevate its future designs.

She considered using varied materials for the brand’s designs and settled on creating bags made from the skins of invasive Burmese pythons.

“We want to push the envelope. We want to think outside the bag, as we say,” Bauer said.

She knew python skin bags and accessories would stand out next to other brands. But then came her next challenge: where would she get the python skins she needed?

‘It’s Not Easy to Skin a Python Properly’

Much like Siewe got her start in python hunting, it was networking that brought her and Bauer together.

Bauer reached out to SWFWMD to inquire about purchasing python skins.

From there, she connected with multiple python hunters. They all agreed with her that it was “a no-brainer” to use the snake skins to create bags and other accessories, she said. “It’s good for the environment. It’s so luxurious and so unique. And it’s such a Florida story."

But the python hunters she connected with didn’t know where to begin. They stopped before they ever got started.

“People would think they would be readily available, being that it’s an invasive species and so many are being pulled out of the Everglades,” Bauer said. “It’s not easy to skin a python properly, to have it tanned properly.”

It’s a centuries-old process that got its start in Indonesia and other countries, and something most South Floridians don’t have experience with, she added.

Eventually, her cold calls to python hunters led her to Siewe, who had already been thinking about how to best use the carcasses of the snakes she was killing.

Siewe found herself frequently wondering, “How can I use as much of the snake as possible, so they don’t have to go to waste?”

She was already interested in learning how to skin pythons by the time she first spoke with Bauer.

“She told me about her operation and said she was looking for one point of contact,” Siewe said. “I just said, ‘Sure, I’ll do it. I’m in. I’ll figure it out.’ And I had no idea what I was saying. It’s an incredibly difficult process.”

She taught herself to skin and tan pythons, learning by trial and error.

“I had to learn to skin them on my lanai in the middle of a condo complex surrounded by old people,” said Siewe, who now lives in Naples with her fiancé. “It took a lot of time to get the tanning right and I’m still working on colors and all kinds of stuff.”

Eventually, she found a local tanner who would tan the skins for her, but he only works in batches of 100. She convinced him to tan about 30 skins the first time, but now she buys pythons from other hunters so she can have them tanned in bulk.

Many other clothing and accessory brands that work with python skins purchase them from farms, usually overseas, Siewe said. It’s much different working with Florida pythons.

“Each one is different,” she said. “There are pattern variations. Some are really dark brown. Some light brown. Others deep black. There are these different variations of the Burmese python that you don’t get with the farm-raised ones.”

This makes Bauer’s job harder.

“We need to try to match up the skins and try to make each piece as uniform as possible,” she said.

And since each python skin is different — and the skins continue to evolve, exhibiting deeper, more intense colors every year — each BSWANKY python handbag is considered a limited edition, Bauer added. “The python bag you buy from us today is not going to look the same as a BSWANKY bag a year later.”

BSWANKY's python collection

These days, the python bags are the brand’s primary focus, Bauer said.

“The python is, right now, our core line because that’s what people want. They want what’s different. They want what’s best. Every woman feels like they want a luxury product, and the python elevates it,” she said.

She credits Siewe’s work ethic and professionalism with growing BSWANKY to where it is today.

Bauer said, “She’s been a champion, finding the best people to work with and the best materials. And we all have a great time. It’s fun making these beautiful things.”

In addition to a strong working relationship, they’re close friends as well, Bauer added.

“I love her like a sister. We’re so similar. There’s nothing she won’t do to make this happen,” she said.

Frequently, Siewe will make the two-hour drive from Naples to Sarasota just to show her new materials or to run an idea by her.

“She’ll show up and open up a cooler with all these dead pythons,” Bauer said. “The integrity she has, it’s admirable. It’s unbelievable. We’re such a perfect fit. And we laugh a lot.”

Siewe is also amazed by all they’ve accomplished together, especially considering the steep learning curve in preparing python skins.

“I think if either one of us were any different, more rigid or not willing to be open to anything and everything, it probably wouldn’t work very well,” she said.

And at the heart of what they do, each python bag produced raises awareness of the importance of preserving the Everglades and the impact of the invasive species.

“I don’t think people know enough about it when they see a python,” Bauer said. “We’re helping with that. Each bag makes a difference. They’re out there eating all the bunnies and birds in the Everglades.”