I have been building businesses for 23 years.
In that time, I have worked from offices in London, Hamburg, and Xiamen. I have sat in boardrooms in Zürich and taken calls in airport lounges in Singapore. I have reviewed contracts on trains crossing Germany and answered emails in hotel lobbies at 6 in the morning before a client breakfast.
And somewhere in all of that, the café became one of my most important offices.
Not because I sought it out. But because the nature of international business — the cancelled meetings, the delayed flights, the sudden gaps in a schedule that was perfectly planned until it wasn't — creates time that needs to be used. And a café, if you know how to work in one, is one of the best places in the world to use it.
The unexpected office
My relationship with café working did not come from a desire for a more flexible lifestyle. It came from necessity.
When you are managing companies in multiple countries, you spend a significant amount of time in transit. Airports. Train stations. Hotel lobbies between a morning meeting and an afternoon one. And within that transit, there are always gaps — sometimes planned, often not.
A client cancels a meeting an hour before it was due to start. You are already in the city, already out of your hotel, with three hours suddenly free and a full inbox. A flight is delayed by two hours. A connecting train runs late and you have ninety minutes in a station you did not expect to be in.
In those moments, the question is always the same: where do I work?
The answer, almost always, is the nearest café with a quiet corner, reliable WiFi, and enough space to open a laptop.
Over 23 years, I have worked from cafés in London, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, and dozens of airports and train stations in between. Some of these sessions were the most focused and productive hours of my week — precisely because they were unplanned, unscheduled, and free from the interruptions of a normal office day.
What I have learned about working from a café
Not every café works. And after two decades of finding out which ones do, I have a few things I look for immediately when I walk through the door.
A quiet corner.Not silence — I actually work well with background noise. But I need to be able to think, and I need to be able to take a call without disturbing everyone around me or being disturbed by them. A corner table, preferably facing a wall or window rather than the centre of the room, makes an enormous difference.
Power within reach. This is non-negotiable on a full working day. A table with no socket is a table with a two-hour limit, and on a day when a flight delay gives you four hours, that is not enough.
Staff who understand. The best working cafés — and you develop a sense for them quickly — are run by people who understand that a customer who sits for three hours and orders twice is a good customer. No pointed looks at the empty coffee cup. No sense that you are occupying space that someone else needs. Just a quiet understanding that this is what the space is for.
When I find a café like this in a city I travel to regularly, I remember it. I have a small mental list of places across Europe where I know I can sit, work, and think without friction. They are as valuable to me as any meeting room.
The bag that makes it possible
Here is something I did not fully understand until I started building Victoria Hyde London.
The bag you carry into a café is not a fashion accessory in those moments. It is your office. Everything you need to work — and everything you need to live — has to be inside it. And it has to be organised well enough that you can find anything in thirty seconds, without emptying half the bag onto the table.
For years, I struggled with this. I carried bags that were beautiful but impractical. Bags that could hold a laptop but nothing else in any order. Bags that arrived at meetings looking perfect on the outside while I spent the first two minutes searching for a pen.
The idea for the New Work Bag came directly from this experience. Not from a design brief or a market analysis. From the specific, daily frustration of a professional woman who needed her bag to work as hard as she did.
A story that stayed with me
A few years ago, I gave one of our New Work Bags to a close friend. She is a CFO at a Fortune 500 company. Every week, she drives from Bremen to the Netherlands for work — a long commute across two countries, often with client meetings, calls, and full working days on both sides of the journey.
She called me a few weeks after I gave her the bag.
"Tian,she said,this bag is my mobile office."
She told me that everything she needs — her laptop, her AirPods, her phone, her charger, her power bank, her mouse, her lipstick, her documents, her keys, her pen — all of it has a place. A specific place. A place she reaches for without looking, without searching, without frustration.
Whether she is in her car between cities, in a café waiting for a meeting to start, or walking into a boardroom in Amsterdam, the bag is there. Everything is where it should be. She told me it makes her feel, in her words, *safe*.
That word stayed with me. Safe.
Not because the bag protects her from anything physical. But because knowing that everything you need is organised, accessible, and ready — that feeling, when you are moving fast and thinking about ten things at once — is genuinely calming. It removes a layer of low-level anxiety that professional women carry constantly, usually without naming it.
That is what the New Work Bag was built for. Not for the photo. For the moment in the café, the car, the airport, the meeting room — when you reach for something and it is exactly where it should be.
What I carry
People sometimes ask me which Victoria Hyde London bag I use myself.
The answer depends on the trip. For longer travel days — Frankfurt to London, Hamburg to a client in Munich — I use the Jolene. It fits my 16-inch laptop, and the trolley strap means it slides onto my suitcase handle so I am not carrying weight on my shoulder through an airport terminal.
For days in Hamburg, moving between our office and client meetings in the city, I use the Ada. At 800 grams, it is light enough that I barely feel it by the end of a long day. And it fits everything I need for a full working day — laptop, phone, charger, the documents I will actually use, and enough of the everyday essentials that I never feel caught without something.
The bag is never the most important thing in the room. But on the days when everything is moving fast — when a meeting runs late and you have thirty minutes to get to the airport, when a client cancels and you suddenly need to find a café and work for two hours — a bag that does exactly what it is supposed to do, without friction, without drama, is one less thing to think about.
And when you are running a business across three countries, one less thing to think about is worth a great deal.
For every woman who works from wherever she needs to be
If you are reading this on a train, in an airport lounge, in a café between two meetings, or at your kitchen table at 7am before the rest of the house wakes up — I built Victoria Hyde London for you.
Not for a version of you that has everything perfectly organised and always planned. For the real version. The one who is moving fast, thinking about more than one thing, and needs the things around her to simply work.
The café will always be there when you need it. Make sure your bag is ready.
Love what you do.
— Tian Yao, Founder, Victoria Hyde London
London & Hamburg
Explore the New Work Bag collection →[victoria-hyde.com/en/collections/women-new-work-bags]
