LEWISTON — Dianna Pozdniakov wants to make high-end handbags, architecturally-inspired creations in rich leathers with sharp angles and folds, heavy on whimsy, right here.

It’s a project three years in the making, and she’s not there yet, but she’s getting close.

The company has a name, she has big plans and all around Lewiston, she sees potential.

“SofiaFima is going back to my roots and bringing back craftsmanship and the ability to make beautiful things with your hands,” Pozdniakov, 31, said. “This city was based on people making things.”

Pozdniakov was an unhappy New York architect married to a Lewiston native when they moved here seven months ago intending to use the city as a temporary home base.

The community changed her mind, she said.

Last week, she and husband Kevin Morin bought the former Terry’s Bridal building on Lisbon Street and plan to live on the third floor. She has joined the Chamber of Commerce, started to make the rounds to local economic development groups, volunteered to teach fashion design classes after school at Lewiston Middle School and gone full force in the handbag venture with prototypes in production now.

“We’ve met so many amazing, incredible people in this community, they sucked us in, big time,” she said. “The people I’ve met, I have made more friends here in six months than I did in eight years in New York. Genuine people, people who want to see you succeed.”

Pozdniakov’s parents are from Ukraine. They moved to Worcester, Mass., in 1979, where she grew up. Her father, Fima, a master tailor, wanted one of his children to be an architect. He pictured it as a good job, she said, one where they wouldn’t have to struggle, so she went off to Roger Williams University to study architecture. She met Kevin there.

After graduation, the couple lived in Brooklyn, N.Y. For eight years, Pozdniakov said she had jobs with two different firms, one doing commercial work with major developers, the other a smaller company specializing in high-end residential development, but didn’t feel a passion for her work.

“I was sitting behind a computer constantly,” she said. “I wanted to engage people more.”

She’d first had the idea about architecturally-inspired bags in college and in spring 2012 enrolled in handbag construction 101 at the Fashion Institute of Technology.

“It was amazing,” Pozdniakov said. “I bought a used industrial sewing machine, tons of scrap leather and glue and finally I felt, ‘yes.’ It was a lot like model-making in college.”

That summer, she took part in a business plan competition through the Brooklyn Public Library, starting to give a foundation to her idea.

Along the way she’s heard, repeatedly, that she can’t do the type of manufacturing she’d like to do in the U.S.

“‘You have to go abroad.’ I think it’s ridiculous,” Pozdniakov said.

Discouraged, she did try working with a company in China, once. It took too much time, too much back and forth.

“It was a great experience because it confirmed I didn’t want to go that route,” she said.

It’s become something of a mission to have her bags American-made since.

She’s pursing a patent for her first design, a twist bag with an aluminum shell covered in stingray leather and an exterior brass frame, but decided to ditch most of the metal for her initial mini-collection to get the cost down and simplify production.

Three pieces are being prototyped now in New York for a high-end line. She’s designing a second line to be made in Maine that’s more streamlined — no silk lining, just the leather’s natural suede on the inside, limited hardware, more simple construction — for a lower price point.

“Because the bags aren’t complete and we’re working through the construction of them, it’s difficult to say what the retail price will be,” Pozdniakov said. “In the next few months, I’ll definitely have a better idea of what range they’ll fall in.”

She and Kevin, who works at his parents’ Morin’s Machine Shop, moved to Maine, she said, for a better work-life balance, a chance to be more involved in a community and so she could juggle freelance architecture jobs with pursing SofiaFima.

Pozdniakov is working now with a local company making small leather business card cases as a test piece. Her goal is to have her handbags in shops by the end of the year.

“My big, big dream is to have my own manufacturing facility right here in town,” she said. “The history is here, the energy is here, the passion is here, the entrepreneurial spirit is here. I love being part of the resurgence.”

Androscoggin Chamber of Commerce President Chip Morrison called her prototype bags incredible.

“You never know as a business gets off the ground whether it’ll pick up steam, but this is an idea that could catch fire. If it does, these are manufacturing jobs and a high-end product being made in Lewiston-Auburn, which is really cool,” Morrison said. “Every woman I’ve seen that has seen one of those wants to take one home.”

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