NORWAY — Natasha Durham has a perfect view of Main Street from her office, a retail storefront in the restored Norway Opera House.

She sees people come, go, and they’ve seen her grow.

“It’s a good thing we’re online — every lady in town has a Rough & Tumble bag already,” said Durham, 50, from Hebron, smiling and glancing out the window.

She founded the high-end leather bag company six years ago out of her house and moved here two years ago. There’s a production annex a few doors down. Soft, rich leather is imported from Italy, France and Germany to be sewn into cross-body satchels, slings and totes.

“And then we ship it back to Italy, France, Germany in the form of a bag,” Durham said. “All this international revenue is coming to this little town.”

Roughly 20 percent of customers are overseas. She suspects more people have heard about Rough & Tumble in Japan than in her own state, and gets it.

“I put it out there and I wait for people to notice,” Durham said. “Why would people in Maine know about me? I haven’t told anybody.”

That’s likely to change with a second retail location opening in December on Middle Street in Portland, in the busy Old Port. That expansion sparked rumors that she’s out the door.

“We love our Norway clients. They are probably the most loyal clients I’ve ever had in my life,” said Durham. “They know their purchase is filling the oil tanks of their neighbors. I would never close this store, not in a million years.”

Durham had been a chef for 17 years with two Portland restaurants when she decided to sell both, take a year off and weigh her next career move. A longtime artist, she began experimenting with handbag designs.

“I hadn’t sewn in 25 years, since my son was little — the last thing I made was a baby quilt 25 years ago,” she said.  “I like working with tools and materials and the challenge of the three-dimensional form.”

She sold her first attempts on Etsy.

“The exercise of making something and then having someone adopt it was really fulfilling,” Durham said. “I was 18 weeks behind on production when I hired my first employee.” She’d wake up in the morning, check the computer and tell her husband, happily, “‘Someone ordered a bag!’ I would come to bed (at night), ‘Oh, no, I sold 15 bags today. What am I going to do?'”

Rough & Tumble now has 22 employees, most of whom live within 20 miles of Norway. She has five prototypes in the works at any one time and the production team now co-designs with her.

“They’re brilliant stitchers, they’re brilliant designers, they’re brilliant trouble-shooters,” Durham said.

The line is carried in 35 stores around the U.S. and also features Maine leathers and Maine beeswax-coated linen; the latter is water- and stain-resistant, and on a warm day in the car, she said, smells like honey.

Durham is at work now on a new clothing line that, like the bags, will also be produced in the state, part of what she calls her commitment to quality.

When approaching a new project, “I concern myself very little with the outcome — I concern myself 100 percent with the process and I trust that the universe will support me, and it always does, it never fails,” she said.

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