If you’ve been in the market for a contemporary bag any time in the last five years or so, you’re likely quite familiar with a couple of Foley + Corinna bags already: the City and Jetsetter totes. Those bags have been the brands bread and butter for years, and by all indications, they continue to sell like those proverbial hotcakes that everyone seems to buy in some make-believe world where people eat carbs.

By now, you know the drill. We think Fridays are the perfect day for online shopping (somehow, it’s the day that I end up doing most of mine), and because we love you guys and we aren’t afraid to be service-y, we’ve done the honors of scouring the Internet and coming up with the Best Bag Deals of the Week, just like we do every week.

Cole Haan is one of those brands whose bags I’ve always wanted to like but never really have. They always seemed directed at a slightly older, slightly less fashion-conscious customer, and while that’s certainly fine, it never gave me or anyone I know much to get excited about. Most brands who find themselves in that categorization eventually try to break free from it, though, and it was only a matter of time until Cole Haan took the necessary steps.

Like many little girls, I always looked forward to trips to my grandmother’s house. In addition to great food and unconditional love, I would almost always get to play with my grandmother’s jewelry, clothes, shoes and bags. While I seemed to find a new treasure with each visit, there was one item that I always made sure to get my hands on – an old and very delicate coin purse.

It wasn’t all that long ago that those of us on the PurseBlog team were shopping for school bags ourselves. I’m the baby of the group, and since it’s August (side note: how?), this marks the fifth anniversary of the very last time I went back-to-school shopping. Despite the advent of things like iPads and Kindles in those intervening years, though, I feel pretty confident that a college student still considers the same things when shopping for a school bag: fashion, function and price.

We tend to write mostly about expensive man bags for Man Bag Monday, which I suppose makes sense in the context of the rest of the things we tend to fawn over; the men’s luxury market is opening up in an exciting way right now, and it’s fun to explore that. For the average style-minded male consumer, though, I get the sense that four-figure bags aren’t the first stop for something stylish.

We spend a lot of time talking about accessories (and with good reason), but a concern that’s equally important to an accessory’s design and quality is how it interacts with your wardrobe. No handbag, shoe or piece of jewelry is an island, and it’s the overall picture that’s important; you want your outfit to be more than the sum of its parts.

If you had asked me to name the brands from which Marc by Marc Jacobs was likely to take handbag inspiration, Valentino wouldn’t have even been on my list. I like both brands’ work, in general, but their aesthetics are so utterly divergent that one borrowing from the other would seem to ignore both’s target customers. The team at MbMJ clearly disagrees with me, though, because the Marc by Marc Jacobs Katie Crossbody Bag owes an obvious design debt to its more expensive predecessor, the Valentino VaVa Voom Flap Bag.

I have yet to figure out why I haven’t purchased a Cambridge Satchel Company bag yet. I believe it goes back to the fact that there are so many amazing color options that I start to feel completely overwhelmed with options. This company has an amazing back story and products that speak for themselves. The fashion crowd loves Cambridge Satchel Company, as do I.

When you receive a text message from a straight guy extolling the virtues of a new bag he just saw, it’s probably best to pay attention, because that sort of thing doesn’t happen often. (Unless you have particularly fashion-conscious straight dude friends, which I don’t.) That happened to me last week, and the object of said dude’s lust was the Everlane Weekender, a promising bag by a fashion startup Everlane that comes in four unisex colors and rings in at just under $100.