With their kid heading off to university and Given Our Current Situation, a friend asked if I could suggest an excellent bag for them, with the caveats being “fashionable”, “durable”, “fits a laptop” and “not American”, all reasonable things to want. Fashionable, I am not good at, but laptop and durable I can do.
With that in mind, avoiding American brands (cutting out a lot of the usual suspects like Timbuk2, Chrome, Tom Bihn and many, many others), I suggested:
- Arkel mostly make panniers for bikes, but they do make a backpack and their build quality is excellent.
- A bit weirder and more heavy duty, a Montreal shop called Cocotte makes courier-focused gear that also has an excellent reputation.
- Weirder still, Mariclaro makes bags out of recycled Airbus lifejackets! I haven’t tried these, but they definitely look cool.
- Going a bit further afield, Crumpler make outstanding gear, or at least they did once upon a time and also do today. They got bought by a private equity firm a while back and quickly lost their way, but then got re-bought back by the original owners and are now A Real Company again. I’ve got two of their bags, and 20 years and thousands of kilometers later, they’ve held up.
- Further afield in the other direction, the Freitag people – a Czech group who make messengers out of recycled truck tarps among other things – seem to do good work as well. “Fashionable”, I dunno, but their bags look great in a durable-working-class-great way and every one is unique.
- Finally, if you have some time and want to go full-custom, go to GreenRoom 136, pick Northseeker and fiddle with the colors and options until you’ve got a bag that is exactly what you want. Neither cheap nor fast, but excellent.
One thing I want to mention if you’re shopping for this stuff is that once you’ve cut out leather and fashion brands, price just doesn’t matter. The difference between uncomfortable, unreliable garbage and a bag that’s decades-durable and perfect for you over the time you’ll spend lugging your life around is pennies a day and you’re worth it. If you’re going to put in the miles, never cheap out on your socks, your shoes or your bag.
