News — product update

Part of this business means occasionally sharing our gear with press so everyone can get different takes on our gear. Long before starting this company, we've been fans of Chase Reeves. If you don't know Chase, he has always been a bag head and what slowly started as a fun side-project of reviewing bags, has now made him a go-to guy for great feedback. Chase always brings great insights into the products he reviews and really thinks about how each bag can affect someones experience working, traveling or just as an everyday bag. But the reason we're glued to his YouTube channel is that this guy mixes humor with an in-depth analysis that makes us feel like we're in the room with him! 

Almost all product companies have a distinctive design process to create strong concepts, but no product you have would be worth its weight without development, the unsung hero that makes everything you have worth owning. If you ask three different people, you’ll probably get three different answers, but in short, development takes a great design and makes it a great product by translating a designer’s vision into tangible instructions for the manufacturing partner. This role exists in almost every product space, but we’re going to focus on softgoods in this post.

Softgoods designers start with some functional goals and a general idea for the look and feel of a future bag before setting to work, researching, drawing and making mockups. Usually by the end of the design process, they have created a set of technical drawings that show every detail about the bag (a spec or tech-pack). At this point, a designer could hand off the drawing to a factory and get a very disappointing sample. Instead, to create the strongest products, designers collaborate with developers. Developers vary in approach and skillset, but generally a developer is expert in all aspects of material, construction and performance of the bag. Before the the good is ever made, they can identify where factories will have trouble with construction or where the design might have functional shortcomings. For example, we had a zipper sticking on our roll top because of the stiff fabric used for the rain flap. After four tests with different zippers and fabrics, we found that edge binding the flap instead of folding the fabric created a thinner, more flexible flap and the low friction of the binding helped the zipper run more smoothly against the flap edge.  While maybe not fascinating work, this one day of testing saved us weeks of back and forth with a factory.

Designs that are shared with talented developers are revised so textiles match product needs, sewing operations are clear, and the bag functions as the designer intended. After all these details are resolved, a full spec and construction samples are sent to a factory for sampling. It’s clear that all the groundwork for a good factory samples needs to be laid out ahead and that design is only as good as your development.

As we prepare to launch our Roll Top, we’re proud that almost all development happens in-house (we still definitely take feedback from factories). We internally pattern, sample and test our bags, working out plenty of kinks before the factory even sees it. We’ve found it’s far more efficient to fail early and often, than to wait till your bag is in the market to find shortcomings.  Though this process takes time, we revel in understanding and resolving every detail so our users can just enjoy performance.

In this post, we're focusing on a fundamental and disappearing element in the design process: making. For us, this is the critical step that connects our craft with industry.

We start our process the same way many designers begin: with observation. We learn about what people love and the problems they encounter. Then we begin drawing up some solutions. With this approach, we quickly run into the limits of two dimensions. Drawings are great to rapidly explore ideas, but it's nearly impossible to verify if the design works.  This is where the sewing comes in. We can quickly go from idea -> design -> pattern -> bag. This way we can put our creations to the test with different users and and see if our ideas sink or swim.

While outdoor packs don’t have to be complicated and technical, we would like our bags to be outstandingly comfortable and functional. There are a lot of nuances to getting a bag right and ideas that look good on paper don’t always work as planned in the field. Sewing up rough samples to test for a few hours or few days can totally changes our outlook on a design solution.

 When creating a new collection of gear, we will inherently make mistakes. It’s our goal to make all these mistakes quickly and cheaply, learning the valuable design lessons without losing too much time in development. So in the long run, all the sewing will make a better pack in a shorter time-frame, and by making these mistakes now, we’ll save valuable and expensive time down the road when we start sampling with a factory. We will know what features test well, what fabrics hold up to our abuse and even know the length of each piece of webbing.

 We now have our first round of samples out being tested and can’t wait to learn about the weak points in these designs so we can make them better.

We’re moving towards our goal of a Kickstarter campaign, and it’s important that we have a compelling product that really works. We want this to be the first of many bags so we feel it’s infinitely important that we start with the right set of values.

We're taking the right steps towards our goal and still have plenty of work ahead of us. We think the journey is as important as the destination anyway, so we're savoring the process until this first bag is in the hands of our customers.