Urban Packs and Making Cash
By Rocky Thompson on August 18th, 2009
The dirty secret is that backpack makers need to turn a profit, and there aren’t enough people spending two weeks picking through canyons to keep a staff of full-time pack makers employed. In pursuit of making shareholders happy and keeping the industry moving forward, they all turn to the urban bag market. Even the dry bag makers at Seal Line figured out that there weren’t enough sea kayakers to grow their dry bag company quite as fast as they’d like, so they moved into urban a few years ago. The small company CiloGear has plans for an urban bag line, and even core-messenger companies like Chrome carry larger urban lines than they do conventional messenger bags.
The Gear Junkie covered the Kelty Saunter and the Osprey Flap Jack Courier the other day–these packs are designed more with a bus commuter in mind than a person on a fixie. The trend is moving even father from the backcountry and closer to the streets. Consumers buying this city stuff must not have read my last blog post about being bad people. Either way, we can all thank them for keeping pack makers in business.
