The BAKBAGS story started years ago. Just the idea. But at the end of 2020 we really moved. COVID punched us in the face for almost a year and we lost quite some opportunities. Not good. But we also had more free hours due to COVID, so we decided to go for our long desired own brand: BAKBAGS was born. Or at least the name and the plan. The name and first design direction were Scandinavian inspired and after a short search we found our ideal design team, led by Javier. Javier is from Barcelona but at the time that we started to work he was residing in Milano. We took our time to come up with designs that we really loved and finally we decided that we were “production ready” in late spring 2021.
Production is what we know quite well so we built in all the steps needed: Prototype, 1st sample, and 2ndsample for both styles. Changed some details along the way as the engineers in the factory advised to do so. This guy, together with the factory owner are simply amazing. So much material knowledge! And this was needed because we wanted to be as “green” as possible and that sounds easier than it works out. Anyway, we started the real production lines at the beginning of September 2021 and we finished everything at the end of October.
Our next hurdle was the transport from China to our warehouse in The Netherlands. After we did our utmost to make our bags sustainable, it didn’t feel relaxed to ship the full container with our bags on a massive container ship. So, we did research on transport by train. All the way from China to Tilburg. It is expensive and at the same time there is a big risk because the winter months already started. And we heard enough stories about trains getting stuck in deep snow. For sure, we like deep snow and we will definitely design some cool bags for snow sports in the future but in this case….fingers crossed and go for it. We were so lucky, because “our train” arrived within 22 days in Tilburg and a few days later in our warehouse.
R&D, production and transport…those journeys came to an end, realizing at the same time that we still need to start. But hey, it feels exciting already. In the meantime our website is live, Bol.com sells BAKBAGS for over a week now and Amazon Germany almost a get set & go. Time for marketing. Next chapter.
