CategoriesTravel
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The ski adventure which wasn’t planned.

As a ski addict with a backpack (actually bags in general) fetish I jumped in the car for a 8 hour drive to Le Grand Bornand. An authentic mountain village at the northwest side of the French Alps. Things were a bit tense before leaving because of the COVID mess all around. With French government changing entry rules often we kept our fingers crossed before and after departure. Besides that, temperatures were record high at the time of departure reaching 15 degrees Celsius at 1500 meters during the day. Were we facing a summer hike in the middle of Winter? In any case a good reason to bring my brand new BAKBAGS Stockholm outdoor backpack next to my Wedze BP Ski FR500 Defense backpack which I wanted to try on and off piste. The BAKBAGS is nice anyway to bring as luggage for accessories like goggles, gloves, hats etc. Brand new, nice bag and proud to say that I helped developing them.

Monday was our first ski day. Enough snow and not busy at all as French schools started today. But too warm. Tuesday the same. Annoying. Same for the Wedze backpack. This bag looks so nice and has so many functions as a real ski backpack. However, it was the weight that killed me. Over 1700 grams empty! With my stuff inside…..well at least it did make me go faster on the fluffy slow slopes. Waking up Wednesday morning was fantastic after opening the curtains of our apartment. Fresh snow. When I was looking for my snow goggles in my BAKBAGS backpack I got this crazy idea to bring it on for the day. Why not? For sure it isn’t made as a real ski backpack, but it surely has the looks. And above all, it is lightweight. A feather compared to the Decathlon Wedze bag.

The experience was good really. For sure I am not 100% neutral but I dare to say that it was much more comfortable than the Wedze. At least for the occasion, where the Wedze would be more suitable for backcountry adventures as it has more typical ski oriented functions. The other good thing is that skiing with your those bags gave me new ideas for future developments. And that is hopefully the way that our blogs are going to work out. Tell us your ideas and we would love to work them out to future BAKBAGS. Let’s do this together!

CategoriesTravel
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Bags are for travel. And so, they did.

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.

CategoriesMonthly Summery
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A monthly summery soon

We love our bags. We love it even better when you love our bags. We plan to work in a transparent way as much as possible. The clear goal is to get your input to make all our future bags. It might be a bit idealistic but still we go for that. We realize that this won’t happen overnight and that is ok. We also realize that we will not be the worldwide number 1 in bag sales within a year. Our goals are different. 

This blog will return as a monthly summery. We will share our collected ideas. We will share our results in the media, and we will even share our result in sales. Why not? 

But first we must get our bags online in a good way. Our team for online sales lean, mean, young and almost angry ;-). We believe to reach this first goal around half February: 3 points of sale online: Bol.com, Amazon.de and BAKBAGS.com Together with that we will start our social media campaign, the sketches of new bags and preparation of our sales in the UK, Canada and USA. 

More on all this in the next Base Blog.