Excellency is forever
We set out to make an excellent travel bag, not just a great one. With the forest of bags in the market, we understood the challenge and winding journey it would take to accomplish this. Our team would need masters in design, veterans of travel, and to only source the best quality materials this planet has to offer without any sacrifice on price, but also a long tenured factory who shared our vision to be simply the best.
Our design house manager
Over the years, we've traveled across Canada, and met with a lot of candidates to oversee our final product. Only a handful of factories and leather workers were able to meet our standards of quality, but the one we chose to oversee our required level of innovative craftsmanship was locally based in Toronto.
Re-inventing the DOPP kit
The word was coined by leatherworker Charles Doppelt, in 1919 and marketed them locally before landing a contract with the US Army during WWII. Dopp kits were once a common gift given to young men as they ascended from boyhood to adulthood. We've re-thought a modern version to co-exist with the Smart-Pack PLUS+ – upgrading the usual leather/pleather exterior to a water-proof iP67 nylon, adding high-grade magnets embedded in-between the fabrics, and designed it to open up as a trifold to store travel sized washroom essentials. It can be hung as well at a 90° angle (which makes packing, and un-packing at your destination a breeze) .
The result: a sleek and modern homage to a once timeless men's accessory, with an emphasis on user-friendly design. Useful, and a necessity.
Undeniably light & strong
All our premium bags are made with a ballistic American made iP67 water-proof nylon – a lightweight, matte military-grade material that is nearly impossible to tear or wear. Additionally because it’s also water-proof, it protects your clothing, and tech from damage – making it an extraordinarily resilient material.
Premium ergonomic AXIS™ mult-functional straps
Comfort level of a bag can make or break it's lifetime value. You want to make traveling and the journey feel as light and breezy as can be. We searched high and low, tested A and tested B and eventually chose a memory foam blend for the backside with extra lumbar support for the spine, padded, and flexible webbed padded straps for all day and night comfort levels even when the Smart-Pack PLUS+ is fully loaded. We couldn’t source existing straps that also featured a zipper pocket, so we designed them ourselves for ease of use having your music within reach as you move about. The straps move alongside its axis vertically for a custom fit no matter who's wearing it, along with a padded waist strap to re-distribute the load.
Our factory partners
We met with many factories before deciding which we would work with. Only a handful were able to meet our standards of quality, but the ones we chose really stood out to us with their level of expertise, craftsmanship, and attention to detail.
Design matters
It took 5 years, and 17 different versions/iterations along the evolution timeline of SmartPack. Co-designer Piero Ricci and the team wanted the "Super car of bags." From the aqua guard YYK Japanese zippers, to the wax coated matte finish texture, to the precise functionality of co-existing features, to the rigorously perfectly curved ergonomics. These finer details that may come across as not essential, to us, are what makes the difference between good, and excellent. The difference between 1 year of use, and a lifetime's worth of use. show respect to our customers. We are true and true perfectionists, and don't quit until we offer a truly remarkable end product to our customers. In the grand scheme of things, design matters.