The legacy of fly-fishing in high-end luggage design

I am routinely defeated by the two pieces of luggage I own. So much so that I desperately want to meet a luggage designer and have him (I think) explain why my luggage is conceived that way. It’s now verging on an obsession.  I’ve been known to ask at cocktail parties whether anybody knows a luggage designer I could talk to. I’ve become a bit of a stalker.

It all started with the two pieces of luggage I own. The first one is a large computer bag with wheels. This thing was clearly designed by fly-fishermen because it has so many pockets they must be built for wooly buggers, tippet and fly-tying material. The business cards pocket buries them so deep it takes sticking most of my head inside the bag to extract one. When I prove unable to provide a business card to my adoring fans upon completion of a triumphant speech, I have to move to a lame “wait a minute, I will write my e-mail address on a piece of paper”. But the pen compartment inside the outer pocket of the bag has no bottom, so pens routinely get lost inside the bag, producing more archeological digging on my part. Finding paper in the file section of the bag is equally challenging because the file section of the bag is divided into four vertical areas, with no room for marking, and no way of knowing inside the darkness of the bag what each section contains, so the only way to get at anything is to dig the whole deck out of the bag and sort it out. Sometimes, I can’t even find the laptop in my laptop bag.

My other piece of luggage is a suitcase that requires memorizing a complex algorithm, just to get it open. I’m waiting for the blue tooth version. The suitcase has a zipper used to expand the size of the thing. Of course, this is always the first one I unzip, since my zippers visual memory has vastly eroded with age. When I manage to get inside the bag – I bat about 50% — I’m confronted with the next challenge: configuration. The suitcase has several pockets that can be zipped or unzipped. I suspect they were originally designed for trout and striped bass. The suit compartment involves a three-part folding contraption, plus a mesh that can be zipped along the foldable device – the original design must have been for tarpon or marlin, before being adapted for business suits. It takes a couple of hours to configure the suitcase – half of that is watching the video – and about the same time to pack – not including laundry time. As for fly-fishing, hiring a luggage coach is the best way to go.

My luggage self-esteem has been so damaged over the years that I’d like to benchmark my luggage IQ vs. the IQ of other luggage users. Call me competitive, but I’d like to know whether I’m at the stupid end of the luggage intelligence curve, or whether only designers and a handful of luggage power users are at the top, with most of us totally confused by their over-design. I’d like to know what data designers looked at when they conceived my two pieces of luggage. Did they co-create it with people like me in front of them, or did they look at focus group data gathered by some market research company, then concocted these massively over-designed pieces because it was more fun for them? I’d like to know what the technical and cost constraints involved in designing luggage are. I’d also like to find out why the overwhelming majority of upscale men’s luggage is black. Are there other people like me out there who would like to avoid the confusion created at airport luggage carrousels by the fact that most men’s suit cases are black, leading to the lifting of an average ten bags before finding your own? Is there something in cow hide pigmentation that prevents me from having a pink suitcase with giraffes? I’d also love to see these guys show me the color trend books they look at, share where their inspiration comes from, and sketch things out in real time in front of me. I’m sure this would trigger my own imagination on what would work for me and others in the market.

So let me warn you fairly, all of you luggage designers out there. I will be calling. My intent is to march onto Tumi, Travelpro and Victorinox Swiss Army headquarters, start a luggage tea party, and demand immediate simplification of luggage and the removal of useless pockets. I trust you designers are good people – you may even do some traveling of your own and might even use some company bags in the process – but you’re desperately out of touch with your market. The time has come for transparency of design.

The days of recycled fly-fishing bags masquerading as travel luggage are numbered.