The bag dad, by the bay
Beyond cost, there is the matter of how we value things in our lives. After putting 10 years of hard road wear on your car, for instance, would you give it up if the manufacturer offered a new one in exchange? What about the latest TV or Palm Pilot as even trade for your old model? Or a fresh replacement for that much-worn 1989 blazer you still wear on weekends over blue jeans?
Many of our possessions are valued according to their newness, not their long service. Of course, some special things in our lives aren’t traded away so fast. A favorite fountain pen or trophy belt buckle, for instance.
At a time when possessions -- stuff, belongings, effects -- are essential expressions of our culture as well as the axis of our economy, the fact that some material things earn our affection while it bleeds out of others is a source of continual wonder, perhaps even significance. The 17th century maxim “Possession hinders enjoyment” lost the argument long ago. Life these days would not, as they say, be the same without the legacy of goods that we have accumulated and those we desire.
Hardly anyone has more fun with the subject, with all its fickleness, than San Francisco manufacturing chief executive Mark Dwight.
Dwight’s company, Timbuk2, makes stuff to carry our stuff.
More to the point, the simple nylon bags made by Timbuk2, chiefly working-class, urban messenger-style shoulder bags, turn out to be belongings that gather devotion with constant use, over time, the harder the better, sometimes to the extreme.
Dwight keeps tab on the phenomenon. At airports, during trade shows, in encounters with strangers, you may hear him make the trade-in offer: a new Timbuk2 bag in return for the tattered, grubby one hanging on your shoulder.
“You watch people,” Dwight recalls. “They really want the new bag. Then they say, ‘But I have to give you this one?’
“More often than not, they keep their old one.”
Which serves as a reminder that the disposable age does not account for the worth of the wine stain that occurred at a bistro in Paris when your spouse-to-be first walked into your life and you knew it right then. Or the sentiment conveyed by the discoloration that is evidence of that first diaper you ever changed on your daughter. And look, here is where your dog chewed the strap, a dog that is now gone except for this memento. And that patch -- why, it covers a tear that occurred when you tried to ride your bike home after a concert at the Fillmore and crashed because ... well, never mind.
People volunteer these stories by way of explanation.
It seems that after awhile these bags carry more than stuff. They become manuscripts that transport stories of their owner’s lives, written in the indelible hieroglyphics of blot, blotch and blemish. Like memories themselves, they are not subject to easy upgrades.
When the 44-year-old Dwight puts on his salesman’s face and gets himself wound up with business slogans about “a bag for life,” it turns out he’s not so far from the fact of the matter.
In Timbuk2’s files are testimonials about messenger bags that saved their owners from disaster. Amy White of Seaside, Calif., for one, wrote to say thanks after her overfilled bag kept her upright and balanced on her bike when she was hit in the head by a low-flying Canada goose.
Maybe it is instructive, or possibly just quaint, to recognize that our tastes aren’t always shaped in the marketing department. Or by flighty judgments of the beautiful people either. Sometimes a bicycle messenger with tired shoulders has a say too.
A carry nation
In its company history, Timbuk2 traces the modern messenger bag to the 1950s and the advent of the Globe Canvas shoulder tool bag devised for telephone linemen. It allowed heavy loads to be carried on the back for ease of movement and then swung forward quickly for access. Some years later, these bags were employed by bicycle messengers in New York City. In 1980, the company Manhattan Portage was founded to create bags specifically for messengers. Nine years later in San Francisco, messenger Rob Honeycutt entered the business with a single sewing machine. Two years later, he changed his brand name from the unwinning “Scumbags” to Timbuk2.
In the years since, the messenger bag, of course, spread far beyond messengers to become an everyday urban accouterment, just the thing to contain the work files, gym shoes, insulated coffee mug, water bottle, music player, book, cellphone, electronic assistant, laptop, lip balm, newspaper, banana and all else that has become essential for even short movements within the city. Most significantly, the messenger bag has been instrumental in introducing men to the utility of the purse -- a blue-collar contribution to the vanities of metrosexualism, with multitudes of manufacturers offering versions from $19 to $1,900.
Timbuk2 has passed to professional management now, although it remains privately held. Dwight worked at tech giant Cisco Systems, and other executives were drawn from Birkenstock and the outdoor gear company Mountainsmith, a lineup that suggests the corporate mind is not immune to the simple charm of the messenger bag.
From a wood-floor loft that overlooks a pint-size factory floor in the city’s Mission district, these shirt-sleeve managers oversee a company that in scale, strategy and imagery stands with one foot in the gritty and old-fashioned world of manufacturing and the other in the contemporary realm of fashion and high-speed management. Levi Strauss, the original San Francisco sewn-goods producer, may have sent the last of its production overseas, but Timbuk2 hangs on, at least in part. New offerings in its product line, like the Yoga bag, are made offshore in China, but all of the company’s classic three-panel messenger bags are still sewn at home, a point of enduring pride for Dwight and the company’s 45 employees.
A trio of horseshoe-shaped assembly lines, each with a half-dozen sewers, produce 100,000 messenger bags a year -- a trifling output compared with global luggage giants but enough to maintain, as Dwight says, “our heritage. There is something in the karma of that product that needs to be made here.”
The economics of paying San Francisco skilled wages for the sake of domestic production -- “always challenging,” Dwight concedes -- are maintained, in part, by U.S. duties on imported bags and by the simplified construction of the messenger bag itself, which has evolved only slightly over the years. Dwight hands a sewer a custom order in the colors of red, black and green, and less than 15 minutes later, he can present you a finished bag with its signature “swirl” logo, waterproof vinyl liner and heavy-duty 2-inch shoulder strap.
Such production speed allowed the company to be a pioneer in customization. For those who could not find their way to bike shops or sporting goods stores, Timbuk2’s website was configured so customers can choose colors for each of a bag’s three panels. With overnight delivery, customers can have their bag sometimes in only a day and usually within five days at basic prices from $60 to $95.
Curiously, Timbuk2 reports that shoppers will frequently toy around with mock-ups using 22 color choices of ballistic nylon or 16 in Cordura and then settle on solid black, by far the most popular “customized” choice.
The cool factor
The business end of the business, however, does little to explain the cultural Tao of Timbuk2’s messenger bags.
They have retained respect among working messengers even as they’ve been popularized by the urban cafe crowd and by college students determined to outgrow their book packs. How this occurs remains one of those small mysteries of materialism, proving that our subcultures, our tribes, are willing to share at least some of their jealously guarded fashion symbols. The cachet of Timbuk2, or to use the vernacular, its “street cred,” is so strong that messenger bags are even used to motivate wayward teenagers to seek better lives.
The San Francisco nonprofit assistance agency At the Crossroads has received 1,300 donated messenger bags in the last four years to pass along to homeless young adults as the first step in establishing trust.
“When they find out that we can hook them up with a Timbuk2 bag, we become significantly cooler to them,” explained director Rob Gitin. “They walk away with the message that we don’t just want them to survive. We want them to feel good, we want to feel that someone has investment in their fulfillment.”
For these youth of the streets, the bags often begin as “portable lockers,” a place to safeguard whatever possessions they own. Gitin said that when these young people later set out for jobs or return to school, the bags are transformed into expressions of aspiration that provide “a sense of confidence, and enable them to create a professional yet hip impression.”
It’s doubtful if many other manufacturers would encourage the spread of their signature product to the homeless while aiming to sell to the chic, but perhaps there is a lesson here too. Maybe it’s no more complicated than the childhood memory of that first cherished possession. As Dwight puts it, “The messenger bag is the blanket we want to carry.”
