Inside the Factory: Summer 2024 Updates

Maia Hamilton
2024-08-23T15:30:01-07:00

Our new retail store has opened in Bellevue Square!

We’re excited to expand our physical footprint beyond our Seattle factory. Our Bellevue Square store has soft-opened! Come by and say hello if you’re in the area! 😊 We have Mystery Grab Bags specifically made for the store, bags featuring new colors, and a few more surprises on the way.

When designing the store, we were committed to bringing elements of our factory into the retail space. With the help of our team, we were able to repurpose a massive 10-foot wooden tabletop from our factory into a centerpiece for the store. We made new table legs and added a fresh layer of coating to make the table look good as new. The table is so large that it couldn’t even fit through the standard loading dock at the mall! Just like at our Factory Showroom, we’ve created a space in our new store where you can have fun packing out bags, recreating the hands-on experience we value.

New Designs

A few weeks ago, we launched our newest design, the Bixi. We’ve been designing this travel backpack for over a year and are so thankful for the support that we received during the pre-order! If you missed your chance to pre-order a Bixi, know that you will still have a chance to shop the Bixi later. Our Production team is making slightly more bags than the pre-ordered quantity (we do this to optimize for batch sizes). We will make these extra bags available for purchase after all the pre-orders have shipped. If you’re interested in getting notified when the bags are available, we recommend signing up for a restock alert on the Bixi page.

New Colors!

Summer is the season for us to get experimental with new colors. We love expanding and playing around with our color palette, and we are always listening to the requests and feedback that you share with us via email, our forums, and social media.

At the beginning of the summer, we released our Sunglow X-Pac RX30 after asking you all to vote for our next X-Pac color! We’re pretty much sold out of all our bags made with Sunglow (at the time of writing this blog), but the good news here is that we are preparing to put more Synik 30s and Synik 22s back into Production and expect them to be ready in mid-to-late fall.

We also released two new 200d Halcyon colors: Tahoma and Kiwi! As with all our 200d Halcyon colors, these are custom dyed and woven just for us by our fabric supplier in Japan. We’ve made these two colors available in a bunch of bags thus far, including the Handy Little Things, Side Effect, Rogue Sacoche, Paradigm, and Paramour.

We’re also working on incorporating Kiwi into more of the larger bags, including both sizes of the Syniks! Some of you have asked whether we plan on incorporating Tahoma into bigger bags as well, and while we’ve made a few samples using Tahoma as a lining fabric, we noticed that materials commonly used in big bags, like foam, tend to alter the way Tahoma looks, so for now we plan on keeping Tahoma in smaller bags only.

We also have two brand new Ballistic colors in-house and available to shop soon – stay tuned for the announcement coming very soon.

Other Seattle Factory Updates

When COVID hit, we installed barriers between each sewer’s table to ensure maximum safety and allow us to continue operating business as usual. Now, more than four years later, we have finally removed all the barriers! It’s wonderful to be able to see everyone’s faces on the floor again and to feel a renewed sense of collaboration.

Recently, we’ve received a few messages about longer-than-usual email response times. We want to say thank you to everybody for being patient with us! The summer has been an extra hectic time with team members on PTO, training new crew members for the retail store, and handling increases in email traffic during one of our busiest seasons. Our team is working hard to catch up, and we recently onboarded new team members to help.

Update: We have adjusted the price of the Packing Cube Shoulder Bag to ensure we can continue offering it to our customers. At the previous price point, it had become increasingly difficult to sustain production, and we even considered discontinuing it. The Packing Cube Shoulder Bag requires a similar amount of materials and labor as the Rogue Sacoche, so we felt it was important to align the pricing to better reflect its value.

Looking Ahead

We’re bringing back one of the most popular 200D Halcyon colors, Cerise, to our line up! (Thank you to everyone who voted in our Instagram poll!) Cerise is scheduled to arrive at the factory at the end of the summer. Along with Cerise, we are also bringing back another Halcyon color that we have not had in a while (can you guess which one?). You can expect both these colors to be included in our fall and holiday lineups. We also have a new Cerylon color joining the family soon - though we are still waiting to nail down an eta from our supplier.

This summer, we have brought back a lot of beloved designs that we haven’t made in a while, including the Parental Unit, Le Petit Derrière, Yeoman Duffel, and the (slightly updated) Western Flyer. Are there any designs that you are hoping to see make a comeback? Share them in the comments below!

Our Design and Production teams are in the process of finalizing a new size for the Synik! That’s right—you asked, and we listened. We’ve heard from so many of you that the perfect size Synik was missing, and we’re excited to share that it’s on the way. Stay tuned for more updates soon!

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