getting to know rickshaw bags
At each of our residency weekends we have some sort of community activity on the Saturday night. Since we only see each other a handful of times per semester, these evenings are a great time to interact with classmates outside of your study/project group.
For last night’s activity, Nathan brought in Mark Dwight, the founder of Rickshaw Bags. I think it was most likely through SFist or some other blog, but I’ve been following Rickshaw’s progress ever since their “coming soon” website landed over a year ago. I’ll admit to being a total bag junkie, but Rickshaw is more than just pretty looking bags. Mark is not only innovating the product, but his entire business model.
Currently Rickshaw offers two main product lines, a computer messenger-style bag and a no-frills shoulder bag. The majority of the computer bag is manufactured in China, while it the finished assembly work and customization happens here in San Francisco. He described this as “outsourcing 90% of the labor and insourcing 90% of the personality.”
The second bag is an aggresively priced pared down messenger bag built from a cradle-to-cradle mindset. These “zero-waste” bags are created without any cutting waste of product (unbelievable when you think about how much fabric is wasted when finishing most goods.) The bag is also produced entirely of nylon so that they can be down-cycled into carpet or other products when a customer is finished with the item. While the bag is not without its flaws or concerns, the effort is quite inspiring. As is Mark’s committment to partnering with other companies to make a recycling loop that creates fabric from recycled bottles and then ensures that the bags can be later recycled into carpet.
I could probably talk on and on about this… so instead I’ll leave you with some clips of Mark which will hopefully give you a sense of what he and Rickshaw are all about.
First off, how to recycle plastic bottles into fabric:
Next, a clip on being a Moleskin geek. I found this clip especially interesting because you can see how passionate Mark is about the littelest details about the bag. It also serves as a nice glimpse into the documentation of his design process and business development.
Finally, a couple of clips on the development of a Moleskin folio. You can see a before and after in the prototyping of a new product.
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