Freitag’s new upcycled baggage are designed from actual airbags—and develop just like them, as well

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Every single 1 of Freitag’s new upcycled baggage is exceptional, from the shade of the handles to the pastel designs of the content and the stitching that holds it with each other. Which is due to the fact every bag is created out of actual airbags. 

Freitag, a Zurich-based mostly company of useful, a person-off baggage and components, is furthering its mission to use the total motor vehicle from headlight to bumper with the new F700 Arrow and F708 Firebird luggage, the two of which are made with discarded airbags as a foundation product and truck pressure belts for handles. The baggage can be made use of as a tote or backpack. The two of the bag versions fall on line and in suppliers today, with the smaller sized Arrow bag retailing for $220 and its more substantial Firebird counterpart for $310.

Freitag's new F700 Arrow and F708 Firebird bags.
[Photo: Oliver Nanzig/Freitag]

Freitag has grow to be one thing of a feeling for its impressive (and typically sudden) use of recyclable resources. The company’s bread and butter is truck tarps, nevertheless the organization has upcycled many other formerly made use of materials, like soda bottles, auto belts, and bicycle tubes for its sporty, utilitarian items.

An up-close photo of the Freitag logo on a bag.
[Photo: Oliver Nanzig/Freitag]

But it&#8217s not the only 1 in the room leaning into upcycled resources. Nike a short while ago launched an upcycled poncho that doubles as a tent, London-primarily based Troubadour launched this backpack built of just one solitary, recyclable material, and Berlin-primarily based Ucon Acrobatics released a line of backpacks designed of recycled clothes in 2023.

In the earlier, Freitag has dipped its toes into working with airbags for lesser solutions, like inside bag pockets or wallets. And in 2021, the enterprise dropped the F707 Stratos, a now offered-out bag that applied the two airbag content and truck tarps. Nonetheless, the Stratos was composed with unused bolts of airbag material relatively than airbags that had previously been sewn alongside one another. Finished airbags, which make up the Freitag&#8217s upcycled Arrow and Firebird bags, present their individual host of creation problems.

An up-close photo of hands stitching a bag seam together.
[Photo: Philip Frowein/Freitag]

Freitag&#8217s very first problem: locating usable supply materials

To start with, Freitag holistic item designer Tu Van Giang and her sourcing staff had to figure out the place to really obtain clean, usable airbags. The proper ones would will need to be those that ended up set up in automobiles but in no way in fact deployed, or those people that ended up put in storage following failing a good quality manage exam. As a single could anticipate, there is not precisely a supplier that specializes in applied airbags. 

“After we introduced the Stratos, a single guy from a [car recycling company] in Switzerland contacted us, and he was like, ‘I’ve gathered these airbags for my daughter for 7 several years, in circumstance she required to do some thing with them,’” Giang says. 

The Swiss supplier available his airbag shops to Freitag—but that was in all probability the most basic element of the sourcing puzzle. To discover much more airbags, Giang’s crew attained out to recycling centers across Europe (even touring in person in some circumstances), and finally landed on suppliers which include a recycling center in the Netherlands and an Austrian maker. Once the group collected most of the airbags, they experienced to figure out how to disassemble them and create designs that would waste as little cloth as attainable. 

“This is the huge distinction between Stratos and the new airbags—raw components give you a lot more liberty when coming up with baggage, because you can just opt for and define any form for the bag. But with discarded sewn airbags, it is a major problem, since they’re all distinctive,” Giang claims. “There’s diverse good quality, colour, stitches, prints, and designs.” 

A photo of a model carrying a Freitag bag from below.
[Photo: Julia Ishac/Freitag]

The upshot of Freitag&#8217s upcycled airbags

Though the extensive array of airbags to begin with served as an obstacle during output, it became the bags’ biggest strength once Giang’s team was ready to nail down efficient styles for the Arrow and Firebird. All of the airbags appear in many pastel hues with darkish, contrasting stitching, which helps make it much easier for their companies to place generation problems.

[Photo: Freitag]

Though that preference serves a realistic operate, the exciting aspect effect is a satisfying aesthetic quality that can make all of the upcycled Freitag luggage unique. Some have striped styles other people element swirl accents in darkish red thread although nevertheless other folks appear with diagonal traces of item identification codes. To contrast the light bodies of the bags, Freitag selected to use neon-colored, recycled truck pressure belts as handles. These, as well, are just one of a kind.

A full-length photo of a model from 3/4 perspective carrying seven Freitag bags.
[Photo: Julia Ishac/Freitag]

Apart from just hunting gorgeous, airbag cloth (which is commonly produced of nylon) is designed to be the two durable and light-weight. And although Giang hasn’t heard from any Stratos consumers about tears in their luggage in the 3 several years considering the fact that its start, she formulated a patch system for the Arrow and Firebird to support increase the bags&#8217 lifespans, just in scenario. 

Once the closing luggage ended up entire, Giang’s crew discovered that they experienced a single much more shocking characteristic in retail outlet. 

“If you deploy an airbag in the car, it blows up, appropriate? This is what I’d like to clearly show you,” Giang tells me, holding up an Arrow bag on our video call. Before she unzips it, the bag is slim, flat, and compact. As shortly as the upcycled bag is opened, although, it expands into a 3D shape—just like a actual airbag would.  “We uncovered it by incident, and we phone it the ‘airbag result,’” Giang says. “It’s like a balloon!”

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