World Fashion   +  Swiss fashion designers

Freitag Bags: Made from Tarp!

Every Jersey boy still has these words on his lips when he crosses the Hudson. Only FREITAG just crossed the Atlantic. Which doesn’t make the quote quite as pathetic. Hey, they’re Swiss.

FREITAG bags started in 1993 with two brothers, design students in Zurich, deciding to cut up used truck tarpaulins and make messenger bags out of them. The clean design, Swiss durability, and the fact that every bag is unique brought them worldwide success, a place at the MoMA (among many other distinctions), and now a new Flagship Store at Bowery and Prince in lower
Manhattan. And all without a dime of venture capital.

In New York City, ambitious store concepts come and go. But the track record of FREITAG is pretty straightforward: Wherever they’ve opened, they’re still open. Keep your fingers crossed—but the cocktail of hand-made, recycled products with reduced design and mass individualism seems to work wherever it is mixed. But step by step:

FREITAG bags are hand-cut from used truck tarpaulin that has seen thousands of miles of European, Russian and American highways. cutting the tarps becomes a creative act, leaving one bag with random letters and design fragments and the next one unicolored, slick and simple.

FREITAG bags are hand-sewn from used truck tarps, car seatbelts and bicycle inner tubes. And they're sewn to Swiss quality standards. Of the 1.500.000 FREITAG bags made over the past 18 years, around 89% are still in use (based on warranty statistics with a solid margin of error).

And what was that «mass individualism» pitch? Having been cut from recycled, graphic truck tarps, every FREITAG bag is unique – in a more or less discreet way. The FREITAG experience goes from finding «your» predestined bag with your initials, favorite colors and/or tantric number to the more intrinsic knowledge that no other bag has the exact same shade of pale.

The FREITAG experience is that the bigger the selection, the more likely people will fall in love with one of the individual bags.

With 1'000 different bags on display in the (equally prize-winning FREITAG V30 Skid storage system), chances are high, you’ll be helplessly sold on one of the designs.

Are you ready to take the risk?

Photos & text Copyright Freitag, Courtesy Agency V.