The Bombay local problem (or, why we made Sobopack)
Here is a true story. A friend of mine — call him Rohan, because that's his name — works at a fintech in BKC. He has two laptops. The office one is heavy. The personal one is light. He carries both because the office one cannot leave the office network and the personal one is where his actual life is. His tiffin is from his mother, who lives in Lucknow and sends it via cousin every Sunday. His charger has a frayed cable that one day will electrocute him in the rain.
Rohan owned, in succession: a Wildcraft backpack (split at the bottom in six months), a Samsonite trolley (a trolley, on the Western Line, in July), and a very expensive Scandinavian backpack that he ordered from a website. The Scandinavian one was beautiful. It also had no tiffin compartment, the laptop sleeve fit one machine not two, and the strap dug into his shoulder by 9.30 am.
We asked him to write down everything he actually carried on a normal Tuesday. The list was eleven items. We went and tested every backpack we could that claimed to be made for "the modern professional". None of them could carry the list and also survive a Bombay monsoon, a Singapore downpour, or whatever weather your city likes to throw at you on a Wednesday.
What the Sobopack actually does
We sat down at the studio with Rohan's list and designed from scratch. Two separate laptop sleeves. A side-opening tiffin compartment that's thermally separated, so your lunch does not warm your laptop. A charger pouch that stands upright so the cables do not turn into spaghetti by Wednesday. A small umbrella sleeve oriented so the wet stays away from the dry. A strap system borrowed from trekking packs, because the platform-to-office walk is longer than it looks, in any city.
It is not a backpack we found. It is a backpack we drew, prototyped, broke, redrew, broke again, and then made. Crafted in partnership with a manufacturer who builds for some of the best technical-bag brands in the world, to a spec we wrote ourselves.
Rohan has been carrying his for fourteen months. The bag is the same. The cousin still brings the tiffin. The job is, surprisingly, the same job. But the morning is better.