Collection: FREITAG Luggage Accessories

Zurich, autumn 1993. Graphic designer Markus Freitag needs a bag that will keep his drawings dry on the cycle to work. From the window of the flat he shares with his brother Daniel, he looks straight onto the motorway at lorries wrapped in colourful tarpaulins, hauling freight in all weathers, year after year. The answer drives past his window every day. The brothers cut a piece of retired tarpaulin, add a strap from an old seatbelt, an edge from a bicycle inner tube and sew the first messenger bag: the F13 TOP CAT. Daniel takes the prototype to San Francisco, where he is living at the time, and puts it through the bicycle-courier community — the toughest bag-testing operation in the world. The idea has a quality nobody planned and that turns out to be brilliant: every tarpaulin has lived a different journey, so no two bags on earth are the same. The pattern wasn't designed by a designer. It was designed by the motorway. In 2003, New York's Museum of Modern Art adds the F13 to its design collection, and the courier hack officially becomes a design icon. Today FREITAG washes dirty tarpaulins with rainwater collected on the roof of its own Zurich factory, runs repair workshops, a bag-lending service, and with a rucksack made from a single endlessly recyclable material is trying to close the material loop entirely. Daniel reportedly didn't even know the word sustainability in 1993. The brothers simply didn't want to throw away things that could still serve. The rest is history, carried on the shoulder of half of Europe's cities.