Staple guns and hammers. Tubes of oil paint and brushes. Protractors and X-Acto knives. DSLR camera bodies and lenses. A Moleskine and a set of premium colored pencils.
These are just some of the tools of creatives, and they don’t fit all that well into the compartments of a typical backpack or messenger bag. That’s why a company called Osuza just launched something better. It’s called the Canvas: a $350 military-grade, weatherproof canvas backpack that unclips and unfurls to display all of your tools in a secure and orderly fashion—whatever those tools may be.
“During a trip to Barcelona, while running down a busy street called Las Ramblas, we noticed startled vendors with merchandise on sheets of canvas pull a rope to quickly close up their merchandise into canvas bags,” cofounders Steven Palomo and Tom Jamieson recount via email. “We always thought about how innovative and efficient that was.”
Indeed, it’s a design that probably looks at least a little familiar. Both the knife bags carried by chefs and the grooming tools that stylists use often feature this type of foldout design to make sharp tools easily accessible instead of forcing you to reach blindly into a hole. In this case, the founders spent three years prototyping what you see here, teaming up with the textile design specialists at Soft Serve Studio to source and build the bag out of military-grade components (such as its completely custom, weatherproof zippers out of Japan).
The team was inspired by MOLLE—aka the Modular Lightweight Load-carry Equipment used by militaries across the globe—and you can see that design DNA in the bag’s prominent horizontal straps, which serve as a soft skeleton framing and a place to stick and slide all of your tools in the main, unfolding compartment. A secondary compartment serves as a dedicated laptop sleeve to hold your computer of choice, so you can bring your digital tools along with your analog ones.
The Osuza Canvas is on sale now for $350—which is, admittedly, a lot to spend on a bag built by a startup rather than a more established brand. But Osuza hopes to mitigate risk in a big way: Each bag is guaranteed for life.
Recognize your brand’s excellence by applying to this year’s Brands That Matter Awards before the early-rate deadline, May 3.