Designed For
The Overbooked,
The Overprepared, And
The Slightly Unhinged
A friend who travels 300 days a year looked at our prototype and told us to start over. This is what came out of it.
A letter from Neil Ferrier, Founder of Discommon
This bag is for people who leave the house at 8am with no idea where they’ll land by sundown, and pack like they know it. Nobody I know fits that better than Riley.
We should’ve named this bag after him. Riley’s a slightly nutty friend of ours who travels 300-plus days a year. He lives out of a bag more than anyone I know, and he’s the reason this tote exists in the shape it does.
I run Discommon, and I design and make things for a living. Left to my own devices, I over-engineer every detail. The Puck, our leather watch case, took 7 years to get right, which tells you most of what you need to know about how I work.
The bag Riley saw first wasn’t a tote at all.
We were building a bag that did two jobs, and I liked it a lot.
I believed the smart answer for someone who travels was a backpack that’s also a tote: one bag, 2 ways to carry it. I was pleased with it, and when you’re trained as an engineer, a product that solves more problems is the one you’re taught to admire.
We started developing a backpack/tote combo thing, and we worked on it for a while.
When it was far enough along, we shared it with Riley, because nobody we knew spent more time moving through airports than he did.
I wasn’t worried about the notes. My first job was at Oakley, in Advanced Product Development, and I’d applied 7 or 8 times before they took me. My boss there, Carlos, broke prototypes that had taken months of my life. He’d take whatever you handed him and see how it bent, how it flexed, how the hinge behaved, and probably 90% of the time it ended up broken. The running joke was that you always made two, because one was getting checked to see if it was right.
After Carlos, I figured I could take whatever Riley had.
I wasn’t ready for Riley.
Riley took one look and told us we’d built the wrong bag.
What we got back was a barrage of very considered thoughts. At the time it felt a lot closer to abuse.
He didn’t want 2 ways to carry a bag. He wanted one bag he could throw everything into and stop thinking about. It took me a minute to admit it, but the second carry mode wasn’t for the person carrying the bag. It was for us. We’d built it because we could, not because someone who’s in an airport most days of the year needed it.
His instructions, more or less word for word:
Simplify your sh*t and just make a great bottomless tote.
He was right.
We dropped the hybrid and set out to make a proper tote. The trouble was, I’d never owned a tote I took seriously.
I wanted a tote that could take real abuse and still go to dinner.
I’d always thought of a tote as the casual bag, the one nobody expects much from. You get a rugged sack you toss in the back of the car, or something nice you have to protect, and I’d never owned one that did both.
So we kept the polish in the details and built a body that’s made to be abused. It’s PU-infused ballistic nylon, a durable polymer-coated nylon, and our spec sheet jokes that “nylon” alone didn’t sound cool enough. You don’t put it in the washing machine. You wipe it clean with a soft, damp cloth.
It came out sturdy enough to take endless beating and sleek enough for 5pm Negronis at The Cap-Ferrat.
The outside was settled. The inside of every tote I’d ever owned had a different problem.
Your keys get lost the second they hit a dark lining.
I’d always assumed a tote was a dark bucket, because every one I’d bought was. You drop in your phone, your chargers and your keys, and the moment you need something small, you’re tipping the whole bag out onto the hood of the car.
We lined the whole inside in a bright teal we call Oslo. Your keys, your cables, anything dark shows up against it, so you can see straight to the bottom of the bag.
Our customer John said it better than I can:
“The blue inside makes it easy to find everything.”
Inside, there are mesh pockets along the wall for cables and a hidden slip pocket for valuables. On the front, a zip pocket with organizers for your phone, wallet and keys.
Then the top. A zipper slows you down every time you reach in, and an open top tips everything out on the floor of the car the first time you brake hard. I didn’t want to pick one. The answer is the part I call the pièce de résistance: a magnetic top lip that snaps open and shut with one hand. For flights, or days when it’s packed to the brim, there’s a backup expansion zipper that seals the whole top.
I spent more time on the handles than anyone would reasonably expect.
The handles and zipper pulls are edge-painted leather, and the hardware is custom Discommon. There’s a custom Discommon carabiner for your keys, and it’s overbuilt, like everything we make.
On the back there’s a pass-through strap that slides over the handle of a rolling carry-on. That one’s for people like Riley, who are already pulling a suitcase through a terminal and don’t need a second thing on their shoulder.
It’s 14 inches wide, 8 deep and 16 tall, which works out to 27 liters. That’s a day of work, a gym kit or a spontaneous overnight. There’s room for a laptop, but we didn’t build in a laptop compartment, so put it in a sleeve.
It isn’t a light bag, and I won’t pretend it is. We’ve got 19 reviews on the site, 18 of them 5 stars. The one that isn’t says this: “Heavy. Due to premium materials used, the bag has some good weight to it and after you fill things in, it does feel heavy on your shoulder.”
That’s fair. Ballistic nylon, leather and real hardware weigh something before you put a single thing inside.
What people put inside is the part I enjoy most. Our customer Jen S. took one to a photoshoot:
“I had props including a vintage telephone, an old brass vase, a champagne bottle and flowers, and my camera equipment- all tucked away; just a cool mysterious tote hiding all the randomness!”
Which brings me to whether you should buy one.
Here’s the bag Riley talked us into.
The Asset is $180.
If it isn’t right for you, send it back unused within 30 days of delivery, for any reason. It also has a 2-year warranty against defects in materials and workmanship. You don’t have much to lose.
If you’ve been carrying your day around in a free tote with 2 straps, this is the one I’d swap it for.
P.S. We still haven’t named it after Riley. The name’s his if he wants it.