Bellroy is one of my favorite brands. I've featured and written about the company and their products several times over the past eight years. Designed with modern lines and built with exquisite attention to detail—Bellroy has carved out a niche as an iconic brand in the carry space. More than that, their products are infused with premium materials and a more ergonomic, human approach to product design. These details all elevate the experience of whatever you're doing when using a Bellroy product.
I was excited to connect with founder Andy Fallshaw earlier this year and offer an exclusive look at how they approach their products and craft. At the end I'll highlight some recent Bellroy products that I've thoroughly been enjoying in my travels.
Bellroy started in 2010 with a slim wallet. It has evolved to include a whole range of high-quality essential carry goods for modern travelers, nomads, professionals, and everyday adventures. What is the biggest thing that has surprised you in Bellroy's journey to date? Knowing what you know now, what would you have done differently along the way?
I think the biggest surprise might be the part that came before Bellroy, which began with seeding Carryology in 2009.
As we theorised about all the ways the world was changing, including how we were traversing more environments and worlds each day, we wanted to reframe how the world thought about the things they brought with them. We thought of this as the ‘carry’ space, and began Carryology as a campfire for learning about and inspiring better ways to carry.
Attempting to change paradigms comes with a high failure rate. But when we look at the thriving Carryology community, the brands that now think of themselves as creating carry goods, and the acceptance of this new paradigm… well, it’s at least a little surprising that our experiment has been so well adopted.
When thinking about what we might have done differently, I don’t think there are any major regrets. But I’ll come back to Bellroy for an evolution that perhaps we could have started sooner.
While we were trying to shape this new carry concept, we were also trying to reshape wallets to be much slimmer and better optimised for modern lives. Again, it was a paradigm shift, and this one really took off – creating enormous growth for us around the globe. Trying to grow a new space, a new brand, and a more responsible shape of business was a huge amount of work, and it meant we didn’t evolve beyond wallets for half a decade.
The whole idea of ‘slim wallets’ really stuck, and for many of those loyal customers it can still be hard to get them thinking of us as anything beyond that! Perhaps if we’d found a way to begin moving into other carry categories sooner, we’d have found it easier to expand the mindspace beyond just slim wallets for these early and very loyal customers.
When you approach a new product line like a backpack, where do you pull inspiration from? Specifically the Apex backpack has some innovative closures and finish details. As you developed the pack, how did you arrive at the decisions of what fabric to use, what details to line in leather, and how to use pops of color?
Inspiration for new products comes from many places, but the most common for us is that we like to build things that bring something new and better to the world.
With the Apex Backpack—it was seeded from a realisation that there are many specialist backpacks for single or limited uses, but very few backpacks that can traverse most environments in a mostly ‘fit for purpose’ way. Our team summarised this goal as 90% awesome 90% of the time.
With that as a North Star, we then start thinking about the four key elements that must unite for a cohesive product – the design elements, the materials, the constructions and the guiding narratives. And because this was going to be our ‘apex,’ we were willing to temporarily ignore existing price expectations to see how far we could take things.
The 90% and 90% lens was surprisingly clarifying for design decisions. We could identify the worlds we wanted to traverse, the functions that would perform in those worlds, the emotions we wanted to nurture and the places we needed to innovate in, and start prototyping with a clear vision of what success would look like.
Then it comes down to exploration and iteration, with lots of cycles. For instance we knew we wanted multiple ways to access contents, and we really liked the innovative Shift Backpack hook we had developed, so we started working out how to radically improve access when packing. Another example is that we wanted distinctly beautiful straps that blended craft with performance, and so that became a project.
Each part of the product looked at those four elements – design, material, construction and narrative fit. And as each part interacted with the others, we prototyped and tested to see how cohesive the overall ‘90% and 90%’ goal was progressing.
Each decision must support (and perhaps evolve) the North Star direction. And each exploration and iteration was tested on the overall feel and resonance towards that North Star.
Backing up a bit, I'm curious as to how your experiment on your path to creating a product? Do you develop lots of prototypes? Do you test and use them internally? What is that process like and how do you integrate collaborative ideas from other team members?
I’m really proud of the product development process we have shaped at Bellroy. It combines art and science, intuition and logic, frames it with Agile Methodologies, and eschews ego in a way that sparks genuine collaboration.
When we began shaping it, we looked at the great innovation brands and confirmed that they all had strong in-house prototyping capabilities. Apple, Nike, Arc’teryx—they can all spark and progress ideas with teams that do more than just draw specifications on a screen and send them over to a factory.
So we have maker labs at both offices, and our designers and developers know how to make things, not just conceive of things. We have experts in pattern making, materials, engineering, and production techniques co-located and working with our designers.
We still love a napkin sketch or paper prototype. But as soon as we can we start making prototypes – first rough, then to increasing resolution. We use these personally. We share them with highly calibrated users. We devise tests that might unearth potential future issues. We learn and we iterate.
The other great aspect of having increasingly higher resolution prototypes is that you can start sharing them with other parts of the company much earlier in the process. We sometimes think of this as spiralling in towards the bulls-eye, where each pass takes the higher resolution concepts through the key stakeholders so they have a chance to help shape and inform the final product, and how it might be communicated.
With so many elements that must unite cohesively for a product to sing, we don’t have confidence in any other way.
For the past couple years I've noticed some thoughtful Bellroy email surveys that ask quite specific questions about habits or travel with an eye toward future products you are exploring. How do you integrate research from talking to customers into your products? Are there interesting stories about things Bellroy has done that are driven by customer asks?
There’s a quote from Denise Lee Yohn that we really like—“Great brands are idea led AND consumer informed.” They don’t just push new ideas out there, nor do they just ask customers what they want. They do both—pioneering new ideas, and then working hard to understand how those ideas are being experienced and received in everyday situations.
When we were first planning Bellroy, we could see that seasonal brands struggled to connect these two elements. If every season starts afresh, it’s much harder to integrate the feedback and learning. So we decided to aim for ‘modern classics’—designs that would stick around and evolve with customer feedback, getting better with each iteration.
And then the magic that gets unlocked from ‘consumer-informed’ is when you have informed consumers. If someone is giving feedback on the first backpack they’ve ever owned, that’s useful, but perhaps not as useful. If someone has owned a diverse quiver of great backpacks from many great brands, the nuance and expectations step up a level or three.
A neat example of this is the Chimera backpack collaboration we did with Carryology (and the recent Chimera sling). Our Carryology audience includes some of the most passionate and informed users in the carry world. The contributors have often used hundreds of carry products —learning from each product and growing their expectations of what great carry can achieve. When we jam with these passionate carryologists, the learning and ideas flow fast.
Speaking of collaborations, I've loved seeing the various collaborations you've done with artists or brands. The MAAP and Patty Mills projects come to mind. Can you talk a little bit about where these ideas come from and why doing experiments and collabs are helpful for the core products you make at Bellroy?
The first words in the first planning document we ever had were “Bellroy has pretty loose edges…” We’ve never wanted to exist in an ivory tower, and we’ve never believed that we can (or would want to) have a monopoly on good ideas.
So we have friendships with many brands and thought leaders. We learn from and dialogue with loads of interesting folks doing interesting things. And oftentimes ideas bubble up from those relationships.
For us, collaborations are typically about exploring an idea space that we could not do alone. Either because we don’t have particular expertise, or because taking our brand to a new space might feel disconcerting without a partner to help orient the project.
The Patty Mills partnership you mentioned was a great example of a collaboration that we learned a huge amount from, and we could never have done alone.
Patty is a remarkable and inspiring human. He’s an elite athlete, but he’s also a hugely engaging leader, philanthropist, and champion for first nation cultures in Australia and the Torres Strait Islands.
I could try to summarise the meaning and significance of this project, but Patty can do a far better job of that, so I’d recommend listening to his story. This link below also includes audio of the artists Shane Cook and Moana Ahwang speaking about their art that was incorporated into the project:
I would like to commend to you both the Bellroy Duffel (Patty Mills Edition) and the Bellroy Sling (Patty Mills Edition). I've tested and used multiple versions of Bellroy's duffel and sling and these editions bring together the classic carry features I love with a few details that make them extra-special:
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highly durable off-white ripstop fabric
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contrasting floral interiors designed by first nations artists
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uniquely colored paracord zipper pulls with heat-shrink to create the perfect closures
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extra-thick nylon straps for the perfect carry
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