webdirections » Blog Archive » Welcome Crumpler as a supporter

If you’ve got a lot of portable digital gear, laptops, cameras, ipods, game machines, tamagotchis, then you soon realize you need really good bags for keeping it in one piece while lugging it to and from the office, on places, in cars, where ever.

A couple of years back, when I started traveling a lot, and got my 17″ Powerbook, I looked high and low for the best bag to keep it safe, yet that I could take on planes, buses, or just walking down the street. For some reason, Crumpler, with their smart sassy logo, and great looking bags, had always caught my eye, but I’d also thought they were pretty expensive. There happened to be a store 5 minutes from my place, so I checked their gear out, and found that they designed bags specifically for 17″ powerbooks (as well as all Apple laptop sizes and models), they looked good, they seemed pretty nicely padded, had loads of extra pockets for all the ephemera you seem to have to take with you when you go anywhere with a portable device, the bag I liked had the cool ironic name of “very busy man” (I love irony), the price was very reasonable, so I bought one.

Since then, I’ve taken my “very busy man” to several countries - it’s probably traveled 100,000km, and all over Australia. I take it on as carry-on luggage, and if I’m going for a couple of days or less, that’s all I take - I can get everything I need for a two day stay, as well as laptop, PSP, iPod, and all the stuff you need to keep them charged in their.

And it still looks brand new. Given I have a 9 month old daughter, this in itself is amazing.

I’ve also got a more lightweight bag for day trips (this one’s callled a “skivvy” which to our USian friends means underwear, but downunder it means “turtleneck”), a “Winkler” for my iPod (we had some winklers embossed with our logos last year for our speakers as a special thank you, and a lucky few bought some of the handful of special souvenirs we had made extra), and Maxine has one of their camera bags for her digital SLR.

And to top it all off, they are an Australian company, with a great attitude, and set of values.

Now, all this sounds like an ad for Crumpler, which it kinda is in a tiny little way. But in reality, I love their gear, it is really well made, and has done the job for me for a long time. Plus like I said they are Aussies, and have a great attitude.

After me hassling them for a year, they got on board just the other day as supporters of the conference, and we’ll have some very nice Crumpler gear to give away at Web Directions, including a unique customized Web Directions bag, which even we won’t have a copy of - this will be a one off.

So go visit their site (yeah its flash based, I’ll try to see if we can’t convince them to rethink this in future) or one of their stores, and check out their gear.

Thanks very much to Crumpler for helping make WD06 even cooler.

Tags WD06 Crumpler

Posted by John on 4/09/06 at 11:05 am