The Backpack That Became Colombia’s Carry-On Economy

On a weekday morning in Bogotá, a TOTTO backpack rarely gets to be merely a fashion decision. It is a portable filing cabinet, lunch cupboard, laptop shell and emergency drawer. Chargers disappear into mesh pockets. A bottle takes the side slot. A zipper closes over the uneven geography of a working day. The bag’s job is not to be admired from across the room. It is to survive the bus.

That practical brief has carried the Colombian brand much farther than its founder’s first factory. In July 2026, Forbes Colombia reported 520 TOTTO stores and sales in 45 countries. Nalsani, the privately held company behind the label, closed 2025 with more than COP 827 billion in revenue, about US$240 million. Roughly 60 percent of product sells at home and 40 percent abroad. What began as a rescue of a failing leather-goods operation has become a sizable system of design, sourcing, franchises, distributors, ecommerce and yearly back-to-school rituals.

“We define ourselves as a brand of containers.”Yonatan Bursztyn, founder and president

It is a wonderfully unglamorous description. It also explains the business better than “apparel and fashion.” A container can be a child’s wheeled school bag, a commuter’s laptop pack, a gym duffel, a pet carrier or a hard-sided case rotating through an airport carousel. Instead of betting everything on a seasonal look, TOTTO follows the objects people need to move through life.

A factory looking for a future

Yonatan Bursztyn was 28 when he took on Bonreal, a Bogotá leather-goods maker that had fallen from about 600 workers to fewer than 50. He renamed the company Nalsani, negotiated with the banks and kept the machinery moving. The decisive idea arrived not in a boardroom but at Milan’s Mipel fair, where he saw bags made from synthetic canvas in bright colors. Leather carried tradition and export credibility; canvas promised a lower price, a wider audience and more room to play.

The first new products appeared at Bogotá’s international fair in 1988. Buyers asked where the bags had been imported from. They were surprised to learn they had been made locally. Bursztyn called the brand TOTTO, inspired by the rock band Toto and by the usefulness of a short name that could be pronounced in many languages. In 1989, a Disney license put familiar characters on the bags. The children knew Mickey before they knew TOTTO, which gave the unknown manufacturer a shortcut into the school aisle.

That last number reveals the engine. School bags still account for roughly a quarter of annual sales. They introduce the brand at an age when utility, color and character licensing matter more than brand mythology. Parents remember whether the seams held. Children grow into university packs, then laptop bags and luggage. A recurring school calendar creates acquisition; durability creates memory; adjacent products create another purchase.

The Levi’s of backpacks

Bursztyn has described his original ambition as becoming the Levi’s of briefcases: a sign of quality that could be used across income groups. That “for everyone” position separates TOTTO from prestige leather houses on one side and anonymous marketplace bags on the other. It competes through recognizable design, warranties, organized interiors, broad family coverage and physical availability across Latin America. The promise is less “look at me” than “this will work again tomorrow.”

TOTTO makes money across a mixed retail network. Nalsani operates stores in Colombia, licenses franchises at home and abroad, sells through distributors and wholesale doors, and reaches customers through national web shops, Amazon and other digital channels. Consumer-finance partners such as Addi, Keypago and Sistecrédito break purchases into installments. Franchisees supply local market knowledge and much of the capital needed to open stores, allowing a Colombian brand to travel without owning every lease.

The network is the moat and the complication. A student in Mexico, a family in Ecuador and a traveler in Spain may meet the brand through different operators, prices and assortments. TOTTO must keep the same basic expectation of function while adapting retail to local conditions. Its early Costa Rica opening in 1993 led to franchises in Venezuela and Ecuador. By 2026, 216 stores were franchised across 18 countries, while distributors and ecommerce extended the brand to 45.

Designed here, made there

The Colombian identity is central to TOTTO’s story, but its manufacturing map is global. About 70 percent of products are made in China and other Asian countries. Design, innovation and product testing remain anchored in Colombia, while the company maintains quality control in Hong Kong. Bursztyn’s argument is economic: a mass-market brand competing internationally needs international costs. Critics see a Colombian icon outsourcing production; the company sees the supply chain required to keep price, quality and global reach in balance.

Logistics makes that system tangible. The Tittan distribution center, opened in Mosquera in 2014, moved more than 10 million products in 2016 alone. Thousands of designs pass from Bogotá through manufacturing partners and back into a web of stores. The company’s skill is not sewing every item under one roof. It is coordinating product design, licensing, quality checks, seasonal demand and last-mile availability at a scale few Colombian consumer brands have reached.

Can durability become circular?

A reputation for bags that “last forever” is commercially valuable, but sustainability asks a harder question: what are they made from, and what happens when they finally fail? TOTTO has incorporated recycled-polyester components since 2017. Its current sustainability site says 20 percent of the portfolio now contains one or more RPET components, up from a 7 percent eco-design share reported for 2023. The distinction matters. An RPET component does not make an entire product recycled, and the company says so.

There are more concrete loops. TOTTO says its repair workshop has extended product life for more than 20 years. Customers can donate an unused backpack at participating stores, receive a discount and let the company redirect the item. It eliminated single-use plastic shopping bags for store customers and estimated in its first sustainability report that the change avoided 180 tonnes of plastic a year. These programs do not erase the footprint of a global volume business, but they move sustainability from a fabric tag toward service design.

Sport has become a laboratory for that work. TOTTO has outfitted Colombia’s Olympic delegation since Athens 2004. For Paris 2024, it said 98 percent of the garments in the Olympic collection used RPET fabrics and biodegradable enzymes. Its first official Paralympic collection added easy-grip zipper tabs, button-free shirts and pockets reachable from a wheelchair. Those small choices are the most persuasive kind of innovation: not a futuristic material in search of a press release, but a pocket placed where its wearer can use it.

The next bag

The next challenge is succession. Bursztyn has laid out a three-year transition toward his son Benny, vice president of product and development, working with his daughter Natalie, vice president of marketing. He plans to remain involved through the board. Family companies often discover that a founder’s instincts are harder to transfer than shares. Here, those instincts include an appetite for overlooked categories and a habit of defining the market widely enough to keep moving.

Nalsani is already testing that range through Topara, its outdoor sister brand. TOTTO itself continues to use licenses and collaborations, from Disney to a current Real Madrid collection, to enter a customer’s world through interests they already understand. The risk is sprawl: too many categories can blur the hard-won meaning of the backpack. The opportunity is equally clear. If the company is really in the container business, it can follow people wherever they need to carry something.

That is where TOTTO sits in the market - between global luggage groups, specialist backpack labels, Colombian leather brands and cheap digital sellers. It cannot win every comparison on price, heritage or technical performance. It can win on a specific combination: familiar Latin American distribution, approachable design, product organization and a relationship that begins before adulthood. The backpack is both merchandise and memory.

Nearly four decades after the Milan fair, the original insight still fits. People will pay for a product that makes movement less annoying. Give the bottle a slot, the laptop some padding and the loose cable a place to hide. Make the colors feel like a choice rather than an obligation. Then build a business patient enough to meet the same customer at school, at work and at the gate. The result may look like a bag. Open it and you find an economy.