Troubadour Goods

Troubadour Goods began as a private frustration. Samuel Bail and Abel Samet met in London and became friends over endurance sport - marathons in Paris, a triathlon in Brazil, Sweden's Otillo swim-run race - the kind of pursuits where gear either performs under pressure or it doesn't. Their bags, meanwhile, were heavy, awkward and often plastered in logos.

So they built their own. The pair spent roughly eighteen months on materials and design before selling much of anything, travelling Europe to tanneries, manufacturers and trade shows. The Wall Street Journal noticed early, in 2013, calling the products "discreet and stylish" - a phrase that still reads like a design brief.

The company started with men's accessories and leather goods: briefcases, weekenders, portfolios, wallets and belts. It added a women's collection in spring 2019 and, ten years after that first hide arrived, opened its first physical store in London's Soho in the summer of 2021.

What holds it together is restraint. In a category that tends to shout, Troubadour whispers - no oversized branding, no flash, just bags engineered to do their job for years and, increasingly, to be unmade and remade when that job is done.

Plenty of brands make a technical backpack, and plenty make a sustainable one. Troubadour's position is the overlap: premium materials and genuine performance, wrapped in a design language deliberately stripped of logos and flash, and backed by a circularity effort deep enough to require custom recycled-PET zippers.

That combination is what the awards recognise. The Apex has been named a best laptop backpack by New York Times Wirecutter, Esquire and The Daily Telegraph, and won a Red Dot Design Award. The Orbis Collection took a Marie Claire UK sustainability award and an ISPO Award, alongside a Glossy award for breakthrough product innovation.

Against everyday-carry rivals like Bellroy, Peak Design, Aer and Away, or heritage bag makers like Bennett Winch and WANT Les Essentiels, Troubadour's edge is that it refuses to specialise into only one of those camps. It is the quiet option that happens to be the certified-sustainable one.

The through-line is durability. The most sustainable bag is one you keep - so Troubadour builds tough, waterproof, timeless pieces first, then makes them recyclable for when they finally give out.

Troubadour's core competence is materials engineering dressed up as understatement. Long before the Orbis Collection, the founders spent their first eighteen months touring European tanneries and factories, learning the supply chain from the inside. That groundwork shows in the details: FortiWeave fabric chosen for tear resistance, DriTan leather that cuts water use in tanning, fluorocarbon-free waterproofing, and bluesign-approved textiles that keep chemistry in check.

The second competence is product refinement. Rather than chase a sprawling catalogue, the brand iterates - the Apex has run through four numbered generations, each tightening the same idea: a padded laptop section, twin bottle sleeves, a zipped pocket on the strap, a back panel that breathes. It is the discipline of improving one great product instead of launching ten mediocre ones.

The third, and hardest, is circular design. Making a bag recyclable is not a fabric swap; it means every component - lining, reinforcement, zipper - has to be compatible with the same recycling stream. When those recycled-PET parts did not exist off the shelf, Troubadour worked with development labs to create them. That willingness to rebuild the boring parts is what turns a sustainability claim into a shipping product.

Design leadership sits with Creative Director Samantha Jacob, who joined in 2015 from Whistles and Anya Hindmarch, and gives the range its consistent, logo-light aesthetic. Marketing is led by CMO Hannah Russin. It remains a compact operation - roughly 54 people - which is part of the point: small enough to obsess over a strap, certified enough to answer for the whole factory.