Welcome to Bag Week 2018. Every year your faithful friends at TechCrunch spend an entire week looking at bags. Why? Because bags — often ignored but full of our important electronics — are the outward representations of our techie styles, and we put far too little thought into where we keep our most prized possessions.
The WP Standard Vintage Leather Messenger Bag is a few years old. It helped launch the Whipping Post brand six years ago. I’ve used mine for about three years and it’s always been fantastic because the leather is amazing. The WP Standard Vintage Leather Messenger Bag is truly a wonderful bag.
It starts with the design. It’s simple and a nod to the classic postman’s bag of yore. But instead of mail, it’s designed to carry a laptop. There’s a main interior pocket large enough to hold a notebook or rangefinder, but not a DSLR. The interior laptop sleeve is padded by with extra thick leather and there’s an attached clip for keys (every bag needs this).
The backside features a so-called newspaper pocket. This is a classic feature. It’s nothing fancy but just a large, thin pocket that spans the backside of the bag. It’s just thick enough to hold a newspaper folded in half.
I carried this bag nearly daily for several years and it’s held up fine. The leather looks worn but not dingy. Like a good pair of jeans, the leather has stretched and molded to the space of my 15-inch MacBook Pro, notebooks and camera I carry. To be clear, the interior pocket is larger than it was when I first got it but it doesn’t look stretched out, just used.
There is one downside to this bag: The shoulder strap is not comfortable because of the leather. After years of use, the leather on the shoulder strap pad is now smooth and unable to stay in place on my shoulder. It just slides around when I walk and it’s much worse when I wear a nylon coat. I’ve resorted to sliding the pad out of the way and using the leather strap which still has texture of raw leather on one side.
At $295 the bag is priced accordingly for the fantastic material and build. It’s a great bag to carry a few things and it will always be noticed. I have yet to see a bag as beautiful as the Vintage Leather Messenger Bag. If more space is needed, WP Standard now has a larger option that looks equally as good in the $310 Large Messenger Bag though I haven’t seen the bag in person yet.
Photos taken in the sunny lobby of the Mendeli Street Hotel in Tel Aviv, Israel where they make a fantastic cold coffee.
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