Origin

Growing up August was inspired by his grandma’s plentiful stories of hitchhiking in her youth and hiking across Europe multiple times. In 2014 they went on a pilgrimage together and in 2018 he finally went on his first big solo hike. Shortly after the hike he did his mandatory military service and was left with a knee that was worse for wear. At the same time, he was yearning to go hiking more than ever. The best way for those two facts to coexist in the short term was to bring light gear. 

After some research, August couldn’t find a suitable lightweight backpack and caught himself thinking “how hard could it be?”. He dug out my mom’s old sewing machine and went to town. The result (pictured) was frankly not a thing of beauty but it was freakishly light and survived a surprising amount of abuse. While the living room table and old domestic sewing machine have long been swapped out with a more professional setup, the ingenuity and lust for creating the best possible gear still remains.

Blind Banana Bags

August was riding my bike across Australia during the driest and warmest spring on record. On a desert stretch, he entered a haze and soon an epiphany hit me. He felt like he was thinking clearer than ever. He likes making and tinkering with gear. He should just do that for a living. To hell with all the rest!

With that decided, he just needed a name. He had stumbled upon the song “No Rain” by Blind Melon. As he was certainly no Melon, he began pondering other fruits when he remembered I’d seen Australia’s biggest banana not once, but twice. Hmm. I was definetely more like a banana, being just slighly taller than average. Blind Banana… Bags? BBB. He liked the alliteration.

As you can imagine, he wasn’t in fact thinking clearly but rather dehydrated and sleep deprived. It was +40C degrees during the day, he had only access to slightly brackish bore water and he barely slept during the night to get the most out of the cooler temperatures. Luckily, when he hit a town some 4 days later and woke from what felt like a fever dream, the idea still seemed sound and of course the name stuck around too.