I design and manufacture backpacks: here's what makes a backpack expensive.
There's a question that comes up quite often whenever someone sees a €300–400 backpack, sometimes even with packs over €200, both in this sub or other ones: "How can a backpack possibly cost that much?".
Money is a deeply personal topic and it implies heavy social, geographical, and cultural influences. What is expensive to one person can be fair priced to the next, or even inexpensive to someone else, so the point here is not pushing the concept that paying €200, 300 or 400 for a backpack is right, but to better understand what can make a bag’s price.
Then, if these elements are something you’d pay for or not, it’s up to you.
I've been on both sides of this equation for years — designing products and dealing with factories, materials, development, production and selling the finished product — so I thought it might be useful to explain where the money actually goes.
The most obvious, but still first thing to say is that retail price and manufacturing cost are very different things.
Let’s make it simple and start with the finished product itself**.** For a backpack, you're paying for:
- Raw materials: outer fabric, lining, mesh and stretch fabrics, foams for padding, webbing, buckles and other hardware, zippers, reinforcement materials, labels and packaging. Costs may vary incredibly, depending on how many different parts and materials the product features (the more they are, the less their use can be optimized), where they have to be shipped from (each shipping will add cost), each component’s MOQ (companies might need to overbuy) and, most of all, what materials the bag features (a 4$/sqm Polyester or a 20$/sqm laminate? A 0,2 nylon buckle or a 7$ Fidlock? a woven stretch or a knit? a closed cell foam EVA or some basic option?)
- Production setup and organization (boxes, carts, space, machinery setup, etc)
- Cutting (Laser? Cutting table? Some components need to be cut manually? Prices can vary a lot)
- Assembly and sewing (is it simple and fast or intricate and slow? Can it be done with automatic machines or not? Can it be done in series or not? Does it need spending time and labour to reinforce or bartack or not? Cost changes according to the time and workforce required)
- QC (some companies do once at the end of production or two, three, even more times during the process to avoid wasting time and materials in case of mistakes, and this costs time, workforce and could also involve travelling and related costs)
Then, keep in mind that the total cost does not end with the finished product, there are also development costs — both direct, in terms of cash and indirect, in terms of working hours — that aren't visible in the finished product:
- the pattern has to be developed and it takes hours of work
- samples have to be made and it takes raw materials and hours of work too. Those samples usually aren't right the first time — a component might need to be changed because it is difficult to sew consistently, a seam might need reinforcement, some particular piece of hardware might work well in a prototype but could create a production problem — so the process is usually repeated.
- Samples must be tested, this takes time, sometimes even money if the tests are run externally.
- When you get to the final iteration, some pre-production samples, made with the final materials, have to be made and this takes raw materials and time too — or cash if they are made externally.
- During this development process, materials or parts are used, shipping to testers or sewers for external validation occurs, sometimes external labour is required.
If you're producing relatively small quantities, none of those development costs are spread over millions of units.
Then, when the product is developed and finally produced, there are other costs to be faced in order to bring it to the customer. Depending on where and how the product is sold, from the final retail price the manufacturer might have to cut
- VAT (if due), shipping (if included), maybe a retailer margin (if not directly bought from the brand), sometimes a distributor margin (if the retailer buys from a distributor and not directly from the company), packaging, payment fees, e-commerce platform fees, photography, marketing, warranty, administration and all the other costs involved in keeping a product on the market.
Only then, the brand company starts seeing a margin.
To get to the final price, companies sum all these costs and apply a markup, multiplying them. We are not debating here about what markup each company applies and what is the fair or right markup, what we can say is that out there you can find bags that cost 1/3 of their final prices as well as bags that cost 1/10 of their final price, and they're not necessarily the most expensive ones.
As someone who makes bags, I think consumers should realize that a high price doesn't prove good design and a low price doesn't prove poor design, but good design — and good development, good construction, good materials — often lead to high costs.
At that point, apart from cost management choices that can help make things better or worse, most comes down to the number of pieces that a company makes: if the number of products to spread those costs across is high, the final price of the single unit will be less impacted. If it is not that high, and for independent companies it usually isn’t, the final price will reflect that scarcity.
This is one reason why comparing two backpacks by looking only at materials can be misleading, there is a lot more behind and consumers, or potential ones, simply need to decide if it is worth it. An expensive backpack isn't automatically expensive because every component is exceptional: sometimes you're paying for exceptionally good design and development, for expensive materials (and this itself can mean great materials or just expensive ones), or for some genuinely better construction, while sometimes you're paying for distribution and overhead. Sometimes you're paying for an inefficient development process and sometimes you’re paying for scarcity, or a combo of these things. The interesting question is what are you actually getting for the difference?
I run a small independent backpack company so I'm obviously not a neutral observer here but I'm interested in how other people think about this. Without necessarily disclosing how much is too much for you, when you look at a backpack, what makes the price feel justified, or absolutely not justified to you?