BY The quest for the perfect, functional bag is an endless one. You may have experienced the marketing hype and paid for expensive ones touting amazing features that don’t really work in real world-use, have budget satchels that seem to be ergonomically designed for aliens, and tried fashionable ones that are completely cumbersome when carrying your daily gear.
The creators of the Bow brand, Singaporeans Mandy and CK, have experienced all of that and they set out to do something radical: invent and design a fully functional everyday bag that would also hold your basic sports gear.
The entrepreneurs took months to come up with the final design for their first product, the Quiver multi-bag.
Mandy tells us, “The idea was to create a bag that would cover all the needs of the urban commuter and fitness enthusiast. I owned plenty of bags myself, and found that every design was missing one important element or another for a complete package. They didn’t carry well on public transport, were difficult to hang in gym showers, had no place to securely stash my EZ-Link card, the list just went on. I made a wishlist, also taking notes from friends, of all the things that everyone needed in an everyday carry bag, and worked from there.”
CK and Mandy revealed that their initial prototypes were made to their specifications by “an aunty at one of the stores in the Beach Road Army Market”.
They kept refining the prototypes, and tried them out themselves, before arriving at the final design nearly a year later.
The Quiver aims to be a completely functional, multi-purpose bag and from our own use it hits all the marks:
- The bag uses waterproof materials, though the main compartment, which can carry your running shoes, is vented.
- It features top-mounted handle that can double as a hanging loop in a gym shower.
- Internal compartments are completely waterproof and feature clear pockets. You can actually use your phone through the touch-sensitive, waterproof, storage compartment.
- The side-mounted water bottle can be zipped up flat when not in use, and has a cinch-corded tie-down so your bottle doesn’t flop out on the MRT or when you’re chasing the bus.
- It comes with one strap for a sling bag configuration, but you can buy a second strap for a backpack style carry. Built-in quick release clips simplify carrying and removal.
- The carry straps features a cleverly integrated pocket for your EZ-Link transport card.
- It has padded compartments, and the secondary spaces fits a tablet or 14-inch laptop.
It’s cleanly styled with no long straps or dangling flaps to get caught on stuff. CK and Mandy also tell us that they are not fans of bags that don’t hold their shapes or distend into unwieldly blobs when fully loaded, so the Quiver has been designed to hold its compact shape through clever reinforcement. It also works amazingly well as carry-on bag for airline travel. Passports and boarding passes fit nicely into the zippered compartments that are of just the right depth.
There’s clearly a lot of thought in the product’s design, and we were impressed by how the Quiver blends the usability of an excellent urban everyday carry with the utility of a small gym bag. It’s a product developed in Singapore to suit what we do, and rather than being designed by a nameless committee, it was put together by two local entrepreneurs that were out to rectify all the shortcomings of current commercial offerings.
Now, a small problem with naming the brand and range of products after archery gear is that googling for them online will take you to a bunch of online archery gear retailers first, so we’ll be helpful and give you the link here: https://bowforbold.com/
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