How hip packs and frame bags are made, with Bullmoose Softgoods
Singletracks Mountain Bike Podcast
Singletracks.com
4.7 • 574 Ratings
🗓️ 20 August 2024
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Wes Holland is the owner of Bullmoose Softgoods where he designs and produces one-of-a-kind bags for cycling and adventuring. Bullmoose is based in Summerville, Massachusetts and currently offers handlebar and frame bags plus hip packs and accessories.
- What came first for you: bikes or bags?
- What kind of riding do you like to do? What is the riding scene like in Boston?
- There are a lot of hip packs and handlebar bags out there, so why make your own?
- What types of materials are you working with?
- What's your shop setup like?
- Your hip packs aren't cheap, with prices starting at $130. What makes bags like this so expensive?
- What's the trickiest part about making a bag for biking? How long does it take to make a frame bag, for example?
- Have you had any failures when testing new designs?
- With accessory mounts becoming more common across all types of bikes, does this make fitting or attaching bags easier for you as a bag maker?
- What's in your hip pack?
- Do you have new products or projects on the horizon?
Check out Wes's work at bullmoosesoftgoods.com.
An auto-edited summary of our conversation is available at Singletracks.com.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hey, everybody, welcome to the single tracks podcast. My name is Jeff, and today my guest is |
| 0:05.6 | Wes Holland. West is the owner of Bull Moose Soft Goods, where he designs and produces one-of-a-kind |
| 0:13.1 | bags for cycling and adventuring. Bull Moose is based in Somerville, Massachusetts, and currently |
| 0:19.4 | offers handlebar and frame bags plus |
| 0:21.9 | hip packs and accessories. Thanks for joining me, Wes. Thanks, Jeff, for having me. So what came |
| 0:27.9 | first for you? Was it bikes or was it bags? Oh, it was definitely bikes. I grew up as a really avid |
| 0:33.8 | mountain biker. My dad was always super into it. My uncle owns a bike shop out in Idaho. |
| 0:39.9 | So when I was a little, like real young, I would go. And when we visit, I would always spend |
| 0:43.5 | a day, you know, ostensibly helping him out just sort of sitting in the shop, bothering him |
| 0:48.4 | all day. And I grew up riding bikes as much as I could. The bag side came in in college. |
| 0:55.5 | I was working at a shop getting ready for a bike packing trip. |
| 0:58.7 | And the bike ahead of the time, nothing off the shelf quite fit. |
| 1:02.0 | And as I was looking into options, I found an online guide on how to sew your own bag, |
| 1:07.6 | which I never really considered that as something that might be possible to |
| 1:11.2 | sew something that wasn't just like a shirt or clothes or anything like that. And I just fell in |
| 1:16.0 | love with doing it. Wow. Cool. Did you have experience like sewing stuff before that? No. |
| 1:22.2 | Not even a little bit. I bought a what was called a singer heavy duty sewing machine, which, |
| 1:27.3 | um, okay. You know, I think it was like |
| 1:29.1 | 200 bucks from Joanne Fabrics, ordered a little bit of fabric offline. And I actually still have that |
| 1:35.0 | first bag that I made. I think it took me two weeks to get it done, you know, start to finish, |
| 1:39.0 | probably ripped it apart four times just making mistakes. But I literally did not know anything about sewing before starting |
| 1:45.7 | that. Yeah, cool. How'd the bag turn out? That's always a tough question to answer because I |
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