Loading...A reintroduction
| JanSport is a name I fondly remember from my Junior High School years. Everybody in my Queens, NY school had to have one, the synthetic fabric with the leather bottoms and leather zipper-laces people re-tied into ornate accessories were staples of school fashion (mine, at least). To personalize them some people stuck their favorite band pins on them, some wrote quotes on them with white out, some, like me, were just anal about keeping them looking brand new. JanSport bags were as essential to my 90s experience as owning a copy of Wu-Tang’s 36 Chambers. It’s 2011 now, 18 years later, and I’m reminiscing about those good ol’ days as I’m covering JanSport’s Freedom Expression bag design contest at Plaza Indonesia’s The Goods Dept. As I wondered around JanSport’s installation one particular section of backpacks caught my eye. | 
These weren’t the Right Pack or the Super Break we are now accustomed to seeing everyday; these sets of bags were obviously built for outdoor activities. Aesthetically though, they had a ‘vintage’ feel to them; the backpacks look functional but did not have the ‘cutting-edge’ appearance a lot of products seem to opt for this day and age. Later on I found out that this was a re-release of some classic JanSport products. Titled “The Heritage Series” this collection of bags revisits some of the innovation JanSport has brought to the market the past 4 decades, and while learning about this series Whiteboard Journal got to interview one of the architects of JanSport, Skip Yowell; discovering the philosophy and the humble beginnings of what is now one of the biggest bag companies on this planet. |
