Nicole Meléndez, the founder of Hábito Design, is the designer that we worked with to create our initial technical design for Sincerity Inside. Working with Nicole was a really awesome experience – most importantly because of how she embraced me and my team, and because of how she embraced the spirit of Badass Backpacks. She loved the theme, and although backpacks aren’t really her thing, she listened closely to what we wanted to create. And then she got to work on several iterations of our first ever designs. While our final product has drifted quite a bit from those designs she created — the bones of what she crafted are there and we couldn’t have made the final version of Sincerity Inside without her work and her design.
Thank you Nicole!!! So grateful for the joy you brought along to the work you did with us – we learned a lot!
Eric, Rusty and I have absolutely no prior experience designing backpacks — which means that from the very beginning we knew that we were going to need to find somebody who could help us with our bag design. Maker’s Row helped match us up with Nicole for a first effort at getting a “TechPack” created for this bag that we wanted to create. To give you an idea of just how new to all of this we are, I had two questions about the “TechPack”. Adam: “First off, what the fuck is a Tech-Pack? And secondly, is it really called a ‘Tech-Pack’?” 🙂 Long story short, the TechPack is a large spreadsheet with several important parts — all related to each and every piece of the bag, top to bottom, and inside and out. Materials, measurements, and draft drawings (like this, this, and this) all combining to give the pattern maker the direction they’ll need for drafting the material patterns (for cutting & sewing) in order to make the bag. Whew, that’ws a mouthful. And yes — “Tech Pack” seems to not just be an industry term — it’s THE industry term that is widely used in design and manufacturing production. 🙂 Now we know.
As Badass Backpacks continues onward, there is no doubt that we will be creating more tech packs in the future. The work that Nicole did with us to create our first tech pack was special — it was a neat chance for me to watch a 3rd party conspire with Badass Backpacks — thank you Nicole for showing up and facing the FRONT. Thank you for putting yourself inside our first ever bag.