The inside of Alejandro Sarete’s backpack is jammed with the objects of a busy student life: smartphone, USB thumb drive, playing cards, lip balm. Cho Young-Uk’s shoulder bag is more minimalist in content: Lenovo laptop and adapter.
Mr. Sarete and Mr. Cho, both students at New York University, have something missing from their stashes: piles of textbooks.
“I don’t really have to carry around textbooks anymore, like I used to in high school,” said Mr. Cho, a sophomore. All but two of his classes — Spanish history and financial accounting — had moved the coursework online.
“I think fewer people have them, for sure,” Mr. Sarete said. “I actually still like physical paper, but I’m an exception.”
As students increasingly go back to school with gadgets instead of textbooks, and no longer need huge backpacks to haul them around, backpack makers in the $2.7 billion industry are rethinking not only the perennial style of back-to-school packs but also the mission of the ubiquitous carrying gear that for decades has been an annual must-buy for students of all ages.
For clues, Eric Rothenhaus and his team at VF Corporation, the apparel giant that owns a leading maker of backpacks, JanSport, sought the advice of some extreme backpack users. They studied mountaineers whose lives can depend on their gear. They talked to the homeless in San Francisco, who live out of shopping carts.
And they visited campuses to observe the habits and habitats of college students, who buy many of the eight million backpacks JanSport sells each year. “We realized we needed to forget everything we knew about the category,” said Mr. Rothenhaus, director of research and design at JanSport.
“We went out to the streets of New York, to San Francisco, to college campuses, and we started to ask: What are the things we carry with us? How do we carry them? And how is that changing?”
Americans bought more backpacks than ever last year— 174 million of them, according to the Travel Goods Association. The bulk of these were purchased during back-to-school shopping season, typically the second-largest sales season for retailers and an important bellwether for year-end holiday sales.
But there is ample hand-wringing within the industry that it is not keeping up with the times. After growing at a fast clip over the last decade, as offices grew more casual and men increasingly switched from briefcases to backpacks, the market for backpack sales in the United States is expected to grow just 3.9 percent this year, according to data from Euromonitor International. That is down from 9 percent five years ago.
“The market for backpacks is becoming saturated and is nearing its peak," Ayako Homma, a Euromonitor research analyst, wrote in an email. Consumers, she said, are “looking for something new and different.”
Those concerns add to pessimism over the entire late-summer shopping season. Consumers will spend about 6 percent less on back-to-school purchases compared with a year ago, the National Retail Federation predicts, in part because there are few new “must have” electronics so far this year.
In backpacks, too, experts say there is a dearth of hits. They say innovation has stalled in a market dominated by VF, which also owns the Eastpak, Timberland and North Face brands and controls 55 percent of backpack sales in the United States. Many packs on students’ backs as they go back to school this week are largely indistinguishable from those their parents carried.
“I think there’s room in the market for something new,” said Lindsey Shirley, a clothing and textiles expert at Utah State University who is developing a new degree in outdoor product design to address a perceived shortfall of fresh talent in the field. “There’s definitely room for innovation.”
Mr. Sarete and Mr. Cho, both students at New York University, have something missing from their stashes: piles of textbooks.“I don’t really have to carry around textbooks anymore, like I used to in high school,” said Mr. Cho, a sophomore. All but two of his classes — Spanish history and financial accounting — had moved the coursework online.
“I think fewer people have them, for sure,” Mr. Sarete said. “I actually still like physical paper, but I’m an exception.”
As students increasingly go back to school with gadgets instead of textbooks, and no longer need huge backpacks to haul them around, backpack makers in the $2.7 billion industry are rethinking not only the perennial style of back-to-school packs but also the mission of the ubiquitous carrying gear that for decades has been an annual must-buy for students of all ages.
For clues, Eric Rothenhaus and his team at VF Corporation, the apparel giant that owns a leading maker of backpacks, JanSport, sought the advice of some extreme backpack users. They studied mountaineers whose lives can depend on their gear. They talked to the homeless in San Francisco, who live out of shopping carts.
And they visited campuses to observe the habits and habitats of college students, who buy many of the eight million backpacks JanSport sells each year. “We realized we needed to forget everything we knew about the category,” said Mr. Rothenhaus, director of research and design at JanSport.
“We went out to the streets of New York, to San Francisco, to college campuses, and we started to ask: What are the things we carry with us? How do we carry them? And how is that changing?”
Americans bought more backpacks than ever last year— 174 million of them, according to the Travel Goods Association. The bulk of these were purchased during back-to-school shopping season, typically the second-largest sales season for retailers and an important bellwether for year-end holiday sales.
But there is ample hand-wringing within the industry that it is not keeping up with the times. After growing at a fast clip over the last decade, as offices grew more casual and men increasingly switched from briefcases to backpacks, the market for backpack sales in the United States is expected to grow just 3.9 percent this year, according to data from Euromonitor International. That is down from 9 percent five years ago.
“The market for backpacks is becoming saturated and is nearing its peak," Ayako Homma, a Euromonitor research analyst, wrote in an email. Consumers, she said, are “looking for something new and different.”
Those concerns add to pessimism over the entire late-summer shopping season. Consumers will spend about 6 percent less on back-to-school purchases compared with a year ago, the National Retail Federation predicts, in part because there are few new “must have” electronics so far this year.
In backpacks, too, experts say there is a dearth of hits. They say innovation has stalled in a market dominated by VF, which also owns the Eastpak, Timberland and North Face brands and controls 55 percent of backpack sales in the United States. Many packs on students’ backs as they go back to school this week are largely indistinguishable from those their parents carried.
“I think there’s room in the market for something new,” said Lindsey Shirley, a clothing and textiles expert at Utah State University who is developing a new degree in outdoor product design to address a perceived shortfall of fresh talent in the field. “There’s definitely room for innovation.”
by Hiroko Tabuchi, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jim Wilson/The New York Times
