When Keyana Sapp, 31, went shopping for a new backpack, the brands he remembered as a kid were just not the same.
He researched the companies, from North Face to JanSport and Eastpak, and soon realized they were all owned by the VF Corporation after a wave of acquisitions in the 2000s. After a Reddit post he made about his discovery picked up traction, he started looking at other types of consumer goods – cookware, shoes, tools, clothing.
“It seems like that was a story that just repeated in every industry,” Sapp told the Guardian.
Nice. I think very durable packs will tend to be heavier fwiw. Neither of my two current “good” packs (both Bozeman-era Dana Design) have any elastic that I can think of, other than the foam in the hip belts. I’m not in the market for another pack any time soon but I’ll keep Vanquest in mind and will also ask on an outdoor forum that I sometimes inhabit. The regulars there are extreme connoisseurs of good packs.