Chrome Messenger Bag

This San Francisco Based company has been outfitting bicycle messengers in big cities for years, with their distinctive seat belt clasps and red griffin icon. Strapped to the chest of hip city dwellers this bag has the toughness and style to protect your stuff and still make you look good, or at least make everyone else look good and what's wrong with looking good? Being a hip city dweller myself, it was time to see if this satchel could hold up as advertised.

Not willing to spend the better part of a Saturday morning visiting the factory in SOMA I ordered my bag online and was genuinely surprised by the wide range of colors available. On the streets of San Francisco, most Chrome bags I had seen were black, with a red stripe along the bottom quarter of the flap. Well it turns out what is popular is not always the only option and online there were dozens of alternatives. Color combinations I would have never thought of, offered there to make your bag your own. After spending close to an hour picking through sizes, styles and colors and enduring my Fiancee's incessant mockery about a man purse, I checked out with a navy blue and light grey citizen style messenger bag.

A few days later, the box arrived at my office and all productivity was lost. The unboxing was refreshingly simple, with no fancy packaging or special security tags or anything like that, just a plain brown box with the plastic wrapped bag and an invoice stuffed inside. After tearing through the plastic, ripping off assorted retail tags and holding it up to the light the bag was exactly as expected.

Designed to be slung from the left shoulder under the right arm (an option, you can get it to go the other way) the thick top half of the strap terminated at a shiny silver buckle. Thick with padding, a big strip of seat-belt fabric runs up the top strap, Velcroed down for attachments such as the optional cell phone holster. A short piece of Velcro at the top of the strap holds yet another strap, designed to run across the chest and stabilize the bag when it's full with a bulky load. Below the buckle is the bottom strap, beginning where the top strap left off. Here is where the buckle earns its pay so to speak, part of the buckle insert is a lever. Whoo! A lever! We like levers, because when you leverage this lever you loosen the strap, and can swing the bag from your back all the way to the front, providing quick, easy access no matter how full or bulky the bag is.

The outside flap closes down onto solid Velcro moorings which hold it securely without the additional adjustable clips. Opening the bag is where the $115 price tag is justified. The bag is made of two layers, the outside a colored heavy duty canvas, the inside a heavy vinyl waterproof material. The inside section floats free of the canvas outer layer, held in place by more Velcro ensuring that any liquids that somehow seep through the canvas or the reinforced seams never reach the stuff inside. A half dozen pocketey put-things-here-places nicely round out the storage area.

The impressive build and solid styling was enough to spur the purchase sight untried, though there are a few items that bear mentioning. The biggest is getting used to the feel of how the bag sits on your back. It really is designed to be strapped tight, not slung loosely like other messenger bags. When it sits loose, or the items you've packed aren't sitting quite right, you can feel it in the small of your back. Not the most comfortable of feelings. This can usually be cured with a quick rearrangement or tightening, but can be an unsettling and even painful feeling if left un-addressed. All in all, if you need a new bag, or just want something different, grabbing one of these is a smart move.