Timbuk2 has always been about making their brand and their bags your brand and your bags and since about 1989 the founder of the uber-popular messenger bags, Rob Honeycutt, has been finding ways to make sure that each bag that he made was exactly what the person buying it wanted.

If you read this timeline on the Timbuk2 website, you'll see that way back in 1990 Rob came up with the first form that allowed people to create their own versions of the 3-panel messenger bag that was just beginning to gain popularity in the bike messenger world in San Fransicso, CA. Soon after, Rob became a student of mass customization, which included him learning the manufacturing philosophy of Toyota Motor Company. With his new knowledge and know-how it didn't take Rob long to perfect his own mass customization system for his messenger bags, which only helped Timbuk2 grow even faster than it already was.

Around the year 1999 Timbuk2 was beginning to thrive and with the flood of new Internet-based companies making their way to the San Francisco area, Rob began conceptualizing a way to take the Timbuk2 mass customization process online.  Creating this bag builder was a fairly large undertaking, especially considering the fact that they were still using the old-fashioned paper form method that they created nearly 10 years before.

Less than a full year later Timbuk2 officially launched the first online version of their Build Your Own Bag system that allowed anyone to completely customize their bags easily with just a few clicks of a mouse. This same system is still up and running today and it now has the ability to customize the 3-panel Timbuk2 Classic Messenger bag, as well as a few others.