Timbuk2 Especial Claro Review: Not for Me, but Great Customer Service Wins the Day

A while back, I covered my abiding respect and affection for my Jandd Hurricane messenger bag. It was and is the stoutest and most robust bag I've owned—but it was really starting to show the wear that comes with age, and it came time to find a replacement daily driver. This is not that story.

This story lives somewhere between the story of the Jandd—a story about an adequately designed and beautifully built object—and the story of the U-Turn Audio—a story about a maybe-adequate object betrayed by abysmal customer service. This story is about the Timbuk2 Especial Claro.

Going out into the world for a new bag was thrilling and stressful. I love that kind of shopping: zooming in to check pocket details; stroking my chin over fabric types; trying to parse "weather resistant" vs. "waterproof"; squinting at different volumes and weights. But it's stressful, because I haven't been on the market for a really long time. "Ich kenne mich nicht aus", as Wittgenstein said, when he was looking to buy a new bike bag. So I spent untold hours on the internet, and more than a few hours boring the bejeezus out of Noodles talking about bags. I checked every site I could find—bag sites, review sites, shopping sites, everything. I pestered my friends with late-night texes about their bag and life choices. I stared at every person carrying a bag within eyeshot, judging, assessing, creeping the fuck out (probably).

Eventually, the planets aligned and I realized something incredibly important: I have insane numbers of coupons for ten wing-wangs off at LL Bean and those coupons stack. This means I could throw coupons at a purchase until I ran out of coupons or until the remaining charge was less than ten wing-wangs! Also? I get free shipping from Bean, because I am secretly an important man.

Let's take a secretly an important man break!

What all this meant was that I could burn a bunch of coupons and get a new bike bag for nine wing-wangs. Also the copy around it said specifically that it's for Serious Cyclists—and who's more serious a cyclist than me!? Nobody, that's who.

And that is how the Especial Claro entered my life. It was so cool looking! A little too stylish for me, probably, but I really enjoyed wearing it, carrying it, fiddling with it, looking at it, talking about it...I kind of felt like an early William Gibson character. (The "hammered carbon" look feels like a very specific alternate future I wish I inhabited sometimes.) But all was not well in this romance for the ages. Enter: writing letter to Timbuk2's customer support team.

I recently bought (and came to really like) a Medium Especial Claro. I really liked how light it was, and I appreciated its minimal approach to organizational features and pockets -- I tend to packrat a LOT of stuff, so the more pockets I have at my disposal, the more I carry with me everywhere, which isn't actually helpful. Plus I really liked its style: I'm an office drone, and the bag matched that vibe, but with a little flair / style that made me feel like I wasn't JUST an office drone.

But after less than two weeks, the seams under the shoulder strap have started to tear loose. I never carried any kind of load I consider out of line for a messenger bag -- I'd guess a 12-pack of Tecate + a couple bottles of fizzy water and a U-Lock would have been the heaviest load. I commute exclusively by bike, and ride everywhere I go, and I've been using a giant Jandd bag for years, and that kind of load would normally go on top of my everyday carry without any problems. (I had to take everything out to make that load fit the Claro, and it was a pretty tight fit.)

So my question is this: Is the Classic Messenger a better choice for me? I.e., will it allow me to carry the stuff I tend to carry on a daily basis without structural failure?
OR
Should I just go for another Claro and adapt my habits to the bag rather than assuming the bag will adapt to whatever I throw at (or in) it? (This would be the case if the Classic Messenger had about the same carrying capacity and build quality -- because if those things are equal, I much prefer the style and waterproofness of the Claro.) Thanks! Sorry for the novel's worth of backstory and detail, but as somebody who really does live on his bike, I have...well, I have special needs.

They got back to me v. quickly.

Hey [Fat],

Thank you for contacting Timbuk2.

Sorry to hear that your bag wasn't working like it should, can you shoot over an image of the issue so we can take a look?

In regards to your product question, the Classic Messenger Bag will do the trick. A lot of the colorways are made from Cordura Nylon and that is a top of the line Cordura that offers lightness and water protection!

If you grab a medium you will be able to easily fit a 12 pack, fizzee water, and U Lock...I speak from experience.

It will also be able to hold the same amount of weight, if not, more.

It is more likely to get water inside the main bucket if your bag is over stuffed, but the fold over flap on this bag also has water wings so water is less likely to dribble in.

Just let us know if there's anything else I can help with or answer,

Your pals @ Timbuk2
Customer Service

This is pretty much exactly what I wanted to hear.

This is totally helpful -- thank you VERY much! I definitely appreciate it. You should tell your boss that this was exactly the response I was hoping for, too! I'll go back to the store where I picked this up and swop out the Claro for the Classic...

I've attached a couple images of the fraying (both sides). Hope they help! The quarter was just for scale.

The story is pretty much over, but one line from their next email really made me laugh, so I'm including it here.

Hey [Fat],

Thanks for shooting over those images. That's definitely odd and not the type of quality that Timbuk2 is known for. Your Claro should have held up a lot better. I'm going to make sure our product design team gets these photos.

If for some reason the store cannot help with the swap, please let us know. We want to make sure you get the best bag that will meet your needs and let you enjoy your Tecate without any worries.

Cheers!

I like a company that demonstrates attention to detail at every step: from educating me about fabrics (never buy anything that's not Cordura: noted!) to keeping an eye on what I like to drink (Tecate and fizzy water, mainly). I like a company that takes Tecate as seriously as I do, as seriously as Kowloon Walled City takes Tecate—and tone. I like Timbuk2. I sent the Especial Claro back and have been using the Classic Messenger for a couple weeks. It's a good solution for me. But that's a story for a different time.

GET THEM: Matt Maxwell's Tug on the Ribbon and Other Stories

"My Spirit Animal Is a Cassette Tape"

My introduction to art and death came through the cassette tape. Christmas of 1984: my first four tapes, and a Radio Shack player/recorder; music; art. Within a year: an everpresent Walkman in my jean jacket's pocket; tapes eaten; death. The fragile ribbon of magnetic tape delivered the music I needed to live a life worth living, and took it away at frequent, irregular intervals. The garbled crunch-then-squeal in my headphones was an everpresent possibility—the presence of loss looming over every time I hit PLAY.

I hit PLAY a lot. I was in the suburbs then. It was unwalkable, but I didn't know that, so I walked everywhere. The public transit system sucked, but I didn't know that either, so I spent a lot of time on the bus, guitars in my ears and a need for literally everything other than what I had in my heart. Eventually I got hip to the power of fleeing, and I began to spend even more time on the bus, out on the prairie between cities, staring out the window, playing tapes, playing tapes, playing tapes.

I've told this story before, or parts of it, anyway. But the experience of the tape, fragile and linear and impossibly valuable, made me who I am, and I'm still always looking for a way to port some art into where I am, what I'm doing.

oOo

I don't remember exactly when Matt Maxwell invaded my consciousness. Likely some confluence of Twitter interests blew him out of the desert and onto my screens like a low-key prophet bringing the sandstorm. Quick poking about established him as, at the very least, a Deeply Kindred Spirit to this Reviewieran Axis—Contradiction, Tinzeroes, Erroneous, et al.—nowhere more clearly laid out than in his "influence map" for his in-progress book Blue Highway, which could no joke serve as a fairly comprehensive introduction to Reviewieran aesthetics:

• The movies The Road Warrior and Mad Max and Blade Runner and Escape from New York and—and this is deeply odd, because Tinzeroes and I thought literally nobody but us ever liked this one—Streets of Fire
• The weird pencil-and-paper board game slash role-playing game Car Wars
• William Gibson's great novel Neuromancer

(Not Tom Waits, tho: Reviewiera is and was and ever shall be a place for Captain Beefheart and Roky Erickson, and no, not ever bad actors and shtickmeisters like Tom Waits.)

The deal was sealed when he tweeted a link to the matchless HEAVY TUNES of Shooting Guns. I had to buy something to say "Thanks!". (Note: by all that is good, I tell you three times that capitalism is gross.) He's got a bunch, but there was no way I wasn't starting with the one with a cassette tape cover.

Tug on the Ribbon's four stories cover considerable ground, as did I, reading them on BART trains over the last week or so. Each draws from and advances on the ecosystem of influences blooming in the influence map we saw earlier. Perhaps more Bruce Sterling than William Gibson, Maxwell likes big-idea backgrounds: several stories are set in a world that feels complex and alien and recognizably the product of our own one unwon world, evolved in some specific way. Maxwell also echoes Sterling's insistence on incorporating non-Anglo/American sets and settings for his stories, as in "Luna Sangre"'s genetically engineered and fully networked gang/religious war nightmare in Tenochitlan and "Tug on the Ribbon"'s desert outside the city:

Wind shearing through the fingers of the creosote and the Manzanita and the stubby paws of the prickly pears. It was laden with trash. Bits of paper or shiny foil that glinted like fake treasure in the half-light. Pieces of plastic so small that they weren't worth cleaning to melt down.

"Coming Soon"'s desert reminded me most of the atom-bomb test site in the strangely effective and emotional Cold War SF movie The Amazing Colossal Man, with a little bit of hot-rod culture dashed in like the sudden memory-blast that Steve McQueen was in early Technicolor monster movie The Blob. This story is a romp, with a revelation I liked so much I won't say more, except to link it to an early William Gibson oddity/fave, "The Gernsback Continuum". (Reviewiera: Never Not Bringing Up Stories from Mirrorshades.)

"Crunch Time"'s world is one where everything is collapsing, the world is fucked, and insane idiots with the exact wrong priorities are in charge. It is unclear what this piece of journalism is doing in a collection of short stories. This mean-spirited slice of doom might have been my favorite in the moment, pulling audible giggles from me and making me want to watch Dawn of the Dead and Office Space simultaneously.

Of them all, "Tug on the Ribbon" is so far staying with me the most—as you'd expect of a dream-hazy story with some drugs, a broken, lying authority feeding on the poor, cassette tapes, and a Greyhound trip.

oOo

Death is coming for us all. We're surrounded by poison because we've proved incapable of governing rationality with moral wisdom; we're governed by imbeciles because we've proved uninterested in introducing rationality into structures of power. What passes for "culture" is a systematic fraud, lies designed to alienate us from each other and even ourselves, providing endless spurious satisfactions and pernicious canalizations and redirections of all worthwhile and productive impulses. It's not clear we have 200 years left. This is admittedly a bummer. And yet I claim there's room for hope.

One reason for hope is that there are still those among us who are trying—who look at all the readymade options and say "Fuck it, I'd rather roll my own.". It's hard goddamned work, though, and it deserves your support. Buy this book. Let it help you think better thoughts. Go forth and be and do better.

—Fat, kicking against the pricks