In late 2015 (!), I had tried and failed to follow a huge, somewhat clunky but infinitely endearing messenger bag, the Jandd Hurricane Iniki, with a sleeker, more stylish number, the Timbuk2 Especial Claro. The style didn't work, but the way the company stood behind the failure made me interested in another of their options, so I ended up with the Timbuk2 Classic Messenger, in Medium, all black.
(The most basic, and basic black, bag around: the Timbuk2 Classic Messenger in Medium.)
I used it daily for more than a year, before putting it into a rotation with the Defy Strapped, and later mixing in the Jannd Shana (link tk). (As I review these receipts, I'm shocked that it only had something like fifteen months of unchallenged No. 1 status.) It's a nearly ubiquitous bike-bag option: in the Bay Area, it's still nearly impossible to leave the house (when you can leave the house) and not see one across somebody's back. It is I think, utterly nondescript, in a way that I kind of enjoy. While it's not wildly appropriate for every office environment, I work in California, so its ubiquity and nondescriptness add up to it being more or less invisible.
A very well put together read on a similar bag by Timbuk2 is by David Pouge at the Strategist. While his is not mine, a couple points he makes seem to me to apply perfectly. As he says:
There’s no corner of Timbuk2 bags that hasn’t been nerdily, almost hilariously sweated over
bigger inside than they look outside
(lengthy, detailed breakdown of his version's pockets, which are different than mine, so not relevant, though still fascinating)
Almost everything about this bag is just ... correct. If you have used any other bag, and thought about it, this bag will impress you as having made the right decision in almost every particular. (NOTE: according to some recent reviews, a lot of the things I will praise may have been phased out, so emptor your caveats and all that.)
Materials
(Cordura on the outside, TPU [whatever that is] on the inside.)
Materials are nearly perfect. The outside is the extremely standard Cordura, but a small, tight weave that holds up beautifully to knocks and dings, avoids snags, and doesn't seem to chafe wool or other materials unduly. The inside pockets are on a fabric panel that's made from a nice, light-colored (grey) smooth "packcloth" I guess they call it that isn't hard to wipe clean and is hard to stain, both of which, in my life, are great. There's also a "TPU" liner which helps keep things waterproof, and is even more wipeable. And only after five years has the TPU started to crack at all.
(Minor cracking of the lining after 5ish years.)
Straps
Not a ton to say here. Shoulder strap: you never notice it. This is good! If you notice a shoulder strap, it's probably because it's binding or chafing or pinching or something, or too slick so the bag slides around too much (like the Defy strap), or made from a wide enough weave to get torn up by the available velcro, like the new Jandd strap. This shoulder strap has none of those problems. It's just there, it's got a little pad on it that keeps pain from happening, it all just works.
There's a quick-adjust flappity that I'm less impressed with, as I routinely thwacked it out of place while under load, which causes the bag to hurtle to the end of the strap length, before jolting harshly, which: unpleasant. Only thing you can do is try to avoid thwacking / flicking. Probably good advice in general, and I honor this bag for teaching me a profound lesson.
The cross-body strap isn't as great: it doesn't easily stow out of the way when you're not using it. When you disconnect it, it's going to bang around your knees, which nothing on a shoulder bag should ever do. I bought a small retaining clip from Jandd, which helps when it works, which is some but not enough of the time. I don't know what would be better. Magnets, maybe? Seems like magnets might help.
There's also a strap that's sewn to the bag with a clip on the end to use as a key fob. People seem to like it. I have never used it, as my paranoia does not allow me to be happy with the idea of keys I own being in something that might not be touching my body at all times.
The straps connecting the main flap to the body of the bag are correct in two ways: the buckles are on the inside of the flap, which looks better and is no less usable than when they're on the outside; the body straps run all the way under the floor of the bag, allowing compression, and enabling stuffing something between the straps and the outside of the bag. (This is one thing I miss a lot when I'm using my Rickshaw Sutro Messenger.)
There's a grab handle, which is also correct. It's very simple, just a flat strap across the top of the bag, but it's usable and essentially invisible, which makes it nearly perfect. Since I tend to carry too much, I routinely worry that the velcro will fail to keep the whole thing together, but I don't think the hook/loop magic has ever actually failed me.
Pockets
Essentially perfect. It is deeply annoying to me that no bag reviews ever give enough detail on the pockets, as a bag just is a pocket, so pockets in pockets are obviously of grave importance. Gravest.
There's a laptop pocket across the back. It's padded on the bag side, but not on the wall side. It fits even my ridiculously large laptop (barely, with some stuffing / shoving and visible stress placed on the fabric), which is rad; a minor scourge of the bag design world is the sense bag designers seem to have that the only laptops that exist are Macs.
There's two water bottle holders. One mesh, one smooth. Both fit a small / 16 oz. type Nalgene bottle fine, but not the standard / 32 oz. size. These are pretty helpful, if only because verticality is a nice thing to impose on a liquid-carrier (and because it's nice to not have your bottle go sideways and start poking you in the back).
And then there's the front wall, a dense city block of pockets. Across the inside front wall: wide pocket; narrow pocket; narrow pocket; wide pocket. The wide pockets are wide and deep enough to hold a hard-sided glasses case (a necessity for me), or two iPhone 6s or similar mid-sized phones. Most bags don't bother to have something that comfortably fits a glasses case, and most bags suck for that reason. The narrow pockets hold two sharpies. Probably could fit three narrower pens, but that would be fussy and insane. Who would do that?
(Detail on the inside pockets under load.)
Behind the front wall, a zippered pocket that doesn't quite run the width of the wall, nor quite to the bottom of the front wall. I believe it should. But it's still a super good place to keep a backup handkerchief, maybe a smaller / thinner notebook. It's not quite deep enough for a typical Moleskine, nor tall / wide enough for my big Baron Fig notebook. But a memory card, a lighter, tampons, or whatever, it's all real good for this pocket.
On the outside of the front wall, a zippered patch pocket (with that little key fob) riding a top-loader. These pockets are bracketed by two vertical strips of the hook side of the hook-and-loop fabric. It's a great way to minimize the amount of this destructive material, but it's still exactly and precisely where a man's sleeve will go most often, thereby getting snagged. The top-loader could stand some pen slots, probably, but I never lost any sleep over it. These two are separated by just a little bit of packcloth, which finally got a bit shredded by the pointy types of cargo I tend to carry here (knives, jacks, throwing stars, etc.). Behind these is my favorite name for a pocket ever: the Napoleon pocket, a side-loader that runs wider than the two square pockets and is a perfect fit for a small tablet (7" say).
(Outside front pockets detail with Napoleon pocket.)
(You knew I was going to show you the damage done by the hook side of hook-and-loop fasteners: check out that fraying! That minor fraying after five years of use.)
Size
This bag has a nominal capacity of 21 liters (1,282 in3). This isn't huge, and the bag certainly doesn't look terribly large, but it always feels as though you can hold Just One More Thing (the bag version of moreishness).
I think it's the depth of the bag that really does this: it's listed as 18.1 inches wide (top, 14.6 inches wide at bottom) which are nothing particularly large, but the 7.09 inches of depth allow a LOT of frank stuffage. Check out the image: that's a bag with four tallboys, a laptop, a coffee mug and a water bottle in it and the bag looks essentially empty. Incredible.
(A bag with a lot in it that doesn't look like it's got a lot in it.)
Historical note on size: After the Jandd, it was very difficult for me to adjust to anything under two-cinder-block carrying capacity. I destroyed the Especial Claro by being unable to pivot to a different strategy. When I traded the Claro for this Classic, still in the shadow of the Jandd Iniki, it wasn't immediately obvious to me that that the Classic was big enough. Since 2015, though, I have tried out the Defy Strapped (nominal capacity unavailable), the Jandd Shana (nominal capacity 1,338 in3 / 22 liters [but I absolutely don't believe this, details tk]), and the Rickshaw Sutro (nominal capacity 905 in3 ~15 liters), and without seeming bulkier than any of these, it just carries more than any of them.
Carrying
Times have changed since I first started thinking about this stuff. Amangst other things, I changed jobs, and my new job (smashing capitalism) required me to buy a car (there are some contradictions)—see here my recent obsession with grab handles—so I don't always remember to stress out about how it goes to stuff in / yoink free a U-lock or two from a stuffed messenger bag, but two features of this bag make those tasks more reasonable: the main compartment is big and deep not small nor shallow, and there's a layer of foam running across the laptop pocket. This foam helps avoid the ol' U-lock kidney strike-&-massage, which is a good thing. I have noticed that it's pretty common to scrape out the pens from the inside wall when pulling out a lock, which is annoying. Mostly it all works real well! All that said, at this point, when I need to carry my locks, I mostly just hang the locks off the shoulder strap.
Punchline
Two thousand words later, on this one bag, this bag that's the most generic thing out there anywhere, after thousands of other words on the specifics of my totally individual needs ... I discover that what works best for me, is the thing that works best for everybody.
David Pogue (and Timbuk2's own marketing copy) is correct: the Classic Messenger is basically a perfected object, with years of lessons incorporated and snags smoothed out. If you can get the one I got, and the reviews on the site right now suggest you may no longer be able to, it's difficult to imagine you wouldn't be happy with it.
(Detail on the inside pockets without load and zipper pocket open.)
Previous entries in the total theory of messenger bags megathread:
