Sixteen years, one year at a time
Trakke started on 10 August 2010 with a market stall, a sewing machine and no plan to speak of. Here is what happened next.
2010
Alec Farmer was studying graphic design in Glasgow and tired of sitting at a computer. He wanted to make things with his hands, and had no money to buy materials, so he and his friends cycled round the city looking in skips. Old sofas, advertising banners, discarded suitcases. He taught himself to sew on those, made a couple of hundred bags, every one different, and eventually had more than he could use. On 10 August 2010 he and his flatmate took the keys to a stall at the Barras and settled on a name.
2011
The bags were selling, but the quality was not where it needed to be. Overseas factories all wanted order minimums we could not come close to, so Alec found a sailmaker a mile down the road instead and rented a workshop the two of them could share.
The bigger thing that year was fabric. He went looking for what "made in the UK" actually meant and found Halley Stevensons, the waxed cotton mill in Dundee, about fifty miles away. Stainless hardware came from a workshop in Wales. Webbing from Derbyshire. That was the beginning of the Trakke you would recognise now.
2012
We worked out a collaboration with Harris Tweed. What we had not appreciated was how well known Harris Tweed is in Japan. A brand a few people in Glasgow had heard of suddenly had traffic from the other side of the world.
2013
A design museum in Glasgow had an exhibition fall through and asked if we could fill the slot. We built it around British materials: where they come from, how we source them, how they become bags, who ends up carrying them. Putting it together forced us to look properly at our own process, and taught us most of what we then knew about telling people what we do.
Three products arrived that year: the Krukke, our first waxed cotton backpack, the original Banana bum bag, and the Óg.
2014
We built a Mongolian yurt.
It was a weekend project, done for the fun of it, with no thought of anyone noticing. It packed into a car boot and weighed about a fifth of a standard yurt. It ended up on the cover of Wired. People still ask if they can buy one.
We also worked with Timorous Beasties on the first digitally printed waxed cotton, which took some persuading of Halley Stevensons to pull off.
2015
We moved into the workshop at SWG3, which gave us room to grow and a proper team for the first time.
It was also the year of the Karrimor K100, made for Karrimor's centenary and based on the Whillans Alpiniste, the pack you see in photographs of expeditions in the sixties and seventies. Alec worked directly with Mike Parsons, who founded Karrimor, and even tracked down the original buckle manufacturer.
2016
The year the range took its current shape. Classic silhouettes, built for cities as much as hills. Most of what we sell today traces back to decisions made in 2016.
We also made 130 backpacks with Jura whisky, dyed with lichen from the island's rocks and finished with deerskin zip pulls.
2017
The Wee Lug won Best Work Messenger at the Carry Awards.
We also made a drumstick case for a friend in Frightened Rabbit who kept snapping his sticks on tour. Word travelled, and we ended up making bags for Death Cab for Cutie, The National and Phil Collins.
2018
The Bannoch launched and became our best-selling backpack, and still is.
The salt and pepper fabric on it came from Halley Stevensons, who worked out how to blend stinging nettle fibre with cotton to get the look of old Swiss military packs.
We also worked with Carryology on the Storr SP, which introduced us to a carry community we had not realised existed.
2019
We stopped pretending we were making bags for Everest. Our customers spend most of the week in a city and want something that will still come to the hills at the weekend. Saying that out loud clarified a lot.
2020
Ten years. Not the year anyone had planned.
We shut for six weeks, then reopened making face masks, donating one for every two sold. Prototyping them was oddly hard, since we could not put them on anyone but ourselves. The Dyneema Banana sling went up around our anniversary and sold out in about a minute.
2021
Remade by Trakke started. Bring us an old Trakke bag, any age, any condition, and we will give you a gift card towards the next one. We restore what we can and turn the rest into something else. Almost every bag that comes back has a story attached, which is the best part of it.
2022
The Canna arrived, a small backpack meant for anyone.
2024
We opened the workshop for an evening during Glasgow's Fair Fashion Festival and walked people through how the bags are actually made, from the Barras stall onwards.
2025
Trakke joined the Alpkit group. Two companies with the same view of what kit is for, and more room to work with than we had on our own. We also moved to a PFC-free version of Halley Stevensons' P400 canvas, which no customer will ever notice, which is rather the point.
2026
Sixteen years. Bags still handmade, still coming back for reproofing with a decade of wear on them, still going out again.
That is the part worth marking. Not that we have lasted sixteen years, but that some of what we made in the early days is still in use.
