In 1993, two graphic designers, Markus and Daniel Freitag, were looking for a functional, watertight bag to carry their work in, but couldn’t find one on the market. The solution, they found, was humming past the front of their Zurich flat every day. Taking inspiration from the colorful tarps closing the sides of flatbed trucks, the brothers used their apartment as a makeshift studio and created a line of messenger bags from recycled truck tarpaulins, bike inner tubes, and old car seat belts. Today, Freitag ships its bags around the world but the real story is in the company’s origin: Looking at the manufacturing process provides a unique insight into a company that has built a business on reclaimed materials. Markus and Daniel Freitag — also known as the Freitag brothers — were heavily influenced by the motorway. Living in an apartment near a highway in Switzerland, they had easy access to watching the trucks rolling by, covered in thick tarpaulin. In 1993, the DoItYourself duo began to create one-of-a-kind bags made of recycled waterproof tarps, bicycle inner tubes and seatbelts.
Before long they were trucking; the company outgrew the brothers’ apartment and moved to its own space in Zurich. Freitag opened flagship stores in Davos, Switzerland, and in Hamburg, Germany. Perhaps more importantly, it established an international presence online. The website allows online hipsters around the world to shop, create custom bags, learn more about the company, play branded games, and even apply for jobs. The Freitag bag is tailor-made on a small-scale, of recycled materials.
Made entirely by hand, the unpretentious Freitag bag has distanced itself from trendy, brand-driven products as a durable and radical ‘anti-brand’ alternative for youthful urbanites who have made it their choice for toting personal necessities. In addition to covering the history of the bag and its particular ecological, economic, and socio-cultural contexts, Freitag.com contains portraits of 3,000 Freitag bags and their owners, most of whom are members of a generation that is as vain as it is critical of consumerism -a generation for whom the Freitag bag is the ideal brand-name product.
Freitag’s flagship store looks like it would topple, if you flicked it with your finger. Teetering above the trendy Zurich-West area, it consists of 19 freight containers piled upon one another. Inside, the industrial theme continues. Bright bags with bold designs peep from a mosaic of floor-to-ceiling drawers. The colourful tarpaulins the bags are made from evoke images of lorries roaring along motorways. It is the bags’ smell that really reveals their trucking heritage: when you enter the store, an overwhelming rubbery scent fills your nostrils.
While Freitag bags have become a modern fashion cult in Switzerland, their origins honour an ‘out with the old, in with the old’ way of thinking. “Our parents showed us how compost works,” says Markus Freitag, who founded the bag company alongside brother Daniel. “We collected trash and old bicycle parts and made things from it.” The siblings’ ideas about re-developing waste were cemented during a family holiday to India, where they observed how very few resources and raw materials could be employed in production and manufacture.
Markus smiles as he tells me about the start of their creative journey in 1993. “We were looking for water resistant bags, which were unavailable in Zurich at the time,” the 42-year-old designer remembers. When he cycled to a nearby trucking company looking for some old tarpaulin to make these bags, he met with incredulous looks. Undeterred, the then-visual design student did not leave empty handed.
At home, the bathtub became a makeshift industrial washing machine and the brothers set about finding a durable sewing machine for the tough material. “That was the first – and in a way the biggest – investment,” Markus sighs.
While admitting the first bag prototype was “not very beautiful or useful,” he saw potential in the tarp. He surprised staff at the industrial zone when he returned a few days later for more raw material, and the bag’s design developed to include bicycle inner tubes and seatbelts. Not “afraid of trial and error,” the brothers learnt on the job. “Friends began to ask about the prototype [a messenger bag called F13 Top Cat] and that’s how it all started,” Markusexplains in his endearingly soft voice.
“There was no business plan and no money. The biggest challenge was just to get the material and do the handiwork.” As the brothers acquired more tarp, the F13 Top Cat gained descendents. Today, Freitag’s FUNDAMENTALS line features 40 models – each one unique – including a F12 Dragnet with gold stars and a sunshine yellow F52 Miami Vice. Distinctly ‘grungy’ with their seat-belt straps and plastic buckles, the bags range in style from the recognisable messenger to shopper to iPad sleeve. Markus reveals that 30 to 40 bags can be made from one tarpaulin, with production lasting between two and three months.
The chicer side of tarpaulin revealed itself in 2010 in Freitag’s seasonal REFERENCE collection: it is like the porcelain ‘girl next door’ beside the acne-ridden teenager. Markus describes the elegant bags (in yellow, red and white) as “intellectual” Freitag bags, because they are supposed to represent the role of a literal “messenger.” I ask if the feminine designs are an attempt to attract a different audience. “We are working more with classical styles,” admits Markus. “But [as in the FUNDAMENTALS line] almost every bag is unisex.”
Freitag is so popular it has spawned copycat products. One of the most successful was Donnerstag (Thursday), launched by supermarket empire Migros in 1997. “It’s always a good sign, when people start to copy you,” laughs Markus. “Migros only does copies of really good, original products. Anyway, there is no better copy than the original,” he adds wryly.
Covetable enough for copies, but Markus insists Freitag is anything but fashionable. “We have our own definition of fashion,” he says. “We work with old tarp, which is different to the fashion industry, where you make new look old.” Looks aside, Freitag has an inherent honesty, too. “We want people to pay for good quality,” insists Markus and admits that for him – as a perfectionist – nothing ever seems good enough.
Quality control comes in the form of brotherly love. “Daniel is [interested in] details, whereas I prefer to get an overview, work with people and bring in staff with new skills,” he adds. “We call each other to get the other’s opinion – which is good for the quality, because we challenge each other.“The bags are individual because of the way we produce them,” Markus continues, “The factory is here, and that is different to other brands.”
Freitag bags are washed, cut, stored, packaged and dispatched in Zurich, where the brothers grew up. “It’s difficult to get away, because it’s so comfortable here.” Logistically, it makes sense, too: the truck tarps they use come from all over Europe. Freitag’s factory is called NOERD and named after its location in the NOrth of Zurich – in OERlikon – and its 115 staff. “The name is also about the people working here: the freaks and the nerds,” says Markus lovingly. The company moved into the 7,500 square metres factory in 2011 – a vast improvement on the 80 square metres they started with in 1993.
Completely self-sufficient, the factory reveals the Freitag brothers’ compassion for the environment. Rainwater collects in a huge underground tank and the tarps are then washed in it. Meanwhile hot, used water goes into exchangers to heat the rainwater and the cycle begins again. “If you think about working in cycles, you don’t have to save,” explains Markus. “It’s the way nature works.” Markus doesn’t have a car – or even a driving licence. “I like to go by train or bicycle,” he smiles. “I think it’s really good to travel and [at the same time] read, talk or work.” This philosophy extends to Freitag company culture. “We encourage our staff to bike to work,” Markus continues. “We have wardrobes and bike stands in the offices, so you can hang your bicycle next to your jacket.”
Freitag’s commercial success – the company is regarded as a model of the Swiss creative industry – is now being documented in an exhibition entitled Out of the Bag at Zurich’s Museum für Gestaltung. Curator Renate Menzi says, “The company started ‘out of a bag’ in 1993, because the brothers began with one product rather than a business model.” That one product – the F13 Top Cat – is available to view in the exhibition. “It’s funny about the number,” laughs Markus. “Maybe 13 is in a way lucky – because of Friday!”
He stifles another chuckle as he tells me about the challenge for Menzi in setting up the exhibition: “Normally exhibitions are about dead designers. Freitag was developing faster than she could investigate us!” The exhibition uncovers how Freitag connects corporate design to product design. “We think it is interesting to have designers as leaders in companies with a design output,” says Menzi.
“In most companies, the design department is outsourced or controlled by marketing.” Markus agrees: “I think the big impact of Freitag is not our company, but the way we do it. Daniel and I can still develop whatever we want.” He explains that he and his brother still wear Freitag bags every day; they do not have to work for shareholders; and they re-work design drafts again and again searching for even better products. “I hope young designers will be able to pick up the way we think,” he continues. As Markus smiles at the memories the exhibition has evoked, I wonder whether there is a limit on the amount of designs you can concoct from tarpaulin. “I think it’s a big playground,” he replies adamantly. “There are still a lot of bags – not in the collection, but in our minds!” ( 5elected from www.museum-gestaltung.ch )
Source of inspiration: Japan. Both brothers are drawn to an elegance of style that only comes into its own over the passage of time. This reverence for processes is not only mirrored in their products, but also in their lifestyle. While Markus lives in a 400-year-old house on a lake, Daniel currently practices “urban camping” as he jokingly calls it. He lives in an old carpenter’s workshop that is at least one-and-a-half centuries old. He offsets the rustic charm with pared-down furnishings designed in Japan. And, since 1998, when they traveled to Japan for the first time, Markus and Daniel have had a passion for Japanese design. “I like the tongue-in-cheek quality Japanese design often has. It’s wonderful when you can afford to introduce a certain playfulness into an object”.
Further points in favor of Japanese style are the high quality and the timelessness of the aesthetics. In their enthusiasm, the bros (as they are always referred to in-house) interrupt each other without the usual Swiss diplomacy of announcing that they are about to cut in. While Markus continues to enthuse about blue Makita cordless screwdrivers, Daniel starts explaining the Japanese concept of Wabi-Sabi. “I’m fascinated by products that need to acquire a certain patina before actually being considered finished. Japanese design manages to combine this philosophy with aesthetics that are none the less precise and exacting.”
Although in Japan and New York their label is being bandied about as a trendy new insider’s tip, the home market is already a few paces further. Here, the big run on the bags is over. Whether this is simply because nearly everybody has one at home, or because the current fashion dictates something else is not relevant.
Markus and Daniel don’t seem to be very concerned. “We have been declared passé so often, we’ve learnt how to deal with it. And, fortunately, we don’t depend on people who proclaim that you’re “in” or “out”. Discovering Markus and Daniel Freitag’s personal imperfections takes longer than this interview lasts. A crooked tooth or a missed spot while shaving doesn’t count – that actually seems to have the opposite effect with these two. Both wear blue shirts and have haircuts that look totally natural, yet are somehow too perfect to really be a product of hazard.
And they speak with a cheerful, yet studied eloquence that makes you wish for an app in technical terminology. (Cue: re-contextualization of the yogurt cup). In a way they seem almost too good to be true – but it is an organic sort of goodness with an edge to it. They are perfectly staged, yet entirely authentic. Upon leaving, we once again hear the orchestral booming of the washing machines that somehow evoke Leonard Cohen’s anthem: «There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.» ( 5elected from www.thebrander.com ) For more information we invite you to follow the link bellow.