The Knack Pack v2 is gorgeous and clever. It’s my new go-to. Despite its many very positive features, though, a couple design choices leave it frustratingly shy of the ideal One Bag travel pack that it could’ve been.
Quick Pros:
- Convertible design is amazing
- Materials are fantastic
- Aesthetics are terrific
- Lots of solid details
Quick Cons:
- Triangle pocket is strange
- EDC compartment is flawed
- Laptop slot is wasted without a laptop
- No hip belt
- Zippers catch on things
- Single handle is one too few
WHY THIS REVIEW
A pandemic might seem an odd time to review a travel backpack, but here we are: I’m writing a review of a travel bag in a time without travel.
One-Bag travel ought to be the name of the game.
Why? The world won’t be on lockdown forever. And when things do let up, my sneaking suspicion is that more folks will want to be traveling lighter than ever before. Not only will we have realized how few things we really need in traveling, we will also want fewer folks handling our luggage as we do so. One-Bag travel ought to be the name of the game.
My Background
I’m not a YouTube influencer or a professional bag-reviewer. I’ve got a few affiliate links scattered through this review, but I’m not in this to make bank. I’m a professor who happens to do a lot of traveling. I work hard to figure out the ideal kit to make that happen, and I’m happy to share what works for me, even when it means weighing my underwear.
I began my One Bag Life in 2013, using a Maxpedition Fliegerduffel Adventure Bag. It was (and is) a good starter bag for this lifestyle. Though still a carry-on size (albeit not for the strictest of carriers), it gave me a generous 42 liters of space to fill. And since I wasn’t yet sure what I really needed to have, I inevitably over-packed and needed that kind of space. The Maxpedition is also built like a damn tank.
It has huge downsides, though. It was built like a tank, but it weighed like one, too. It was also brutally uncomfortable whether worn like a backpack (bad straps, bad weight distribution, bad heat entrapment) or carried like a duffel (handle too far from the body). I also disliked the tacticool aesthetic.
Nevertheless, it helped me fall in love with the One Bag Life, so in 2014 (after much research) I stepped up to a Minaal carry-on bag (now called the 1.0).
The Minaal was a breath of fresh air, and I confess that as I traveled hither and yon I became a kind of wandering missionary for the brand. It was lighter, tighter, sleeker, and classier than anything else I saw or tried — year after year.
It still wasn’t ideal, though. All these trips, all these thousands of miles, and some problems have really stuck out. Some of these (e.g., the configuration of its compression straps) have been resolved in their updated Minaal 2.0 carry-on. But other problems remain.
First, the way it packs is less than ideal. Traditional suitcase designs are “clamshell”: fill up a tub and then close the lid on it. It’s good for filling the gaps and making the most of your volume, and it’s good for finding things when you pop open the lid. A mountaineering kind of backpack is a top-down pouch. Good for filling up, but horrible for finding a damn thing. The Minaal opens like a clamshell, which is great, but because it doesn’t have stiff sides it’s hard to utilize the space well.
Second, for me the Minaal wastes too much space with its gestures toward a “portable office”. There’s an entire slice of the bag that is an L-zip (zipper on the top and down one side) compartment for a laptop and a motley assortment of pouches for pens and business cards that are single-use specific: if you don’t carry all that stuff, there’s minimal flexibility in the use of the space, which is 100% the opposite of what you want in One Bag travel where flexibility is king. If you’re not lugging around a laptop, what’s this good for?
Third, my Minaal is a single size. Say I head out for a week in Wales to do some research. If I’m staying in the same spot for a few days I can unpack and only take the field books and weather gear I need. But if all I’ve got is my Minaal, I’ve got 35 liters of overkill on my back. As a result, I’ve learned to carry a second, smaller bag for day trips. This is not as efficient as a bag that could change sizes.
Enter Knack Bags, who wrote and asked — no strings attached — if I’d evaluate their product: a pack that could handle my One Bag Life when I travel but also be a smaller backpack when I need that, too. Like, well, two bags in one.
Since there aren’t many backpacks like this — the Tortuga Setout Divide is one obvious competitor — I was more than happy to receive a bag and run it through the paces.
I’ve looked. I’ve used. I’ve pondered.
I have conclusions.
THE NITTY GRITTY
First, some basic specs, using my trusty old Minaal and a Tortuga Setout Divide (which I do not own) as comparisons:
Minaal 1.0:
Weight: 3lb 3oz
Volume: 35L
Dimensions (HxWxD): 21.65 x 13.77 x 7.87”
Knack Pack v2 (large):
Weight: 3lb 3oz
Volume: 22 / 37L
Dimensions: 21.5 x 14 x 4.5 / 9.5”
Tortuga Setout Divide:
Weight: 3lb 13oz
Volume: 26 / 34L
Dimensions: 20 x 13 x 6 / 8”
MATERIALS AND MAKE
Manufacture on the Knack is solid throughout. YKK zippers. Metal where it’s needed, durable plastic where it’s not. The outer material is tough and water-resistant, and it doesn’t seem to pick up as much dust and crap as my Minaal does. Something about the material of my old bag was just “grabby” for particles, I guess, so this is a really nice improvement.
In terms of aesthetics, the bag I have is Savile Gray, and I’m tremendously pleased with the look. It’s not another black bag, but it’s not bright and bold and clownish. It’s also not glaringly branded. A subdued Knack logo is on zipper pulls and center top of the bag’s front, as it is on both the Minaal and Tortuga. “Knack” is also written out at the bottom of the bag’s front, but even that is pretty subtle: I don’t feel like I’m a walking billboard, but the brand name is there if someone is intrigued with the pack but doesn’t want to chat. That’s a fair balance I can accept.
So, in sum, I’d say from the outside the Knack looks professional to me in just the same ways my old Minaal does. That’s a damn high compliment to me.
And on the inside? Well, the material here is absolutely superior to my Minaal. That old bag was dark and black inside; the Knack is lined with a white and orange patterned fabric that’s bright and airy and makes it easier to find things. Even better, this liner is anti-microbial to keep the bag and my stuff smelling clean. Love it!
The bag came well-packed and defect-free. I was even pleasantly surprised that it came inside one of Knack’s laundry bags, which is a bonus that pays big dividends in terms of customer happiness. Well done, Knack!
ON THE OUTSIDE
SHOULDER STRAPS. I found these to be very well made and generally comfortable. There’s a design balance between beefy enough and too beefy, and I felt like Knack got it right here. These are sized nicely and had the right amount of cushion.
Also, I’m very happy to report that the straps tuck away quite neatly, and the hardware for clipping the straps to the bag (often a weak link in tuck-away designs) is suitably stout. Tuck-away straps are immensely useful if you have to check the bag (a sad moment for any One Bag traveler). Having them tucked away could also be useful for allowing a more professional briefcase carry if needed — except that due to a lack of a second handle (see below) that won’t be happening here, which is just hugely disappointing.
Some additional flaws here that I should note:
First, there’s a lack of load lifters, which my old Minaal had. If you’re really hoofing it through an airport or city streets these can make a world of difference in terms of settling the pack comfortably. (Tortuga Setout Divide also lacks them.)
Second, the straps tuck into a slot behind the back pad that cannot be secured. While the first version of the bag apparently had a zipper to secure this space, v2 instead relies on a flap that barely comes over the slot. This is strange, since the flap can so easily get caught on the wrong side of the slot and thereby leave an open invitation to the elements. I wondered if Knack thought to pop a couple of drains in the bottom of the slot just in case rain got in (my Maxpedition had that), but they did not. (The Tortuga Setout Divide seems to be even worse, by the way: it has neither a flap nor a drain!)
Third, something that stands out — literally — are the attachment points on the lower corners for the straps. They’re strong, which is good, but when the straps are tucked away they stick out like sore thumbs. (For a much cleaner alternative in attachment design, see the design on the Tortuga Setout Divide.)
Fourth, the straps are horizontally attached to the top of the bag. Angled attachment points that more closely distribute the weight along the curve of the shoulders would be preferred.
STERNUM STRAP. I’m a fan of chest straps, and I’ve always loved the brilliant one on my Minaal: it’s adjustable and easy to buckle, it clips neatly out of the way when not in use, and it has a bonus built-in whistle. The Knack has a strap, too, but so much about it is strange. I’m a broad-shouldered fellow, a shade over six-foot tall, and given how much extra room for adjustment I have left in the sternum strap I must assume they sized this for the Hulk. Worse, all that extra strapping just dangles around, as do the straps themselves when not in use (there’s no clip-away feature). Sure, you can remove the strap completely, but it’s hard to do that (for good reason) and then you’d need to store the strap some place and hope you don’t lose it.
HIP BELT. Haha. Just kidding. There isn’t one! Not even as an option. The first version of the pack had one, and it’s such an obvious feature for this large pack when expanded that I honestly thought there might be some mistake in the v2 bag that I received. Nope. According to Knack, 3/4 of their v1 customers reported never using the hip belt, so they cut it for 4/4 of their v2 customers. The hip belt on my old Minaal isn’t much, but it’s still better than having no hip belt at all with no option of getting one. (The hip belt on the Tortuga Setout Divide, for what it’s worth, has the opposite problem of being so big that you’re unlikely to have it with you when you need it!)
BACK PAD. Not a lot to report here. It’s a basic foam cushion with some passable air canyons. It’s comfortable. It gets the job done. And as an added bonus it has a pass-through trolley sleeve that enables you to slip the bag over the handle of wheeled luggage — a nice little touch that my Minaal lacks completely. (Word is that the Tortuga Setout Divide has superior airflow to both this and my Minaal, but I haven’t tried it.)
HANDLE. The bag handle is comfy in the hand, but it’s totally in the wrong place. They’ve put it center-bag at the top. Ideally, a handle like this should be positioned at the back of the bag so that when you hang it up the bag rests flat against the wall (this is what my old Minaal does). Having a back-mounted handle would’ve been especially good on this bag, since if you have it fully loaded in expanded mode the center-bag handle isn’t even close to center-mass. Indeed, once the bag is expanded you can forget about hanging the bag on, say, the average luggage hook in an airport bathroom stall. So onto the dirty floor it goes! Yuck. (The easy solution here is to add a simple hanging loop at the rear of the bag, as the Tortuga Setout Divide has.)
Worse, this is the only handle. Knack didn’t put one on the side. So if you wanted to carry the bag like a briefcase in a more formal setting, you’re simply out of luck. Bags like the Minaal and the Tortuga Setout Divide have an obvious edge here, since they have a handle on the side, too. Knack tells me they didn’t think it was worth the extra weight. I disagree, but I’m also not in the bag-making business!
ON THE INSIDE
TRIANGULAR POCKET. Knack appears to have this as part of their core design aesthetic. I wish I could say otherwise for something they seem to be building their identity around, but I think it’s a design disaster. Where to start?
First, in design terms, this pocket is only accessible from around the 2/3 height of its height. The top 1/3 is wasted space unless you maneuver something tall up into it or prove adept at stacking.
Second, there’s not a lot of organization for an area that’s clearly supposed to be the “office” part of the bag. What you’ve got is a dividing panel that has six business or credit card slots in it (something about as useful these days as those clear plastic accordions that once held pictures in your wallet). That’s it. I’m all for utilitarian openness (see my above complaint with my Minaal), but there are better solutions than this.
Third, this pocket is accessed by two zippers that open up the sides of the triangle. My suspicion is that the designers thought this would be a clever way of allowing users to swing the pack around from either shoulder and be able to access the pocket by unzipping either zipper. In practice, though, it’s such a big pocket with no organization that effective use demands getting both zippers down — thereby completely removing whatever benefit there might’ve been and just making it more of a pain. (And this swing-around capability disappears completely if the pack is expanded: the reach to the pocket is too far.)
Fourth, the two zippers zip up under a bit of flap in order to “close” the pocket. Two problems with this. First, even if you zip it up correctly, the compartment can be opened by simply slipping a finger under the flap and pulling down. That makes this area fundamentally unsecured, which is no good in a travel pack. Second, if you’re not careful zipping it up then one or both of the zippers will get stuck on the wrong side of that flap: at that point, you have an unsecured compartment that’s also open to the elements. This wrong-side flap happens more often for me than not.
Fifth, it turns out that the dividing panel in this pocket is lined with RFID blocking fabric. There’s zero indication on the bag or in the documentation it came with to inform the user that there’s RFID protection in this area, but I’ve confirmed that it’s here. So, ok, cool, nice feature, as I guess you could also slip your passport into the space behind the panel … but why on earth would you put your passport in such a completely unsecured place? Honestly, this pocket is the last place on this bag that you should put something so important. The whole thing is just bizarre.
TOP COMPARTMENT. This pocket is split into two parts. One is a fuzzy-cloth pouch that’s a great place to slip glasses or a phone. The other is perfectly sized and perfectly located for a passport — which would’ve made this a far better place for the RFID fabric that was inexplicably put down in the triangle pocket.
BOTTOM COMPARTMENT. Knack advertises this as a cord pocket, but it’s on the wrong end of the bag. Because of the location of the handle (and that top, passport-friendly pocket), the user will almost assuredly slip this bag under a seat or into an overhead bin with this bottom end first. As a result, if you need your cords during a flight, you’d need to pull the bag all the way out and flip it completely around.
Regardless of what goes in here, this compartment is a frustratingly odd dimension to pack. It’s too small for shoes or dirty laundry. Nothing remotely breakable or openable or damageable can go here, since it’ll be resting on the ground/elements with the weight of the pack atop it. I’ve stuffed it with my travel clothesline, microfiber towel/rag, and some inflatable hangers.
For good and ill, I should note the pocket has no volume of its own: when you put things into it the pocket expands into the EDC compartment. The good news is that this means it’s not a total waste of space to leave it unused. The bad news is that if you do stuff it with something the expansion leaves little dark crevices at the bottom of the EDC compartment for things to get lost inside.
SIDE COMPARTMENT. You could put other things here, I suppose, but for all intents and purposes this is the water bottle pocket. It fit my bottles like a glorious glove, and I love the way it zips out of view — with or without the bottle — to give the bag a sleek, clean look. Very nice. Very, very well done.
EDC COMPARTMENT. So this will be the heart of the bag on most days, and the design once again strikes me as odd. I spoke above how clamshell openings are best for packing. And indeed the glorious expandable Luggage compartment of this bag has exactly that (see below). But here Knack opted for a lockable U-zip (good so far) that doesn’t get quite to the bottom of the bag (huh?). Even more annoyingly, the flap of the EDC compartment that is thereby unzipped has expanding gussets almost halfway up the sides of the bag. As a result, instead of folding completely open at 180 degrees — which would be perfect for packing! — only the top part of this compartment opens up, and it does so at something more like 45 degrees. Ugh.
Worse (yes, it gets worse), these damnable gussets can get caught in the zippers. So not only are you often fighting them to access this space, but they’ll almost certainly get torn up with every day use. Honestly, I’ve a mind to save the hassle and just rip them out, myself.
Up top of the EDC compartment is a removable key chain clip. I doubt I’ll use it, but I like the touch.
The back of the bottom of this compartment has a fuzzy cloth pocket that ostensibly is for a tablet, but if you’ve filled up the EDC area at all you’ll need to be digging past your things to get to a device located here. Definitely less than ideal. There are also a couple mesh pockets in here: one above the tablet pocket and one on the flap. These are a nice transparent mesh so you can see what’s in them, though it should be noted that they have no depth: they’ll fit a few flat things only, which reduces their usefulness a bit.
SIDE NOTE ON PACKING CUBES: Knack makes some truly terrific packing cubes. Legitimately the best I’ve ever handled: lightweight, strong, with see-through mesh up top. Even better? They use the same wrap-around zipper that allows the Knack Pack to expand, only here it functions to compress: you load the cube up to the rim with clothes and then zip it down to compress them into a smaller space. They’re dynamite. They sell a bundle for the large Knack Pack that consists of one large cube and two medium cubes that all fit into the expanded Luggage compartment. I would suggest adding at least one additional large cube, since this slips neatly into the bottom of the EDC compartment. Doing this makes this compartment feel a lot less problematic!
LAPTOP COMPARTMENT. This is located against the very back of the bag (I’ve skipped over the Luggage compartment for the moment). It’s a slot compartment with decent cushion, only accessible from the side of the bag. It does not have a lockable zipper.
I no longer lug around a big laptop, so for me this is empty space and wasted weight — it’s so big and deep that my iPad would just slide around in it! Most bags have these compartments, though, so it’s hard to fault Knack for my own laptop-free life. That said, a lot of bags (again, my old Minaal being one) have zippers on the space that can come around at least one additional side of the bag and give you more access to it: with some care, I’ve managed to use mine on the Minaal to lay flat a sport coat. A clamshell zip-around would have made this space infinitely more useable, rather than laptop or bust.
LUGGAGE COMPARTMENT. For all the things I dislike about this bag, I love love LOVE this part of the Knack design. It’s just brilliant, and I’m glad it enables me to bring this home on a happy note.
Just forward of the laptop compartment is a 3/4 zip that opens up in true clamshell style to reveal the luggage compartment. No restricting gussets! The top of this pocket (which is the back of the bag) has a single zippered mesh pocket. Can’t fit a lot here since it’s tight mesh, but it’s still a nice touch.
But oh the glories of the Luggage compartment this revealed! Instead of a criss-cross of compression straps (which often leave wrinkles), this has a sleek compression panel that’s there if you need it but easy to ignore if you don’t.
You can use this compartment in unexpanded mode — it’ll fit some books, a jacket, maybe — but it’s true magnificence is revealed when you expand it. The expansion zipper is neatly tucked away behind a flap that runs around the sides of the backpack. Spin that zip around, and this Luggage compartment pops out to add 15L of open, clamshell-accessible space!
You don’t have to add a bundle of Knack’s awesome packing cubes to make use of this space, but I can tell you that combining their compression capabilities (see above) with the expansion of this compartment gives me the ability to fit far more in this flexible bag than I could dream of fitting in my Minaal. For me, this is a true 11/10 feature.
CONCLUSIONS
So all in all, the Knack Pack is a mixed bag (hehe). There’s enough positives here that I’ll be using this instead of my Minaal for the time being. The flexibility outweighs the negatives.
It shouldn’t have even been a question, though. The Knack Pack is so damn close to perfection it hurts. What would get it over the top? For me, if I were advising Knack, I’d highly recommend:
- Add a handle to the side
- Add a hanging loop to the top-back
- Move RFID to Top pocket and highlight it
- Eliminate the EDC compartment gussets
And more complex changes:
- Rethink the sternum strap
- Rethink the Triangle pocket
- Rethink the Bottom compartment
- Rethink the strap attachments
- Rethink the hip belt option
- Rethink the Laptop compartment as a clamshell
In the meantime, I don’t want this to end on a sour note. No bag is perfect, and this one gets so much right even for my demanding sensibilities. And remember that your experience may be different. Maybe you still lug around a big laptop and that Triangle pocket looks like heaven to you. If so, then this is the bag you want.
And even if you’re like me, there’s still enormous utility to be found here given the clever flexibility of the bag’s size, its professional look, and its excellent material make-up. Well done, Knack!