How RiutBag is trying to put an end to backpack thieving

One evening in 2010, Sarah Giblin was getting off a plane in Berlin. Or trying to. She was trapped in a line of people heading towards the exit but temporarily jammed. The guy in front of her was wearing a backpack. He must have felt she was too close to all his precious belongings, because he turned and glared at her then took off his bag and removed his phone and passport and put them in his pockets instead. He didn’t trust her. She was annoyed with him but then she started to feel that the person behind her was getting too close to her, so she took off her rucksack and held it in front of her where she could keep an eye on it.

“I had this vision of a whole queue of people all worried about precious belongings stashed in their backpacks.” And, in a moment of epiphany, she realised how the problem could be fixed – if only they were wearing rucksacks with zips facing inwards towards the person wearing it, not out towards the person behind. Then, unless you could actually run off with the whole bag, there was no risk, no anxiety, no questions as to whether or not you could trust the people behind you. “I thought it would be make for a better world,” she says. “If only we had this kind of bag, none of us would have to be stressed. Cities would be calmer places.” So she went looking for just such a bag but it didn’t exist. So she decided to make one for herself – and RiutBag was born.

Giblin says that her only qualification was having worn a lot of backpacks over many years. Being mugged aged 14 probably helped. She was going home from school in Reading and made the elementary mistake of going down a dark alleyway next to a cemetery. She didn’t end up in the cemetery or even A & E but she was caught in a pincer movement, with one “scarey girl” wielding a knife in front of her and, behind her, two confederates who duly unzipped her backpack and stole everything of value, including phone, walkman and even exercise books.

Giblin, now living in Berlin, studied politics at Manchester, where she joined the choir and would earn a crust singing at weddings. She once had a regular gig singing on Radio Four. “I did more singing than politics,” she says. It was around this time that she also took up camping and relied increasingly on an accommodating backpack. She says: “My bag carries everything – I’m a digital nomad.”

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After her flat in Manchester was broken into three times in a week, she took off, travelling on Eurostar. She says: “I realised I didn’t have to be in England.”

She sang for her supper in Paris, then worked in a bakery in New York before landing in Berlin.

She says: “I’d been singing Bach chorales in German, I thought why should I continue to struggle with French?” Having a German mother probably helped.

She describes herself as a backpack designer: “I used to be good at doing a hundred different things. Now I’ve focused on creating the best possible backpack and I’ve been doing it for seven years.”

When she came up with her idea she was working in financial services and commuting between London and Reading and to Berlin. “If you’re on a train or a plane, you’re surrounded by backpacks. I kept staring at them in case. It took me a long time to accept that I had had an idea for a thing that did not exist.”

She was with friends in London when she told them: “Don’t you think it’s weird that the person behind you can open your backpack? I think all the backpacks are the wrong way around.” Her friends had a bad habit of laughing at her great ideas (her last one was bubblewrap filled with helium to make parcels lighter). But this time one of them said she should do it.

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She determined to save up enough to get her idea off the ground and gave up smoking and going out and spent her spare moments sketching bag designs. In March 2014 she handed in her resignation and set about creating Riut with £20,000 and a kickstarter campaign. She drew on Guy Kawasaki’s book, The Art of the Start, and met the author when he was passing through Berlin. She says: “He found it amusing that I used tech startup methods to found a textiles startup. We agreed the RiutBag is, essentially, hard software, or soft hardware!”

“Riut” (pronounced “riot”) could be written RIUT since it stands for “Revolution In User-Thinking”. She says: “It was basically conceptual. I still had the fear that it wouldn’t work in reality.”  She had a single guiding principle, inspired by thinking about the PPI scandal, and then doing the exact opposite.

“When you’re making hundreds of decisions in a week, it helps to have a guiding principle: whatever gives the customer a better journey.”

Giblin is so independent she is effectively a one-person business and personally does quality control on every single bag but relies on thousands of users to inform her designs.

The classic RiutBag is black and minimalist, “so you can go unnoticed as you travel” but the pandemic (and 2001: A Space Odyssey) inspired Giblin to come up with a new easy-to-clean Covid-proof model, more silvery and metallic, with holders for masks and sanitiser. “I feel like an astronaut when I’m wearing it,” she says and she has a new one in the pipeline for carrying laptops. She agrees that the last year or so has not been great.

She had a flight to China booked but found herself locked down in Manchester and says: “A backpack designer in a world where no one is travelling. Overnight my orders stopped.” She is stoical: “Plenty of things can go wrong during seven years, so I was prepared for it. I focused on the things I could control. This was not the right time to force people into buying backpacks.”

Even during major growth, Giblin had anticipated that things could go wrong: “I thought it was teleportation that might kill off backpacks.” So as travel returns to a new normal, at least until we start beaming up, the demand for backpacks is back. Especially the back-to-front ones with the zips facing in not out. “I love having everything on me,” says Giblin, “and not having to worry about it.”

@andymartinink