Gregory’s Unlikely Japanese Roots
A look at the brand’s in-house design co-lab in Salt Lake City and Yokohama
Worship the lowly backpack, if you dare, like you would a Birkin bag. That seems to be what gave rise to the popularity of proletariat pack maker, Gregory, in Japan in the early 1990s.
At the time, Gregory was merely the author of over-brawny, profoundly utile book bags for the masses. If you knew them otherwise, it’s because some of their wares would take you to the top of Denali or across the breadth of the Sierras without the merest inkling of wear. (More recently Gregory has become a producer of excellent luggage, too.)
But you wouldn’t imagine Gregory would have caught fire in the megacities of Japan. Yet that’s exactly what happened when their Classic Day Pack became the “it” book bag for high schoolers and college kids all across Tokyo. It was one of those early symbols of American-gear-as-hip-shorthand, along with Levi’s 501s for club kids, J. Press for prepsters, and The North Face for the puffy down crowd.
Matt Connors, director of product creation, says the brand doesn’t actually know how the Classic Day pack got elevated to cult status in the student book bag pantheon, long before the era of TikTok or even Web 2.0 “influencers.” But Connors is sure it wouldn’t have happened had founder Wayne Gregory not been “a maniac when it came to quality.” That obsession dovetails nicely with a certain strain of Japanese national character, where there’s no such thing as perfection, but there is definitely a culture-wide goal of aiming for it.
Wisely, Gregory put a bet on its staying power in Japan while the brand was rising, opening a design studio in Yokohama about three decades ago. This led to a two-way collaboration between the Yokohama team and the HQ in Salt Lake City, where Japanese aesthetics and a reverent focus on quality and minutiae has refined Gregory’s products. The brand brings its collaboration back to America with YOK x SLC, a release of three new lifestyle pack lines. The Rhune X-PAC, Outset and Signal are the first pieces in a small collection exclusively created by Yokohama- and Salt Lake City-based designers.
What that means is exceptionally subtle, until you don one of the packs when it’s fully loaded. Then you’ll notice the extraordinary comfort, despite none of these packs having a waist belt. Connors explains this comes down to three core details that were born out of Gregory’s alpine pack expertise then tweaked at the Yokohama design offices.
For instance, the memory foam backpack straps taper across your shoulders and slightly inward, mirroring the path of a jacket lapel at your collar, but then with an exaggerated sweep back to your hip. The straps are also externally reinforced with a ribbon of soft nylon at their outer edge and a rigid spine that won’t collapse under weight. “These kinds of details are going to be meaningful for somebody who’s transitioning throughout their day on the Tokyo rail system as a commuter,” Connors says of the lifestyle collection, rather than, say, ascending Mt. Fuji.
In addition, the Aircushion back panels on these packs slightly sweeps in toward your tailbone. That’s a trick Gregory also uses in its hiking packs, and in both designs the shape helps spread the load from your shoulders toward your hips.
On the Rhune and Outset, though, the Aircushion panel design took some time to refine. “We went through tons of versions of it when we were developing the back panel,” Connors says, and the goal was to create a mesh material that’s high-quality, durable and smooth. Just as a mesh panel made for trekking through Douglas fir forests has to resist snags, it also needs to be friendly to the basket weave of your sport coat.
Lastly, there’s the silhouette. The Outset is truly an ode to the Classic Day Pack, which means there are no external pockets or bottle holder. Connors says this is consistent with adopting a Japanese aesthetic and constraint, rather than trying to jam too many extras onto what’s meant to be a streamlined and elegant form.
Thinking of the pack as part of a wardrobe and not as the SUV of rucksacks is liberating, Connors says. The packs’ designers could focus more narrowly at optimizing their internals and superior function. They chose meaty 500-denier Cordura for the Outset’s exterior that’s smooth and relatively soft, not than crinkly to the touch. The oversized YKK zippers allow super-smooth feel and won’t derail or fail—even when they zip over the pages of a magazine during closure, which happened during our testing.
If you look closely, you’ll see the Yokohama studio’s fingerprints on the interiors of this series, too. The mesh used for organizer pockets are made of a hand-friendly, almost silky material, laptop sleeves feature a semi-rigid leading edge so they stay slightly open and the soft nylon lining won’t nip at your skin when you reach inside. The pen sleeves are generous enough for a Mont Blanc and can release a mechanical pencil when you need to write a quick note.
We understandably crave niche collaborations between brands because they can yield something unique in a world of vanilla. That’s partially how “big in Japan” worked for so many Western brands in the “en-daka” late 1980s and early 1990s, when some feared that a powerful yen would lead to Japanese economic dominance. But it was also when the world belatedly woke up to exceptional Japanese creativity, attention to detail and varied aesthetic.
With YOK x SLC, the merits might be even stronger. It’s a mature collaborative environment between two talented design teams that know what Gregory stands for, and the products of their efforts in Salt Lake and Yokohama will be far more durable than a stylistic flash in the pan.
What are your thoughts?