It'll take the kitchen sink: the question is, why?

By LFTO Gear Team

Gear news

26 February 2008 11:59

You’re trying to design a new rucksack for adventurous backpacking. You sit in a meeting with your fellow designers and kick around ideas for features it should have.

Now, in most cases, you’ll slim down the 60-odd ideas to a hitlist, depending on exactly what you want your rucksack to do and who you want to sell it to.

Not Oakley, though, who came out of that meeting having put a big tick by every single wheeze and threw them all into their latest offering, the aptly named “The Kitchen Sink”.

Laptops

This new 30-litre sack is studded with metal clips, buckles and straps, designed to offer “every conceivable innovation, from a mobile phone pocket to a padded sleeve that holds up to 17 inch laptops and a compression moulded top to protect eyewear or media players”. 

It also has a mini organiser for, um, organising your smaller essentials, plus drainage points underneath in case you’re carrying soggy clothes and enough clippers and attachment points for mugs, clothes, multitools, GPSs and anything else that you can’t cram inside the Kitchen Sink.

The idea of a rucksack for absolutely everything you might want to carry up a hill is decent – heaven knows we’ve all wished we had Mary Poppins’ handbag for that extra insulating layer or Trangia. But actually creating something that will carry your entire life seems a little excessive – and there’s always a risk that you can over-design something.

But looking at what they're saying it can hold - laptops, shades, phones - perhaps we've missed the point. Clearly they envisage it more as an urbanised rucksack which can work in the great outdoors, than a backpacker's companion in the first instance. Either way, it's an interesting pitch. Would like to be in their meetings...

Available for £120.

For more details, see their website here or call 01462 475400.