The Swiss Brand That Turns Truck Waste Into Cult Bags — What Is Freitag Really Selling? | Market Inventors

"Freitag talks about sustainability, but it still gets people to buy more bags. Isn't that a contradiction?"

At 6 p.m. on September 21, 2018, nearly 600 people were lined up outside a bare concrete building at the corner of Julu Road and Fumin Road in Shanghai. Markus and Daniel, who had just finished registering their Chinese company, turned up in baseball caps with backpacks on, planning to welcome the fans into the store themselves. But many people headed straight up to the second floor the moment they were through the door. Within minutes they had four or five bags — average price around 1,000 yuan — in their hands and under their arms. Only once the buying frenzy had run its course did anyone remember to say hello to the brothers, ask for a signature and pose for a photo.

In China, Daniel and Markus Freitag are no better known than the bags that carry their surname.

They don't know much about who buys their products, either. In 2004, Glossy, a shop in Shanghai's Xintiandi, became Freitag's first Chinese dealer; its owner, Guo Ben, was a Shanghai native who had studied in Switzerland. But it took another ten years, until 2014, before the founders saw the size of their fan base on WeChat. Three years after that, they decided to come to China and open a store of their own, with a local partner.

Freitag has eight stores like the Julu Road one worldwide. Internally it calls them By-Stores, to set them apart from dealers, whose relationship with the brand is pure wholesale.

Twenty-five years ago, Markus and Daniel Freitag, then twenty-year-old designers, took their inspiration from the countless trucks rolling down Europe's highways: waterproof truck tarpaulin, reclaimed, for the body of the bag; car seat belts for the strap; bicycle inner tubes for the trim. That was the first bike messenger bag made out of waste. In Swiss German, Freitag means "Friday."

The brand is still independent, and it now turns out 450,000 grubby-looking bags and accessories a year. No two Freitag bags carry the same pattern, and for urban creative types a Freitag sits alongside a tattoo, a bicycle or a pair of Air Jordans: a mark of individuality, a lifestyle, even a collectible.

On the page of Freitag's website addressed to dealers is this line: "Our experience shows that the more choice there is, the more successful Freitag products are."

In a café next to the new Shanghai store, the brothers explained to us how Freitag, now 200 employees strong, built a labor-intensive business in Switzerland, where wages are the highest anywhere, and grew into a brand with far more influence than its size would suggest.

In 1993, the first piece of truck tarpaulin was washed in the bathtub of Markus's apartment, then taken to a studio to be cut and sewn into a messenger bag. That workflow now lives in a factory north of Zurich. Five buyers do nothing but deal with the roughly 5,000 trucking companies across Europe, tracking down 460 tons of used tarpaulin a year. It goes into the plant's industrial washing machines, is cleaned with collected rainwater and hung to dry, and the bag designers then cut and sew it according to their own eye.

"Cutting up stiff truck tarp to make a bag is exhausting, like going to the gym," Daniel said. "But the moment you open up a tarp, it's a bit like Christmas."

About a third of the material ends up as scrap; the rest becomes bags. "We almost never sell out, but at the beginning it really was hard to predict how many of a given pattern to make," Markus said. As the number of dealers around the world has grown, the brand can balance patterns better. Dealers cannot pick the color combinations they get: "They can only tell us which colors they don't want."

So far Freitag collects only a fraction of the tarpaulin Europe retires. And every trucking company handles the deal differently. "Some say, 'Cool, just call us.' But then you're relying on luck. Others call us and say, 'Next year we're retiring the tarps off 50 trucks.'"

Freitag does no conventional advertising or marketing. It leans on press coverage, events and word of mouth. "I think what's good about Freitag is that we have a story to tell. Not just product and promotion — really about how we make the bags, how we recycle." At the opening, Markus and Daniel put their phone photo albums up on a screen and invited people to pick any picture they liked; the brothers would then explain what had been going on — a fan food party in Hong Kong, say, or a trip to France hunting for recyclable fabric.

Freitag's appeal is a bit like that of ripped jeans, though on recycling it stands on exactly the opposite side from denim. On this China trip the brothers spent most of their time giving talks, at Tsinghua University and the Central Academy of Fine Arts among other places, adjusting the material to each audience. "At first we said this was recycling. But over the years we've learned to describe what we do more precisely, to break sustainability down into finer questions: rebuilding culture."

It sounds abstract, but this kind of cultural talk is exactly what has bound Freitag so tightly to its customers. Just as IKEA's FRAKTA bag has become a visual badge for the urban renter, Freitag weaves a set of transport images into a portrait of a different kind of city dweller: trucks and highways, messenger bags and bicycles, a container headquarters and globalization — driving toward the modern and, somehow, staying sustainable while doing it.

All of which leads a lot of people, when they tell the Freitag story, to forget that it is still a business.

After one talk, a student at the Central Academy of Fine Arts asked: "Freitag talks about sustainability, but it still gets people to buy more bags. Isn't that a contradiction?"

Markus's answer landed somewhere between endorsing consumerism and rejecting it: "I believe our products are more sustainable than any other brand's. You can buy five Freitag bags and still have a better carbon footprint than if you had bought one bag from someone else."

Recycled plastic, two parts, demountable: the same shelving unit stands in every Freitag dealer's shop, and it is the brand's signature piece of retail furniture. Once a dealer is approved, the shelves ship from Switzerland with the first delivery of bags. The V30 SKID system was designed by Colin Schaelli when he was still a Freitag intern, won a Swiss design prize in 2009, and lets dealers use their space efficiently and extend it whenever they need to.

That is the brand's sales secret: show as much choice as possible, and one of the bags is bound to be yours.

"We get a lot of customers asking us to choose for them." Zhang Zunxiang, whose friends call him Gavin, is the founder of Harbook+ (Wanli Shuxiang), the local partner behind the Shanghai Freitag Store, and has run design bookshops for years. "It's good that they can't make up their minds. The longer they stay, the better the chance of a sale."

"We did a rough count, leaving out the regulars who know the Freitag models. A new customer brought in by a friend takes an hour on average to decide, even for a very small bag. Someone who comes alone, with no friend along, takes longer than that."

In its first month, Freitag Store Shanghai By Harbook+ sold more than a thousand bags. Zhang says it has already restocked twice. "Each restock is big. We planned on 500 a month; the actual figure is way above that."

Retail tends to get less attention in the Freitag story than the design or the sustainability argument, but it is a large part of why the brand works. Most of the time Freitag does not talk to shoppers itself. That job belongs to 364 dealers and nine By-Stores around the world.

Fan Qi, who joined Freitag last August, is the brand's only employee in China, responsible for developing the market, dealing with dealers and setting marketing plans. She lists the criteria Freitag uses to pick a dealer:

• Location: a street-front shop is best, and "we don't look for A Street, we look for B Street — the back street"
• Category: what the shop sells has to overlap with Freitag's customers
• Interior: not too streetwear, not too trend-driven; our shelving needs a fairly clean space or wall
• Price: a Freitag bag should sit in the middle of that shop's price range

More than a third of Freitag's 22 Chinese dealers are in Shanghai, which is also why the brand chose Julu Road for the new store: within three kilometers, two other shops sell Freitag too. "Our sales in Shanghai have gradually turned into a network," Markus said. "Because every bag is unique, the one you like best might be in another shop down the street. Go take a look."

Freitag's relationship with its retailers is in fact a very old fashion-industry model: the brand concentrates on keeping itself desirable and scarce, and hands distribution to concept stores and boutique department stores with a following of their own.

The difference is that a fashion landmark chain like Dover Street Market is too commercial for a brand that talks about sustainability, while independent multi-brand stores usually have no mature logistics or warehousing of their own. Many Chinese Freitag dealers make thin margins on the bags, and because the goods are flown in from Switzerland, a month passes between ordering, customs clearance and delivery — so popular patterns go out of stock fairly often.

Now that it has a registered company in China, Freitag is setting up its own warehousing and logistics in Shanghai. "It will help us a lot, cut out a lot of steps," Zhang says. "It should be done around the end of next year, and costs will drop a lot then. For now everything still flies in from Switzerland, and duty and freight are both brutal. A lot of the margin just isn't there."

Zhang heard around May that Freitag was looking for a partner to open a store. Harbook+, his design-goods-and-books shop in Shanghai's Réel department store, had just been forced to close over a property dispute, and he was already looking for a new site. Through various contacts he learned that a 500-square-meter street-front space on Julu Road was up for lease, and he signed a long lease immediately. Counting the fit-out and the first batch of stock, he put more than 4 million yuan into the shop. His goal, he says, is to turn it into a city landmark on the model of Merci, the Paris lifestyle concept store; the Freitag partnership was a bonus he had not planned on.

"Give us first pick of the good patterns, hold the events here first — that's enough." What Zhang wants from Freitag, as his anchor brand, is foot traffic for the rest of the shop. "There'll be plenty of people early on, around the opening. But the sales after that still have to come from all the other goods."

To catch the founders' first joint trip to China, the site was found at the end of June, the contract signed in July, and the fit-out squeezed into 26 days. A month after opening, the books and homeware section, which takes up more than half the floor space, still was not finished or officially open. Which means Harbook+ missed the Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day holidays, the busiest stretch after the Freitag Store opened.

Harbook+ also runs a Taobao shop, selling a carefully chosen set of moderately priced Nordic small goods and lamps that don't need to be seen in person, along with Normann Copenhagen, the Danish furniture brand it already had a distribution deal with. But Freitag did not extend online sales to Harbook+.

That is another break from wholesale-model clothing brands, which usually hand e-commerce to their better retailers as well. For all that every bag's pattern is unique, Freitag is the more standardized operation, and it still has the capacity to run e-commerce itself.

"The timing isn't right yet. I think the bag's real fans only need to see the colors — they already know the styles. It's actually well suited to selling online," Zhang says. Perhaps that is exactly why Freitag keeps online sales in its own hands for now.

In mid-September, before the opening, Zhang and Fan Qi went to a meeting in Bangkok, Freitag's strongest market in Asia. By-Store owners from around the world met each other and swapped notes on running a shop, and the brand laid out its coming products and marketing plans. In November, Freitag advertised a temporary position worldwide: Executive Vice President of Global Joy. For the brand's 25th anniversary, whoever gets it will plan a run of content aimed at "sustainable growth in global joy."

It is the familiar Freitag language. But the growth that matters for Freitag's future sales is not in joy — it is in China. "Headquarters has put a lot of time and resources into China and has high expectations," Fan Qi says. The company already has very specific plans to add local dealers.

After the Tsinghua talk, someone in the audience asked: how do you recycle a Freitag bag?

"For a long time I didn't have to answer that question, because Freitag bags last," Markus Freitag said. "But 25 years on, we're getting close to the moment when people start saying, my bag is finished! So what did we do? We answered with a creative project."

What came up on the slides was an art show the brothers staged in 2015 with mudac, the Museum of Contemporary Design and Applied Arts. On the streets of Zurich and Lausanne they talked people into handing over, for free, Freitag bags too old to use. Once they had 100, they cut them up and sewed them back together into a single multicolored truck tarp.

In 25 years, though, Freitag has recycled its way to more than 4 million bags, and plenty of them have gone to the same buyer. China has many such customers. An article on Freitag's official WeChat account on October 16 profiled one of them, a young man from Guangdong known inside the Freitag crowd as "Chief Qiao" or "Emperor of the Universe." Born in 1992, five-plus years into collecting, he runs a clothing shop. He has bought more than 40 Freitag bags.

Which is exactly what Markus said about Freitag's relationship with those European trucking companies: "The moment you start asking for something, even waste gets expensive."

Cover image and in-article images from Freitag