Most of what comes off our welding hall is black, charcoal or a solid colour, and for good reason — solids are forgiving. This week the line looked different. Three all-over printed programs were running at once: a tropical palm print, a geometric ikat, and a large-scale wave motif, all on coated waterproof fabric, all going into roll-top dry bags and dry backpacks.Printed coated fabric is not simply solid fabric with a picture on it. It changes the cutting table, the welding window, the inspection criteria and the way a buyer has to specify the product. This is what that actually looks like on a production floor.
A kayaking backpack has two jobs that pull in different directions. On land, it is a backpack: it has to carry a full load comfortably from the car park to the launch, along a portage or up to a campsite. On the water, it is cargo: it has to sit low behind the seat or in the tank well of a sit-on-top kayak, stay strapped down through waves, and keep everything dry if it goes over the side. A bag that is good at only one of these jobs is the most common reason paddle shops see returns.
A 50-litre dry bag holds roughly a sleeping bag, a tent and a change of clothes, or a week of clothing for one person. It is the size rafting outfitters, boat owners, expedition teams and camping retailers buy most when they need one bag to carry a whole load. It is also the size where the design rules that work for a 10- or 20-litre dry bag start to fail. A 50L bag is heavy when full, hard to dig through, and carried in very different ways from a small one, so it has to be built differently.
A wet dry bag is a bag with two separated zones: one that keeps dry things dry, such as a phone, towel or change of clothes, and one that holds wet things, such as a swimsuit, goggles or a damp towel, so the water does not reach the dry side. Swimmers, gym users, beachgoers and surfers use them to carry wet and dry kit together in one bag. The idea is simple, but how the two zones are separated decides whether the bag actually works, and it is the part most cheap wet dry bags get wrong.
"Floating" is one of the most common words on dry bag listings, and one of the least explained. Buyers see it as a selling point, retailers put it on the packaging, and the end user only finds out what it really means when a bag goes over the side of a boat. Some bags bob on the surface with their contents dry. Others float for a minute, take on water and go down. The difference is rarely the fabric. It is how much air the bag holds, how well it is sealed, and what has been packed inside it.
A dry bag is one of the few promotional products that gets tested by the person who receives it. A pen either writes or it does not, and a tote bag either holds groceries or it does not, but a dry bag makes a promise, and the recipient finds out whether the promise was kept the first time it rains at the beach or the bag goes over the side of a kayak. When a branded dry bag lets water in, the logo on the outside is the name that gets the blame.This guide is for promotional product distributors, event agencies and corporate buyers ordering dry bags in volume. It explains the difference between the dry bags sold in the promotional market, how to plan an order around a fixed event date, which decoration methods suit a giveaway budget, and what to check before the cartons are shipped. It is based on over 20 years of making waterproof bags at our factories in Dongguan, China and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.