M LAUFBURSCHE huckePACK Review

by Hendrik Morkel

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Article Summary:

The LAUFBURSCHE huckePACK evolved steadily to reach its current design. Comparing the prototype pack and the commercial pack side by side, and looking at the early designs, I see that they have come a long way. The initial design was drawn up to suit the needs of Mateusz Szultk, the owner of LAUFBURSCHE, one of the early adopters of ultralight backpacking in Germany. As usual in UL circles, after using commercial lightweight packs but wanting to decrease his load further, Mateusz sat down to design and sew his own pack. He posted the original design on the BPL MYOG forum and the German Trekking Ultraleicht forum, and soon received a number of requests for his packs.

At that point Mateusz, an architect by education, decided to design the pack further and offer them in a limited series to interested people. The design went through four major evolution steps, which each had a dozen sub-steps, resulting in about fifty prototype packs until the final design was deemed good enough for retail. Every pack design was tested by friends and UL aficionados to gather feedback and further improve the design. The innovative lid of the pack, which makes water leaking in through the lid nearly impossible and is the characteristic feature of the pack, was developed during the third major step. It was hailed by those who used it as a breakthrough in pack design, and the interest in the packs started to further climb. At this point, Mateusz decided to make LAUFBURSCHE his main business - alas, establishing a cottage business is very difficult in the bureaucratic environment of Germany, so it took a while until his business was ready to hang its shingle.

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