Financial Times columnist Michael Skapinker has an interesting piece about "The luggage revolution that passed me by". A long time traveler (and former FT aviation correspondent) he has only now come to appreciate what other traveler have known for a long time - the benefits of luggage with wheels. But not just any luggage with wheels, the ubiquitous upright wheeled bag:
Then this summer, for the first time in many years, we went on a holiday involving movement from city to city and ticket office to train platform and I realised how horribly unsuitable my luggage was. My suitcase does have wheels, but not the sort that allow you to tip it upright. You do not pull the case along with a lead, as if it were a dog (even I am not that backward). Instead it has a short loop on the top corner, so that you wheel it along in the same position as if you were carrying it by its handle.
This allowed me to see the true genius of Mr Plath’s creation. It is not just the wheels that make his bags easy to move. It is turning the suitcase into the vertical position and equipping it with a long, broad handle that allows an even distribution of the weight. A small handle in the front, as I had, means the entire load is concentrated in your hand.
By the way, the Mr. Plath he refers to is Robert Plath. As Skapinker reminds us, the upright wheeled bag was a user-driven innovation:
It was only in the late 1980s that Robert Plath, a Northwest Airlines pilot who was tired of lugging his bag around, fixed wheels and a pull-up handle to a suitcase and turned it upright. Manufacturers were sceptical, but Mr Plath sold some wheeled bags to other airline crew members and then set up a luggage company called Travelpro.
Not a product of an extensive focus group and development process; not the brain child of some design shop. Just someone who had a better idea.
But you can probably bet that the suitcase Skapinker complains about (with the handle in front) was the result of a product development and design process - attempting to come up with an alternative. Not that it is necessarily bad. It is just not as good as what it is trying to replace.
Score one for user-driven innovation.
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