Kinesis Photo Gear and eoGEAR is a pack and bag brand headquartered in Mount Pleasant, Utah. It was founded in Denver, Colorado, in 1996.
Kinesis Photo Gear, whose bags are now sewn in Mount Pleasant, Utah, began with a flash strap that kept hitting things. In 1995 Richard Stum was shooting commercial jobs in Denver, and the battery pack for his Lumedyne flash came on a red and white shoulder strap that, he writes, swung about "smacking whatever was in its path." Carpenters had belt systems, and so did the US military. Photographers had nothing like it, so Stum sewed his own.
That first belt was unpadded Cordura nylon with a pouch for the flash pack, and more pouches followed for film and a lens. Sewing was already a hobby. Stum is 6 foot 4, and he had been making his own mountaineering packs on a Viking home machine because the one-size-fits-all internal frame packs of the 1980s did not fit his torso. The first Kinesis products went on sale in the spring of 1996.
Kinesis is Greek for motion. One of its longest-running products barely moves at all. The SafariSack, made since 1999, is a U-shaped bean bag for steadying a camera on a car window or a fence post, and the company named it for photographers who shoot through the moon roof of a Land Rover on African safari, where it says a tripod is too dangerous.
Travelers can buy it empty and fill it locally with rice or bird seed. At the end of the shoot they dump the filling and fly home with a flat bag.
Stum is also a former ultrarunner and a long distance cyclist. In 2010 he added a top tube bike bag called the Brevet Bag to the Kinesis line, and saddlebags followed in 2011. A year later the cycling bags got their own label, eoGEAR, short for endurance outdoor athletes. The Burrito handlebar bag is a little wider than a 2-liter soda bottle and closes with a heavy #8 YKK zipper.
In early 2025 a business broker listed the two brands for sale together. The listing called Kinesis the preferred bag vendor for Disneyland photographers.
The homepage now says the company is back and rebuilding inventory, and since December 2025 the only way to reach the office in Mount Pleasant is email. It is a quiet setup for a company that began with a strap that would not stop swinging.
For the Crazy Quilt version of its Large Century Bag, eoGEAR hand cuts fabric scraps that might otherwise be tossed, so the color mix on each bag is random.
