WANDRD is a pack and bag brand founded in Utah in 2015. It is headquartered in Orem, Utah.
WANDRD began with a shopping trip that went badly. Ryan Cope was headed to New Zealand with his wife, and his brother Spencer was about to shoot Paris Fashion Week. They shopped for camera bags together, and Ryan wrote that everything they found either worked poorly or "looked like gear our dad would wear." So the brothers designed their own. WANDRD is run from Orem today.
The PRVKE pack raised $113,697 on Kickstarter in 2015. After ordering the first inventory, the brothers were $10,000 in the hole. In Vietnam, their factory partner asked if they knew about the import tax. Ryan says they answered yes as confidently as they could while he pulled out his calculator.
Nobody got paid for the first two years, and the office was their father's basement. Every bag carries a warranty for as long as the original owner keeps it, and the company says a full zipper or strap failure counts.
The family still owns all of it. Their father, Kevin, came in as an investor, and the brothers' one condition was that he stay a silent partner. Ryan says they still remind him he only gets so many words a month.
Older brother Austin Cope left a real estate job in Kansas City to join WANDRD and earned the nickname "Spreadsheets."
Utah makes a lot of great bags, and WANDRD's are some of the cleanest. Really well designed.
Alex
