We have reached this point with respect to the soap bag, and there is no turning back
Travel toiletries are one of the weirdest things to me. They are a ritual that could only exist based on the essential tension between international law, scope creep, a desire for comfort, and grim compromise.
The first thing anyone notices is the industrial design. There are travel equivalents for every possible object. Some of them are like normal toiletries, but smaller and somehow more expensive. Others are meant to be decanted. The 311 bag continues to exist, bafflingly. The goal, of course, is to minimize liquids, flat-pack everything, and overthink tradeoffs. Fine.
On the minimizing liquids tip, the first and most important thing you should do is embrace bar soap – which includes your body soap, facial soap, shampoo, and conditioner. But you still need a way to carry that soap, and most travel soap cases are not good:
- They are too bulky
- They don’t shrink to fit the size of the soap inside of them
- They aren’t durable; the hinges often break
- They don’t self-dry; if your last day in a place involves showering & leaving, you’re always throwing wet soap in your pack load, and then it never dries out
So I did what normal people do, and I spent two years going on a travel soap case journey. The goal was to tick all four of these boxes at once, and to do so for four different soap bars.
There is only one answer as of press time, and it is Matador’s FlatPak soap case. It is a tiny roll-top bag for a single bar of soap. It has a one-way membrane for drying out. I own four of them.
Befitting a person as normal and regular as I am, I have not stopped my journey of flat-pack soap cases here. I suspected, after Matador released this, that there would soon be imitators, or even some who improved upon the original design. After all, Matador won a bunch of industrial design awards for this, and ripoffs always flood the market. So I kept an eye out to see if anyone one-upped the thing. Heck, I kept an eye out to see if Matador upgraded their own model.
No such thing has happened.
Why not? Carry nerds love to overengineer the heck out of cases for every purpose imaginable. There is so much money in the carry industry. Travel backpacks exist from so many different companies for a reason; they are all north of $300 for a reason.
Furthermore, this extends from carry to other industries, including and especially camping. Who wants to bring anything but bar soap camping?
Also: why do I care so much about the innovation of the design of soap bar cases? Because I care a lot about travel goods, and I want to carry as little weight & bulk as possible. Since I want to carry as little weight & bulk as possible, I look to places in my pack load where I can reduce weight & bulk. Turning liquids into bar soap is an easy and obvious win on the face of things, but then you have the case to worry about.
I can’t be alone on this? Other people travel. Some of them camp, I guess. They use soap. I can’t believe I am saying this out loud. I think I am saying that this represents an untapped market that you could probably make a lot of money off of, if you had the materials & industrial design know-how. You’re welcome.