The End-of-Year Recap
It’s that time again. I wasn’t sure about writing this, but Alejandro, who handles our Db downloads, assured me it’s become a bit of an event. So, grab your favourite festive drink, and let’s reflect on a year full of fun. But before we do, let me raise a glass in a Leonardo Di Caprio, Wolf of Wall Street style, to everyone out there who has showed up to an event, logged in online, sent us a DM or even organized events for us. This wouldn’t have been possible without all of you and your energy.
So where to begin? Well, we kicked off the year strong with a breath of winter in Morzine at The Hoxton chalet, enjoying skiing, Polestar cars, and Aperol Spritz with Db friends which was the perfect start to the year and nothing better than some winter sun to combat the dark days at home. Chapeau Ebba, Ella and Kim at Hoxton for arranging.
Next up we launched the new carry-on hugger 40L, so we hit up the crew at Beyond Medals, because their intros to their snowboard films are the best in the game, to pick their brain. The response was that Kevin’s brother works at an agency called Super Studio who create magic on the regular so off we went to Borås, with an idea to create a fictional character who has collected every hugger ever made and then create a short film, and then market the movie Netflix style. Yep, sometimes we get excited and end up going down these rabbit holes. We welcomed Kevin Baekkel into the family by giving him a star role as the brother, Sage Kotsenburg as the ´best actor from action sports, ´ selling us on that crypto dream… “It’s coming!!!”. It was a good test of our abilities for what was about to come in Summer….
As we come out of winter, we usually start hearing more from Sam and Hallvard, who spend the darker months chasing the world’s best creatives for Pack Heavy, Chase Light. Season three has been our biggest lift yet, with every year pushing us to improve. Episodes featuring legends like Jordy Smith and Ishod Wair are still in the works—25% of the season remains on Sam’s computer—but perfection takes time. Filming with Ishod in Barcelona taught us a hard lesson: don’t leave your bag unattended. Naturally, Barcelona stole it—along with $4K worth of 16mm and analog camera gear—breaking Sam and Hallvard’s hearts.
Despite the setbacks, the series continues to grow, seeing incredible traction on YouTube. It’s grown so much that 2025 will bring our biggest challenge yet: turning it into a book—a task that looms over us like the North Wall in Game of Thrones.
This Summer we also decided to challenge ourselves a bit. Rather than make a product campaign for luggage we asked ourselves how we could make this uniquely relevant to our audience? We all travel, we all see the same characters every time and so couldn’t help ourselves. The summer chaos idea was born.
We took our Borås friends (Superstudio) to Amsterdam and rented an entire airport—security, baggage claim, passport control, the works. It was massive! We brought in ambassadors, Db students, the whole brand team, and even my dad as the old guy in security. Naturally, Tin couldn’t resist sneaking into restricted areas to make Slovenian airport announcements, almost getting shut down before we started…
It was a whirlwind of fun that energized us for summer, and hopefully, when you travel, you’ll spot the repacker, the TikToker, or the photographer dad and think of our ad. The campaign even snagged us an award from LeBook—well-deserved for those long days in Holland. A good learning for campaigns like this…. When planning something so audacious, think of how many extras it takes to fill a space like an airport.
In terms of product this year, we had a lot of fun. Our product team are the best, no matter the idea, they are down. The biggest was likely the skate duffel. Rethinking what travelling with a skateboard can be like, the team got to work on the ultimate travel piece thanks to the insights of the team including Ishod, Beatrice, Sarah and Hugo.
Along with that we also worked with Olav on a solution he has been craving for years, the art bag. Remember at high school when it was trying to get bubble wrap, tape and everything else to carry these unwieldy pieces of art around? Well with Olav we decided to fix that and developed a great solution which we have already seen being used by lots of our favorite artists including Thomas Campbell, Frode Sandbech, Scoph and more.
The one which really got the imagination running wild was the Pizza bag which started as a random idea thanks to the crew at Starcow, who also run Sonny’s Pizza who challenged us to test our hand at the pizza delivery game. Who doesn’t love pizza? and it always needs to be delivered fresh, right? So, we started with pizza delivery for Sonnys in Paris, before delivering for Db Black Members in Stockholm, Oslo, Innsbruck, to Chamonix, being delivered on the Aguille du Midi. If there was one project this year that summed up our approach it would be this. The Pizza was also delivered to Fumi and the crew in Japan at their new store, just off Harajuku, a great spot which I know we are already booking tickets for us to visit in 2025.
When we started Creative Exchange, we just thought that about a moment to share knowledge from creatives in our network to the wider community would be good. Since then, it’s taken on a life of its own growing from humble beginnings as a Google Hangout, to 350 people at a sold-out event at Kendall Mountain Festival with Chris Burkard. The turning point where we realized we had something, was the online one we did with Sally Braid and Jordan Rogers, which had so much energy and passion about brand building it was one for the books. It also made us realize that Google Hangouts has a limit and we had just broken that. There were 150 people on the call and another 100 trying to get in. Our bad for not researching that but thank you for coming back the next time when we started streaming on YouTube live. We are around 25 deep now with lots planned for the new year. The personal highlight for me would have to be the one we did in Bergen with Mathias and Magnus from Springbettet. They tracked us down on email and explained their roles, so before we knew it, we were off to the rainiest city in Europe for some group runs in the wet, followed by a 100-person session focused on brand building and Tin’s legendary, “how to get a job in the industry?” Which includes anecdotes about pasta pesto as the highlight. We see the potential here and so in 2025 will be doing a university tour for Creative Exchange.
At the beginning of the year, we also had another lucky connection. Marcus, as Marcus always seems to do, bought a place in the apartment building where the design lead at SAS lives, so likely whilst chatting new paints for his place or taking out the trash, they got talking and a few weeks later we have a call, then meeting then we go all the way and brought SAS onboard as our first airline partner. So, starting very soon, the pilots and cabin crew will be rolling with Db bags and luggage. If you own an airline and would like to talk, the best thing is to buy an apartment near Marcus and spark up a conversation.
Whilst on Mobility we also rolled out a line with Polestar our Swedish friends disrupting the EV market with their design led approach to cars. We love their approach, their vehicles and yes we are looking for a Polestar 2 Off Road for next summer to do a road trip from Oslo to Portugal.
Finally, to wrap up the year, there have been two things which have defined the closing of 2024.
Firstly as you will have read by now, we received backing in the form of minority investment from LVMH Luxury Ventures arm. This will help us continue to do audacious things like the summer campaign, whilst delivering informative interesting content like Creative Exchange and Pack Heavy, Chase Light. As an expert in the space, we are excited to learn from them and they are very committed that we stay true to the community and the sports that built us, which is one of the reasons they were the very best partner we could have hoped for.
Then of course to round out the year, we wanted to create an ode to every creative travelling home for the holidays. We have all been there, you travel home, worked all year, just to have grandad ask when you are going to get a real job. It’s such a simple insight, but one that brings us all together as every year we all have that same moment. This time it featured William’s whole family including his grandparents, aunts and uncles. One thing, whenever we do these kinds of projects everyone goes all in, families and all.
Years like this are the ones that will run long in the memory, and honestly, whether you have attended an event, bought a product, watched a video, jumped on a live stream, had a drink with us, picked up a tool to help, or just thrown us a like here and there, it all counts in what we feel building a brand like this is all about. I hope you get to spend time with your nearest and dearest, and ideally, in the snow.
I will leave you with the words of our creative director, the multi-talented Vincent Laine: