Why oh why oh why, outdoors industry, do people keep producing garments with seperate stuff sacs?
Two super-light down jackets - the North Face one (right) stuffs into its own pocket, slightly awkwardly to be fair, but it does. Meanwhile the Rab, left, has a stuff-sac supplied. Easier to use and neat, for sure, but guess which one will still be around in six months time...
Everytime a bit of lightweight test kit arrives with its own stuffsac, my heart sinks. Kit that invariably packs to the size of some sort of small fruit - an apple, an organge, a medium-sized strawberry, a modest mango - always comes with its own tiny mesh receptacle and an imutable law of the outdoors, is that the two will become seperated within days.
No-one quite knows why - one theory is that the things are desperately community orientated and will go to any lengths to form little colonies of sacs under fridges or tucked away in the dark corners of sock drawers. Another, on the contrary, is that they are essentially solitary creatures and will go to Houdini-like lengths to avoid contact with other items of kit, particularly their own parent garmet, even hurling themselves out of moving vehicles or commiting hari kiri in the waste disposal unit.
In a sense though, none of this matters. The essential truth is that tiny stuff sacs always go missing and will be found only when you've contrived to lose, sell or wear out, the item they're associated with.
So, designers of the outdoor industry, please, please, please, please stop making them. Instead, why not - as many do - utilise an existing pocket as a stuff receptacle?. It's what I generally end up doing anyway. Or if you can't bring yourself to do that, how about you just stitch the stuff sac into the garment in some way, so it physically can't go walk-about? Yes, it'll add 5g or so to the notional weight of your ultra-filmy windproof underpants, but hey, at least it'll still be there a year later.
Thank you and good night.
