Does the perfect camera bag exist? Some would say their search for such a bag has been fruitless so far. Often, you stumble upon a bag that looks stylish and has loads of features that appeal to you, but it ends up not catering to photographers, especially from a customizability perspective of the interiors. This is where a new company, Grumbler Gear, aims to make life easier. They’ve just launched a Kickstarter campaign with an admirably modest goal.
It is as easy as; measure – cut -fix
When I saw the email about Grumbler that came in from the team at NYA-EVO, my mind immediately raced back to flashbacks about Trekpak. This was a company that sold customizable hard dividers for your backpack and was a product that I wanted to buy some years ago for many of my camera bags. Then, around the time I was about to, I found out that they were acquired by Pelican cases. The acquisition wasn’t really a matter of concern until I realized that you couldn’t really buy the Trekpak Rollipak anymore, which you could cut out as per your whims and fancies. It only seemed to come custom-made for existing Pelican case models. And it seemed to have gotten a lot pricier too.
Grumbler seems to be a similar solution for a similar problem, with some differences. For starters, the dividers here aren’t made of a hard material like the ones Trekpak had; they look like foam neatly sandwiched by two layers of colorful felt. And they aren’t held together by pins—this one is all Velcro. Grumbler says this is a DIY customizable divider system that should work with any camera bag. I’m sure it’d work just as well with any travel bag that you want to keep your cameras inside and this is where this product has a lot of potential. It shouldn’t just be seen as an option to replace the stock dividers that came with your favorite brand’s camera bag. You can even use them to add extra partitions inside this and/or any bag that you want.
The whole system looks fun. It comes in a range of eye-catching colors, seems to require no fancy tools to cut into size, and doesn’t look like it will graze your precious camera gear inside your bags. What I don’t have clarity on is whether the Grumbler product comes in a range of sizes to cater to a range of depths/heights of camera bags. Some bags are deeper than others, and I hope Grumbler has taken this into consideration. If these bright colors aren’t really your style, not to worry. The Grumbler dividers also come in Grey and Black. All velcro seems to be only in black for now.
At the moment the product is only available for backing on Kickstarter. For around USD 17 you can get a pack in one color, or get all 7 colors for just USD 98.
All images seen in this article were provided to us by the team at NYA-EVO who are also the folks behind Grumbler Gear
