This is the third time I have given Cinomadist money on Kickstarter. First AxisPack, their modular tech pouch. Then Swift, their gym and training pack, which I backed roughly nine seconds after seeing it, having apparently learned nothing about impulse control and everything about how quickly a brand can become a habit. Now Motion, which arrived this month and has been on my back ever since.
I want to note one thing before the review proper, because it delighted me and I refuse to carry it alone. Two campaigns ago, this same company shipped a bag called The Pinnacle Of Urban Work And Travel Backpack. The pinnacle. The summit. The highest attainable point, beyond which there is only thinner air and a long walk down. Six hundred and five people agreed, to the tune of HK$530,441. And then Cinomadist, presumably having caught their breath up there, went back to the drawing board and made two more. I find this genuinely endearing. Every carry brand does it, but most of them have the decency to use a word with some give in it. Cinomadist looked at the English language, selected the one adjective that admits no sequel, and then filed a sequel.
Anyway. The bag is good.
The honest idea underneath the marketing
The pitch is "Three systems. A smarter urban backpack," which is the sort of phrase that means nothing until you use the thing and then means exactly one thing. Strip the copy away and Motion is built on a single opinionated decision: the main zipper runs down the centerline, not around the perimeter.
That sounds like trivia. It isn't. A perimeter zipper gives you a clamshell, which is wonderful on a hotel bed and useless on a train platform, because opening it means committing to a horizontal surface and a certain amount of public vulnerability. A top-loader gives you speed at the cost of ever knowing where anything is. Centerline access splits the difference on purpose: the bag opens down its own spine, both halves stay upright, and you can get into it while it is hanging off one shoulder without performing an excavation or a striptease.
For a city where I spend a meaningful fraction of my life standing up on the Yamanote line, that is not a feature. That is the whole argument.
The specs, and what they actually buy you
The shell is 1260D nylon, with the front panel stepped up to 1800D and given a water-repellent coating. Denier numbers are the horsepower figures of the bag world, quoted constantly and understood rarely, so here is the practical translation: this is a heavy, structured fabric that holds its shape when the bag is half empty, which is the state most backpacks spend most of their lives in and the state most of them look worst in. The zips are YKK, which is the bag industry's way of saying "we did not cheap out on the one component that ends bags."
Capacity is 28L, and 28 is a deliberate number. It is the last size that behaves like a commuter bag and the first that survives two nights away from home. The marketing calls it "the perfect sweet spot," which is marketing, but it is marketing that happens to be pointing at something real.
Then there is the count: 17+ pockets and 25 attachment points. Written down, that reads less like a bag and more like a diagnosis. In practice the pockets earn it because they are grouped rather than sprinkled, and the ones I keep using are the two hidden ones. There is an elastic bottle pocket that swallows a bottle without putting a tumour on the bag's silhouette, and a concealed side pocket sized for a passport, positioned where a pickpocket would have to be both determined and extremely rude.
The 16-inch laptop compartment is a dedicated device sleeve rather than a slot with ambitions. The luggage pass-through does the boring, load-bearing work of letting the bag ride your roller through an airport instead of your shoulders. The webbing grid on the front panel with its clips is the sort of thing that either becomes your entire personality or gets used exactly never, and I remain honestly unsure which camp I am in.
The feature I did not expect to care about is the stowable shoulder straps. You tuck them away and the backpack becomes a hand-carried bag. I assumed this was a party trick for the product video. It is not. It is for the specific moment when you walk into a restaurant, or an office, or anywhere that a backpack silently reclassifies you as someone in transit rather than someone who has arrived. Ten seconds of zipping and you look like an adult with luggage instead of a tourist with a shell.
How it stacks up, and what I am watching
Against Aer, Bellroy, Peak Design and the rest of the urban-carry establishment, Motion is not trying to win on refinement. It is winning on price and on that one structural decision. At $119 on Kickstarter against a $198 retail figure, with the toiletry bundle at $139, it sits well under what the established names charge for a bag in this class. The toiletry kit alone is $39 if you want to feel like you exercised restraint while spending more money.
What I am watching, in the interest of not sounding like the pitch video:
The heavy fabric and the structure are not free, and the invoice arrives as 1.7kg before you have put a single thing inside it. A bag that holds its shape is a bag carrying material that exists purely to hold its shape, and if your carry philosophy is "as little as possible, ideally a tote," this is not your bag and has never pretended to be.
Twenty-five attachment points is a number whose value is conditional. Modularity is a real reason to choose a bag like this, and nobody backing it is being tricked into wanting it. But a grid is worth exactly what you hang on it, and the things worth hanging are generally sold separately. Until you have bought into the system, it is webbing you carry either way.
And the honest caveat that applies to every review written this early: I have had this for weeks, not years. Zips and water-repellent coatings are precisely the parts that fail late, long after the reviews are written and the campaign page has gone quiet, so nothing I can tell you today is evidence about either. It arrived in time to catch the back end of this summer, which has told me it survives being sweated on and nothing else. The real examination is the rainy season, and that is nine months away.
The verdict
Motion is the rare crowdfunded bag that is built around an actual idea rather than a feature list wearing an idea as a disguise. The centerline zipper is a real answer to a real problem, the fabric is serious, the price is not, and the stowable straps solve a social problem I did not know I had been having for years.
Is it the pinnacle? Almost certainly not. The pinnacle shipped two campaigns ago, and I have every confidence a newer pinnacle is already in sampling. But it is the best bag this company has made so far, which is a sentence I expect to write again the next time they run a campaign, with a straight face, having backed that one too.