A Leather Briefcase as Unique As You
The MacCase Premium Leather "Flight Case" is a not for everyone, which is an odd thing to hear from a company hoping you'll buy their product. The world is full of perfectly acceptable laptop cases, in all their boring, dull, uninspired glory.
We created this design to stand apart from that, a handmade leather briefcase that is unique as the people who chose to purchase one. Whether you choose our classic, pebble grain black or our vintage brown briefcase, each makes a statement as unique as you.
Many of the traditional briefcase touches are present in our design. But look closer and you'll see that not only does the bold design set it apart, but the details do as well. The beefy, riveted leather handle and the stainless steel finished metal clasp for the flap are familiar. But notice how the clasp does not attach to the exterior surface of the front flap as on most cases.
It's attached to the underside surface allowing for a much cleaner and understated look. The chrome feet along the bottom edge will keep both the leather and the contents of the case safe from wear and tear, extending case life. The front panel loop is the safety catch attachment point for the removable pouches. All these details come together to create a design that is radically new, yet somehow familiar.
Vertical Functionality
Functionally, the Flight Case holds a wide variety of hardware including laptops up to 15" along with any tablet you need to carry with it. The padded, removable divider insures that the two will not come in contact, keeping them both safe. Other things like a writing folio, a three ring binder or printed reports will also fit.
The main compartment is complemented by three additional larger pockets as well as the removable front pouch. If more room is needed, an optional extra large pouch is available with 50% more room than the standard pouch. So as laptop cases go, it's got the room to store, transport and protect the things you need to carry.
One of the things that make this leather laptop briefcase so unique is the ability to turn it into a full fledged backpack. While the look is not one of a traditional leather backpack, the fit is comfortable thanks to the optional backpack strap set featuring the beefy 35mm wide leather straps.
As with any backpack, wearing the Flight Case this way allows for a hands free user experience and also distributes the weight more evenly across the body preventing fatigue.
How is Our Leather Briefcase Different From Our Flight Jacket?
In a word, structure. The Flight Jackets are fully padded but unstructured. This full grain leather briefcase, while looking radically different from a traditional brief, is built in a traditional way. The is a signature of MacCase design. We've become very good at taking a tried and true method and doing something completely new with it.
Basic structural panels are covered in foam, lining materials then exterior hides. This not only provides some of the highest levels of protection for your laptop and tablet inside, but also allows the handmade vertical briefcase to be free standing, like a typical brief.
While there are many sizes for the Jacket models, iPad, 11",12", 13" 15", there is only one Flight Case. This leather laptop briefcase is for someone who likes the look of the Flight Jacket but needs a bit more room than these compact designs can provide.
The extra room comes from the 2.5" width of the vertical briefcase where the Jackets are much more narrow. Also, this handmade leather case is compatible with any size laptop from any brand up to 15". The FJ's work best as a MacBook Pro case.
Whether you choose the black or distressed, vintage brown, the design has a much more substantial handle than their compact brothers. The optional backpack straps are also much wider. The brief includes the padded shoulder pad as part of the package. This is an option on the Flight Jacket.
Lastly, the Flight Case has a Large Pouch option which adds storage capacity. Both the brief and Flight Jackets are convertible into fully functional leather backpacks. While we agree that each doesn't fit any definition of what a leather backpack traditionally looks like, over 70% of customers who order either model, order the backpack strap option.
Both the Flight Case and the Flight Jacket are extraordinary laptop cases. The handmade leather briefcase just happens to be an excellent case whether you are carrying a laptop or not. If you have any questions about which one is best for you, give us a call at 760 729 0620 between the hours of 10am and 4pm PST and we will be happy to help.
Vintage Leather Briefcase and the Steampunk Movement
by Jody K. Deane
I was at a party recently and someone asked me what I do for a living. When I mentioned I worked for a bag company they asked to see. I pulled our site up on my phone and showed them our vintage leather briefcase that is part of our Premium Leather collection.
They were quick to notice that the design was not based on some older, set aesthetic that we had just copied. They mentioned that there was a certain modernity to the proportions, execution and details. "The vintage leather really makes it look like steampunk."
Huh?
Is This Case Steampunk?
I really was at a loss for a reply. In the same way people hear things in a song that they want to hear, product design can be the same way. I would never think of MacCase design as steampunk.
We just do what we do and for the most of our history enough people have liked it enough for us to continue doing it. (For which we are very grateful!) We never set out to be part of any design aesthetic or sub-culture. We eschew trendy. Was this person's comment warrantied or was he just projecting?
One of the sub-genres of the overall steampunk movement is "western steampunk". One of the tenets of western steampunk aesthetic is a vision of a re-imagined American West.
It's a view of the past as if the future would have happened sooner. In that regard, I can see his point. In this brown hide, our vintage vertical briefcase with it's very modern vertical orientation appears retro and futuristic at the same time in the same way that our Flight Jackets do.
A Cool Modern Vintage Leather Briefcase
There are a number of things that set our vintage leather briefcase apart from many cases out there that are just copies of older designs. The vertical orientation being the most obvious. But what about the details? The MacCase design is not dated by the heavy handed details of the past.
An example of this would be the lack of leather straps with belt-like buckles to open and close a compartment. Or handles made up of many heavy, distressed metal parts with a faux patina.
Thinking about our vintage vertical briefcase and how it did or didn't fit in with the steampunk aesthetic made me think of a similar situation where a creative work was associated with a group or movement that could have been taken out of context.
The time was 1935 and America's most famous or infamous architect, depending on your perspective, was Frank Lloyd Wright. He was once again being told he was washed up and that his career was over. He was being upstaged by a group of architects and designers from Europe, most notably from Germany's Bauhaus school.
Their claim to fame was a movement called Modernism. Architecture as the sleek machine. Machines for working in and living in devoid of any of the craft that were the hallmarks of home design up until that point.
During this time, Wright was asked by Pittsburgh department store owner Edgar Kaufman to design a summer home for his family. Was Wright's solution a "modernist"statement to show the Europeans how it's done or just the greatest, most daring piece of residential architecture of the 20th century?
For people who knew nothing about architecture and had spent their lives living in Victorian homes with pitched roofs and tiny, compartmentalized rooms, Wright's Fallingwater looked like a spaceship that had landed in a ravine in western Pennsylvania.
For people that knew Wright's work, it was just Wright being Wright. All the hallmarks of his earlier work were there, just taken to a new, higher level. A masterpiece and one of the high water marks of his long and illustrious career. But was it modernist in the way the Modernists would define a modern home according to their aesthetic?
I think the answer, like the answer to whether our vintage briefcase is steampunk or not, is both yes and no. Whenever anyone sits down to create something new they have to work through what an old teacher of mine called "cultural baggage". Cultural baggage is the visual vocabulary we carry around in our heads that define objects.
For example, a chair is visually defined as this, or must has these elements, etc. When we set out to create something, there are images and ideas of whatever it is we are trying to create that are usually the first designs that we put to paper. They are very rarely our best work. True creativity comes from pushing past the cultural baggage into the unknown. That's where the fun begins.
Rebel, Rebel
Wright designed Fallingwater aware of the Modernists and their machine for living ideas. But he didn't let that stop him from imbuing Fallingwater with his values, his aesthetic and his genius. Our vintage case was designed to be a statement against what a case like this had always been.
In essence, a rebellion against the cultural baggage that people carry around with them about what a briefcase is supped to be. There is that rebellious nature of "punk" in the design. And let's face it, our vintage hides are the essence of the romanticized American west aesthetic.
So after thinking about it, I guess I could not disagree with the person at the party's comment about our vintage case looking steampunk. I wouldn't call it that and I know our designer wasn't motivated by that aesthetic when drawing it up.
The steampunk aesthetic seems much more detailed oriented. There is an overabundance of detail in the most simplest objects. Where as our vintage leather briefcase is very clean with minimal detail.
But that is what makes creating and putting real products into the world so rewarding. Like music, fine art, literature, even dance, you never know how someone will respond to your work. You hope for the best and keep creating.
This is one of the main differences between how MacCase approaches a product design or product development and what many other companies do. We're not really interested in creating a design that will look good for a few months or be trendy. Our products are designed and built to last a long, long time. We are passionate about putting the best of a thing into the world.
We don't use focus groups or marketing surveys when we develop or launch a new product. We use an in-house proprietary system that has severed us well for over 20 years. The company started out designing products for one of the hardest customer bases in the world to please: Apple owners and users. If you can make these folks happy, the rest of the world is easy.
We've been doing it for 20 years and show no signs of slowing down. Please join us on this exciting journey into quality, design and leadership.
