Each one of Freitag’s new upcycled bags is unique, from the color of the handles to the pastel patterns of the material and the stitching that holds it together. That’s because each bag is made out of real airbags.
Freitag, a Zurich-based manufacturer of functional, one-off bags and accessories, is furthering its mission to use the whole car from headlight to bumper with the new F700 Arrow and F708 Firebird bags, both of which are constructed with discarded airbags as a base material and truck tension belts for handles. The bags can be used as a tote or backpack. Both of the bag models drop online and in stores today, with the smaller Arrow bag retailing for $220 and its larger Firebird counterpart for $310.
Freitag has become something of a sensation for its innovative (and often unexpected) use of recyclable materials. The company’s bread and butter is truck tarps, though the company has upcycled many other previously used materials, like soda bottles, car belts, and bicycle tubes for its sporty, utilitarian products.
But it’s not the only one in the space leaning into upcycled materials. Nike recently released an upcycled poncho that doubles as a tent, London-based Troubadour released this backpack made of one single, recyclable material, and Berlin-based Ucon Acrobatics released a line of backpacks made of recycled clothing in 2023.
In the past, Freitag has dipped its toes into using airbags for smaller products, like interior bag pockets or wallets. And in 2021, the company dropped the F707 Stratos, a now sold-out bag that used both airbag material and truck tarps. However, the Stratos was composed with unused bolts of airbag fabric rather than airbags that had already been sewn together. Finished airbags, which make up the Freitag’s upcycled Arrow and Firebird bags, present their own host of production challenges.
Freitag’s first challenge: finding usable source material
First, Freitag holistic product designer Tu Van Giang and her sourcing team had to figure out where to actually find clean, usable airbags. The right ones would need to be those that were installed in cars but never actually deployed, or those that were put in storage after failing a quality control test. As one might expect, there’s not exactly a supplier that specializes in used airbags.
“After we launched the Stratos, one guy from a [car recycling company] in Switzerland contacted us, and he was like, ‘I’ve collected these airbags for my daughter for seven years, in case she wanted to do something with them,’” Giang says.
The Swiss supplier offered his airbag stores to Freitag—but that was probably the simplest part of the sourcing puzzle. To find more airbags, Giang’s team reached out to recycling centers across Europe (even traveling in person in some cases), and ultimately landed on suppliers including a recycling center in the Netherlands and an Austrian manufacturer. Once the team collected most of the airbags, they had to figure out how to disassemble them and create patterns that would waste as little fabric as possible.
“This is the big difference between Stratos and the new airbags—raw materials give you more freedom when designing bags, because you can just choose and define any shape for the bag. But with discarded sewn airbags, it’s a big challenge, because they’re all different,” Giang says. “There’s different quality, color, stitches, prints, and shapes.”
The upshot of Freitag’s upcycled airbags
Although the vast array of airbags initially served as an obstacle during production, it became the bags’ biggest strength once Giang’s team was able to nail down effective patterns for the Arrow and Firebird. All of the airbags come in various pastel hues with dark, contrasting stitching, which makes it easier for their manufacturers to spot production mistakes.
While that choice serves a practical function, the fun side effect is a satisfying aesthetic quality that makes all of the upcycled Freitag bags unique. Some have striped patterns; others feature swirl accents in dark red thread; while still others come with diagonal lines of product identification codes. To contrast the light bodies of the bags, Freitag chose to use neon-colored, recycled truck tension belts as handles. These, too, are one of a kind.
Aside from just looking beautiful, airbag fabric (which is typically made of nylon) is designed to be both durable and lightweight. And although Giang hasn’t heard from any Stratos users about tears in their bags in the three years since its launch, she developed a patch system for the Arrow and Firebird to help extend the bags’ lifespans, just in case.
Once the final bags were complete, Giang’s team discovered that they had one more surprising feature in store.
“If you deploy an airbag in the car, it blows up, right? This is what I’d like to show you,” Giang tells me, holding up an Arrow bag on our video call. Before she unzips it, the bag is thin, flat, and compact. As soon as the upcycled bag is opened, though, it expands into a 3D shape—just like a real airbag would. “We discovered it by accident, and we call it the ‘airbag effect,’” Giang says. “It’s like a balloon!”
