“It’s a rare condition, this day and age, to read any good news on the newspaper page.” The words of the Family Matters opening theme song feel especially true in the bike industry right now. That’s why we’re introducing For a Change, a regular series where we will highlight people, brands, and organizations who are making honest efforts to help the planet and those of us who live on it.

Today, Travis takes a deep dive into Los Angeles designer Fierce Hazel, whose on- and off-bike bag lineup is constructed using a mix of reclaimed material and a sustainable fabric called Olefin that’s popular in outdoor furniture but unprecedented in bike bags.

We’d like to thank Schwalbe for supporting these stories.

 

 

If you grew up in North America during the ’70s, ’80s, or ’90s, you might have spent the occasional weekday afternoon in Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. I certainly did, though not for very long. The show’s target audience ranged from around age 3 to age 6. My mom tells me those years pass in the blink of an eye. I guess they were a blur for me, too, because I barely even remember King Friday or Mr. McFeely. But I do remember when Mr. Rogers took me to the crayon factory, the toy builder, or the recycling center. I was fascinated to learn that these objects had a life before me, and that they could have a life after.

When we talk about making products more sustainable, it’s the life after us that tends to get the most attention. But as Mr. Rogers showed us, a lot happened during the life before. At each of the many stages, energy is spent, packaging is used, and waste piles up.

That part of the process is of special importance to Fierce Hazel, a softgoods brand based in Los Angeles. Swipe through Fierce Hazel’s catalog, and you’ll notice that two very different fabrics dominate their lineup. One is a high-tech ripstop nylon, like you might see in modern lightweight camping gear. The other resembles canvas or wool, like you might see in an early-20th-century newsboy cap.

That material is called Olefin, also known as polypropylene fiber. It is made from a by-product of oil refining that, until Olefin was developed in the late 1950s, would have been burned off in its gaseous form. It’s fascinating stuff, but what’s arguably more fascinating is that Fierce Hazel’s other chosen material—that high-tech nylon—was once just as doomed. It’s what the softgoods industry sometimes calls “dead stock,” which is the fabric yardage left over after a production run is finished. I’ll go into more detail later about these materials, but first, let’s talk about the bags themselves.

The Fierce Hazel Lineup

Frankie Holt founded Fierce Hazel in 2019, about a year after she stitched together her first bag. Like any good DIY project, Holt’s prototype served a need that the market didn’t: A lightweight, durable organizer that would comfortably slide into a jersey pocket and help bring order to an often frantic race day. Inside, it could hold small essentials like cards, cash and keys. Outside, Holt sewed a sleeve that was sized with a tampon in mind, though on a recent trip to Canada, I used mine to hold a pen for filling out a customs form. By the way, it also fits a passport quite nicely.

That project would eventually become Fierce Hazel’s Echelon All-Conditions Ride Pouch, an extremely lightweight and slim organizer offered in either Featherweight or Ballistic versions. It was joined later by their Tour de Fierce and Ultra Fierce clamshell-style zippered cycling wallets to lead their high-tech ripstop lineup. Those newsboy-cap items were first produced in 2023, and are also high-tech despite appearing so low-fi. They feel thoughtfully overbuilt, if that makes sense.

Not heavy, but sturdy. And they’re all lined with waterproof fabric. The True Grit Handlebar Bag offers a mid-sized two-liter capacity, and the matching True Grit Saddle Bag has that time-tested wedge shape and measures just under one liter. Then there’s the Urban Explorer Pack, inspired by an antique rucksack that Holt found at a Paris flea market. According to her research, these bags were used by the Swiss Armed Forces to carry gas masks.

All these products use material once destined to be discarded in one way or another. That was something Holt was hoping to achieve from the beginning, but function had to come first. Her mission was to serve a practical need, and she sought a practical way to do it.

She and her husband share an art studio that happens to be in LA’s Fashion District, so they were already in the right place. Just south of downtown, the crowded sidewalks of the Fashion District have a bit of a Blade Runner vibe. Whatever it is you want, someone there can either make it or import it for you.

Literally surrounded by buildings full of commercial sewing machines, Holt planned on finding a local manufacturer. But the more she researched the features she wanted, the more she learned that they’re rarely offered by US factories. Things like certain seam-sealing laser-cutting machines are now almost exclusively operating overseas. A sustainable product still has to be a quality product if people are going to buy it. These bags had to have the polish and consistency to rival major players like Ortlieb or Revelate.

That meant looking abroad. It’s like how the carbon-fiber-manufacturing industry grew up in Asia, and so that’s where best tech and best technicians have taken root. Similarly, garment and textile production in Vietnam has been booming in the past decade or two. And so, that’s where Holt chose to start.

With the help of an experienced designer local to Vietnam, Holt found a factory that was experienced in making high-end outdoor gear, both for on- and off-bike activities. They also were willing—even eager—to work with materials from their dead stock. It made sense on the pouches and wallets because they’re so small. It’s easier to tessellate a lot of panels out of just a few yards of fabric. It’s a little more difficult on larger items like backpacks and handlebar bags, but Holt learned of a different approach to those items when she went to Vietnam herself to visit the factory.

There was a large discarded pile of a unique, durable fabric often used in outdoor furniture. This is Olefin, that petroleum by-product. It doesn’t matter so much that an item made of Olefin uses virgin material. Depending on your preferred definition of “virgin,” even shiny and new Olefin has actually been around the block a few times.

What Exactly Is Olefin?

Holt says (and Google confirms) that Fierce Hazel is the only brand using Olefin in bike bags. She chalks that up to her fresh perspective on this particular sub-industry. Experience sometimes gives you tunnel vision, making it hard to see solutions that are right under your nose. Olefin is a pretty practical choice for outdoor bags. It can be made relatively lightweight at a little under 8 oz per square yard. That’s not as light as something like X-Pac, which is a hair over 5 oz per square yard, but it’s lighter than 1000 Denier Cordura, which is more like 11 oz.

And being commonly used in outdoor furniture, Olefin is also durable and holds up well to water, though it’s not naturally water-proof. But it is nearly stain-proof because Olefin fibers lack “dye sites,” a term I knew nothing about until researching this. There’s a chemical component to fabric dyes, where their molecules are attracted to molecules in the fabric because of ionic charge. That’s not the case with Olefin, meaning its color needs to be determined at an early stage in the material’s manufacturing. And despite being quite plastic-like at some of those early stages, the end result is surprisingly soft. It’s got a sort of fuzzy, distressed-canvas texture.

Another thing I knew nothing about until now is how a durable, fibrous material like Olefin could possibly be made from gas. I’ll do my best to sum up the Wikipedia explanation, but it starts with a process called “steam cracking.” There are a number of gasses that can be processed via steam cracking, but I’m fascinated with one called “naphtha.”

It’s used to dilute crude oil, making it possible for it to flow more efficiently through pipes. It can be extracted once the oil is ready to be processed, but instead of burning it, we can combine it with steam and a chemical catalyst and run it through a 1,600-degree furnace at near the speed of sound. The substance that comes out the other end can be further processed into various useful materials, including plastic pellets that are run through something called a “spinnerette” to make fibers.

It would seem like there were a lot of dirty words there, but these types of textiles require no water and no fertilizer to produce. And again, most of their ingredients were going up in flames as recently as our parents’ generation. Of course, there is no such thing as a 100% impact-free commercial product. But some are less impactful than others. A manufacturing-industry tool called the Higgs MSI scores various materials on dozens of criteria to determine their cost to the environment.

It’s not as simple as the AFI top 100 films list, where a bunch of critics can just decide that Singin’ in the Rain ranks higher than Fellowship of the Ring. But Olefin scores better than silk, cotton, wool, and bamboo-based fabrics. Although, if Higgs had a way to rate the reclaimed materials used in the rest of Fierce Hazel’s lineup, those sources might score even better.

What Exactly Is Dead Stock?

When I first learned about Fierce Hazel’s use of dead stock, I thought of Oveja Negra’s Wack Pack lineup where bags are assembled from leftover fabric of assorted colors and patterns. And that’s a great practice for a brand who can manufacture in-house and at their own pace, but wouldn’t be as easy for a designer making a bulk order from a for-hire factory.

But there are other approaches like Cotopaxi’s Del Día Collection. These items are made primarily from dead stock abandoned by other brands working with the same factory, and supplemented with leftover material from Cotopaxi’s own production runs.

To be clear, those “abandoned goods” are not the corners and curves left over when a pattern is cut out. They’re multiple whole yards of fabric, often untouched, often still on the roll. Think of it like those last few feet of tubeless tape that won’t quite make it around a whole rim, but on a much bigger commercial scale. Also, sections of blemished or partially damaged fabric is sometimes categorized as dead stock, but it’s all still essentially just as usable as virgin material.

There are resellers out there who deal in deadstock fabric. They buy those excess rolls from garment and other softgoods manufacturers and then sell them at retail. But as far as I could find, these services are largely aimed at serving individuals or very small producers. It’s not a business-to-business agreement like what Fierce Hazel has put together.

Packaging, Plastics, and People

Nearly everything we buy has spent the beginning of its life in a single-use plastic bag. Even if your wool socks were tied with organic twine to a branded cork-board hang tag, they were probably wrapped in plastic before being packed into a box and shipped from the factory. Though wasteful, it’s not totally pointless. Those bags protect products from chafing against one another over the often thousands of miles they travel from their birthplace.

So, Fierce Hazel opted to have cotton pouches made instead of traditional plastic. Yes, cotton has an impact, too, but instead of trash, you end up with something actually usable. The packaging bags have a small drawstring, so they could get a second life holding your toiletries, tent stakes, or emergency Snickers reserve. I know I still use the bag my 110 mm Thomson stem came in, even though I don’t still use the stem.

When possible, Fierce Hazel avoids plastic elsewhere. The main buckles on the Urban Explorer bag are aluminum, as is the key clip on the True Grit Handlebar Bag. Even the zipper pulls on the pouches and wallets are fabric. And that wasn’t just done to reduce a little plastic waste. Plastic production can be kinda nasty. Holt saw it first-hand when visiting a factory that made zipper pulls, and saw hundreds of women working in front of molten plastic all day.

That was another part of production Holt paid attention to while building Fierce Hazel. The factory she partnered with is modern, spacious, and well-lit. The craftspeople there are paid a fair wage, and they put in reasonable hours. Holt had to spend months researching the often opaque world of overseas manufacturing and then make a personal trip to see the supplier in person and to solve a logistics puzzle that doesn’t yet have a very well-established playbook. But Fierce Hazel is proof that this is possible. Maybe even repeatable. Plus, it would have made a hell of a Mr. Rogers episode.

See more at Fierce Hazel

 

Many thanks to Schwalbe for supporting our For a Change series here at The Radavist!