What inspired you to want to design the perfect festival bag?

We needed to come up with a better cure-all medicine for a lot of the problems plaguing festivals. The whole thing began at Ultra 2018. The water lines were an hour long, I saw four or five people get their bags taken at the gate (including me), and two friends were pick pocketed. It's not just theft, it's theft from vulnerable people who may be disoriented or need to find a lost friend. That's a very terrifying experience for a lot of people, so that's what we're trying to stop.

I was really bothered by this; it kept me up at night. I had to do something, right? So I wrote out a script of questions and interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people about their festival experiences, habits, and needs and really gained an understanding of what people wanted. We realised that people wanted to be safe, they wanted to get back to the music as quickly as possible, and they wanted to look good on Instagram, obviously. With those considerations we started to build, looking at 19 different production partners and going through seven rounds of prototyping. I was in New York hacking together a canvas prototype for this bag in April and we had our first live prototypes in the field by June. We used the festival schedule as a way to show the developed product to more people and ask, what more do you want? As it got better we realised that we weren't just solving the two or three problems we had originally set out to, we were able to solve much more and really make the whole product a valuable addition to the entire festival experience.

The Lunchbox is the first anti-theft festival hydration bag that has everything you'll ever need, and keeps you secure and comfortable all day. The final result is something we're incredibly proud of. We want to help people dance safer, rave happier, and have a better overall festival experience. The best part? We feel like we're fulfilling a debt and giving back to the space that's given us so much - it’s getting to realize a passion of ours. That doesn't just stop at the product. The idea of the Lunchbox is helping people do what they love and bring communities together in the safest way possible.

How did the idea develop? What has gone into the research?

It's a pretty fun process with three stages. I call them Test, Iterate, and Kill or Live. We went out and between the 100+ people we spoke to we discovered a wide range of preferences. We took all of these ideas and put them into this giant basket, picked out the most essential ones to create a theoretical Lunchbox. We’d then pick out of the bucket and test features out on the newest prototype, which started the ‘test’ element of Test, Iterate, Kill or Live. Then we asked people for their thoughts on the newest prototype with the test feature, and so through this process we kept going back to the market and asking what they wanted next. There’s your iteration. We walked around the Firefly campsite with a prototype and asked attendees what they thought and asked them to test it out. Then we went back to design and improved everything. That’s where our features either were ‘killed’ or would ‘live’ to see the next prototype. We also accounted for wider aspects of the industry such as theft rates and the health issue of hydration. We were really trying to be as focused as possible to make sure the Lunchbox is perfect.