Matador Blog

You’ve probably heard of the Leave No Trace principles by now. These 7 principles teach you how to be responsible and ethical in the outdoors. It includes guidelines like respecting wildlife, packing out your trash, and more. The general ethos is that when we’re in the backcountry we’re not in our own home, and it’s important to acknowledge and respect...

A term we’ve recently started using around HQ is “objective-based travel”. It’s the type of travel most of us here thrive on, and it’s the type of travel we design our products for. Objective-based travel is setting out with a purpose. Whether it’s traveling to Tanzania with the goal of summiting Mount Kilimanjaro, or heading to Turkey to motorcycle the...

Designed to handle the mountains, perfected for travel beyond the outdoors. Equipment tough enough for the mountains is surely good enough for the day to day of city centered travel- but it’s not optimized for it. Optimization matters, performance and specificity go hand in hand. If you’re wondering what makes On-Grid different from the rest of our line, you’re in...

Designed for city travel using materials perfected for the outdoors, On-Grid Series bags are built to perform as beautifully as they look. Sam, one of the designers on this project, takes us through the design decisions that make these bags optimized for travel on the grid.

While it’s looking like most international travel is still not in the cards for the foreseeable future, National Parks are opening back up, and road trips are looking like the way to go this summer. With restrictions in place to ensure social distancing, it’s actually a great time to visit without the crowds you typically see this time of year....

Micheal and Tabitha Coen, better known as CoenFilm, have been good friends of the Matador team for some time now. Over the years, we've collaborated on countless videos- from our dynamic studio demos to those epic lifestyle videos that push the limits of what a bag promotion can and should be, they've been the folks in our corner with that magic touch.  In...

As a consumer shopping for a new piece of outdoor gear, fabric terminology can be a bit confusing. The old “apples to oranges” analogy often applies when comparing backpacks made by different companies, of varying fabrics and feature sets. Spend a few minutes(or hours, or days) Googling and you will find more information than you likely bargained for on the...

The SEG42 is a revolutionary new architecture of travel pack designed for one-bag travel. Sam, one of the product designers behind the pack, walks us through all of the behind the scenes details: from ideation to prototypes to the final product.