There is a workshop on Marlow Street building one of the best backpacks in America. Almost nobody outside this valley has ever heard of it — and the man who runs it never learned how to fix that.

The shop at the front of 118 Marlow Street has a bell over the door that does not ring very often any more.

Inside there are maybe forty backpacks hanging on a rail along one wall, a counter with a pad of paper on it, and a chair that Roland Kozar sits in when there is nothing else to do. On a Tuesday morning in August there was nothing else to do.

Which is strange, because forty feet behind that counter, up one flight of stairs, is a working floor where eight people are building a backpack that is better made than anything you will find in a sporting goods store for three times the money.

What is actually being made back there

Kozar’s grandfather came over from Moravia in 1929 and sewed canvas mail sacks. He took the top floor of the brick works in 1957 because the rent was nothing and the windows were big. Roland took the business over in 1985, at twenty-five, and has been at the same machine ever since.

The pack he makes came out of a complaint. A contractor down the road kept tearing the bottom out of the bags he bought, twice a year, every year, and came up the stairs to shout at somebody about it. Kozar cut him one out of heavy nylon with a doubled base and put a bar-tack into every seam that carried weight. The man came back eleven months later — not to replace it, but to order four more for his crew.

The pattern has been refined six times in forty-one years. It has never been redesigned.

He is not the owner who walks around with a clipboard. He cuts the panels. He sews the shoulder straps and sets the bar-tacks personally, because that is the joint the whole bag hangs off. And nothing goes into a box until it has been across his bench and he has pulled on it.

“People hear factory and they picture a robot arm. There’s no robot. There’s me, a few good neighbours, a lot of coffee, and a radio nobody agrees on.”

The part nobody bothers to copy

Pick one up and you feel it straight away. It has weight without being heavy. The shell does not crackle. The straps do not fold over on themselves when you load it. The zips run without you having to steady the bag with your other hand.

“Anybody can copy the shape,” Kozar says. “Nobody copies the parts you don’t see, because the parts you don’t see are the ones a person has to sit and do. There are fourteen points on this pack where the weight actually goes. Every one of them gets bar-tacked. That is real time on every single bag, and across a container load it is the entire margin. So it doesn’t get done. And then the thing fails at the strap, right at the top of the shoulder, about eight months in.”

If you want to check this yourself on any pack you already own, it takes four seconds. Turn it around and look at the top of the shoulder strap where it joins the back panel. A bag built down to a price has one straight run of stitching there. This one has a boxed block of thread stitched back and forth across the joint.

• Kozar’s hands on every single one. He cuts the pattern, sews the shoulder straps, sets the bar-tacks and checks each finished pack before it is boxed.
• 1000D nylon throughout, doubled at the base. The panel that fails first on a cheap pack is two layers here.
• 14 bar-tacked stress points, fed through the machine by hand, one at a time.
• 45 litres — carry-on size for most U.S. domestic flights, and a full week’s worth of room.
• Padded ventilated straps, a sliding sternum strap and a removable waist belt, so it sits right on more than one kind of back.
• Padded laptop sleeve up to 17″, plus a lined tablet pocket.
• Webbing front and sides. Hang what you want off it, or nothing at all.
• The flag patch comes off. Hook-and-loop, two seconds. It is a work bag, not a statement.
• Hand-stamped brass plate on the zipper pull.
• Whatever is still on the shelf. The colours available are simply the ones that have not gone yet.

“I’ve had customers write to me about bags I sold in the nineties”

Ask Kozar what he is proudest of and he will not talk about the product. He will talk about post.

“A man wrote to me last winter,” he says. “Bought one in 1998 for a job in Alaska. He only got in touch because he’d finally worn a buckle out and wanted to know if I still had the same size. Twenty-seven years, and the thing he needed was a two-dollar buckle.”

There is a drawer under the cutting table with letters like that in it. He does not display them and he was reluctant to get them out. Most of them are about the same thing: the person expected the bag to be worn out years ago, and it still isn’t.

“Nobody writes to tell you a bag lasted eight months. They write when it’s been fifteen years and they’ve started to feel odd about it.”

It is also, he admits, part of the problem. A pack that lasts twenty years is a pack somebody buys once. Nobody comes back for a second one, and he has never worked out how to mind.

This building used to employ half the street

It is easy to miss how large Marlow Market once was, because there is not much left to look at.

In the early nineties there were more than forty people on that floor, working two shifts. The stairwell was loud. There was a second cutting table where the pallet racking is now. Kozar can walk you down the row and tell you who sat at which machine and what year they started.

Today there are eight. Most of the machines are under dust sheets. Nobody was ever let go — people retired, and he never replaced them, because there was not enough work coming in.

The patches are Dana’s job, and always have been

Kozar’s daughter Dana is forty-one. She has been in this building since she was eleven, not because anybody made her, but because she liked it and nobody could keep her out.

Her first job, as a child, was setting the flag patches onto the lid pockets. It is still her job. She does it at the end of the bench, last thing before a pack is folded and boxed.

“I know exactly how many I’ve done, roughly, because I worked it out once and then wished I hadn’t,” she says. “People take them off, and that’s completely fine, they’re on hook-and-loop for a reason. I just like that it was the last thing that happened to it before it went in the box.”

Why you have never heard of any of this

Here is the part that is genuinely hard to write about without sounding unkind.

For forty years, everything went out through that little shop at the front. Someone from the valley came in, bought one, and told their brother-in-law. It worked, so nothing else was ever tried. Marlow Market has never run an advertisement, never had a stall at a trade show, and never sent out a catalogue.

Then the trade moved online, and Kozar did not go with it. Not out of principle. He simply did not know how. No shop, no listings, no idea how any of it is found or paid for.

“I know how to make it. I never learned the other half. That’s on me, and it’s a bit late to be learning it now.”

So he did the only thing he knew how to do, which was to keep making them properly and keep the door open. It has been getting quieter for years. These are hard times in that building, and nobody up there pretends otherwise.

2,500 set aside for readers of this paper

When we asked what would actually help, the answer was not complicated. People need to know the place exists.

So Marlow Market has set aside 2,500 packs at $65 instead of $165 for readers of this piece. It is a reader price and it lasts until those 2,500 are gone. After that the pack costs what it has always cost.

It is not a closing-down sale. Nothing is closing. It is the first piece of advertising this business has done since 1993, and this is what it looks like.

Three people who already own one

How this paper found out about it

This piece exists because of a letter.

In June a reader in Woonsocket wrote to us about a backpack she had been carrying to work since 2010 — sixteen years, nothing torn, nothing frayed — and mentioned, almost as an aside, that she had only recently found out it was made twenty minutes up the road. She wanted to know whether we knew about the place.

We did not. So we drove over.

Kozar knew nothing about any of it until a reporter called him. He was, by his own account, not delighted.

“I don’t like being written about,” he said, twice, on two separate visits. “I make bags. That’s the whole story.” Dana, standing about three feet away, rolled her eyes so hard we heard it.

What you are actually buying

A backpack that you stop thinking about, because it stops giving you reasons to.

It takes what you put in it. It sits right whatever your back is shaped like. And on the evidence of the people who already own one, it will outlast the phone in your pocket, the car on your driveway, and two or three of the jobs you take between now and whenever you finally retire it.

And while those 2,500 last, it costs less than a bag that will do none of that.

What readers have been saying since the piece ran