Forty-four luxury lofts are going in where he has sewn since 1985. There is a reason he is not setting up somewhere new, and it is the reason his remaining stock is now 60% off.

Roland Kozar found out in March, from a stranger on his stairs with a laser measure.

The building had sold six weeks earlier. Nobody had thought to mention it. The formal notice — out by September 30 — turned up eleven days after the man with the measure, and by then there were orange survey marks on the sidewalk out front.

The buyer is turning the old brick works on Marlow Street into forty-four loft residences. Four floors, a loading yard, and a window wall that runs the full length of the building. Kozar has the top floor, which holds light from first thing in the morning until the sun drops behind the hill. In the sales plans, the top floor is the expensive one.

“I want to be clear that I’m not retiring,” he says, flatly, no drama in it. “Nobody asked me a single question. The building changed hands, and I found out from a guy measuring my stairwell for a lobby.”

Four floors, and only one of them still working

The room smells of machine oil, cut nylon and coffee. A radio in the corner is playing something with a lot of horn in it, quietly. Rolls of fabric stand on end against the wall, a different colour on each one. On the wall by the door hangs a calendar with one date in September circled in red, and a yellow tape measure that has been around Kozar’s neck for four decades.

Half the machines are already under dust sheets. He sits at the one nearest the window — the same one he started on — with a half-finished shoulder strap under the foot.

“There were four businesses in here when I took over,” he says, without looking up. “Tool and die under me, a printer on two, an upholsterer out in the yard building. They went one at a time and I never thought much about it. You don’t. Not until you’re the last one left and somebody’s measuring your stairs.”

Ask him whether it’s unfair and he shrugs. “It’s a good building. Sooner or later somebody was going to want it for something better than backpacks. I’d rather spend August working than arguing.”

It started with mail sacks

To understand what gets emptied out on September 30, you have to go back a good way before Kozar.

“My grandfather came over from Moravia in 1929,” he says. “He sewed canvas mail sacks. That’s it, that was the whole business — sacks for the post office. He took this floor in 1957 because the rent was nothing and the windows were big. My father ran it after him. I took it over in 1985. I was twenty-five and I had no idea what I was doing.”

What the shop now sells as Roland’s Mill Street Backpack started with a complaint. A local contractor kept tearing the bottom out of the packs he bought, twice a year, every year. Kozar cut him a new one out of heavy nylon with a doubled base and bar-tacked every seam that carried weight. The man came back eleven months later — not to replace it, but to order four more for his crew.

In the 41 years since, Kozar has sewn a little over 70,000 of them on this floor. The pattern has been refined maybe six times. It has never been redesigned.

That is not a large number, and it isn’t meant to be. There is no assembly line up here and nothing is automated. Over the years there have been as few as three people on the floor and never more than eight — a handful of neighbours who come in to run panels and set zippers, most of them part-time, most of them for a very long time.

And then there is Kozar, at the machine by the window, every working day since 1985.

He cuts the pattern himself. He sews the shoulder straps himself, and puts the bar-tacks in himself, because that is the joint the whole bag hangs off and he has never been willing to hand it to anybody else. 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. If you own one of these, my hands have been on it. All of them. That’s not a sales line, that’s just the only way I know how to run it.”

The part nobody bothers to copy

Pick one up and you feel it immediately. It has weight — not heavy, but solid. The shell doesn’t crackle. The straps don’t fold over on themselves when you load it. The zippers 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.”

• Kozar’s hands, on every single one. He cuts the pattern, sews the shoulder straps, sets the bar-tacks, and checks every finished pack himself before it is boxed. No exceptions in 41 years.
• The 41-year pattern. Refined six times since 1985, never redesigned. Nothing on this pack is there because it looked good in a rendering.
• 1000D nylon shell, doubled at the base. The panel that fails first on a cheap pack is two layers here.
• 14 bar-tacked stress points. Every place the weight actually pulls, fed through the machine by hand, one at a time. This is the work that gets cut first when a bag is built down to a price.
• 45 liters. Carry-on size for most U.S. domestic flights, and a full week’s worth of room.
• Padded, ventilated shoulder straps with a sternum strap and a removable waist belt — so it sits right whether you’re 5’2” or 6’5”.
• Padded laptop sleeve that takes up to a 17” machine, 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’s a backpack, not a statement.
• Hand-stamped brass plate on the zipper pull, carrying the number of the final run.
• Whatever is still on the shelf. The colours left are simply the ones that haven’t gone yet. Some run out weeks before others, and when one is gone there is no dye lot coming behind it.

Sixteen years of night shifts

Ask him what he is proudest of and he will not talk about the product at all. He will talk about email.

“A woman emailed me in the spring,” he says. “Bought one in 2010. Nursing, three twelve-hour shifts a week, sixteen years. She only wrote to ask whether I still sold the waist belt separately, because she’d lost hers on a train. Sixteen years. Nothing torn, nothing frayed. That’s what I wanted the work to do.”

It’s one of the few things going into a box rather than a dumpster.

It isn’t the business he’s losing

Kozar is 67 and his hands have been getting worse for four years. Nobody would blink if he closed the business tomorrow of his own accord. That is not what is bothering him.

What is bothering him is the hour between six and seven in the morning, when the coffee is on and the first panels are cut and the light comes flat across the table from the east end of the window wall, and there is no one else in the building. He has had that hour roughly ten thousand times.

And the part he keeps circling back to is this: the light is exactly what the developer is selling. It is on the second page of the plans. The thing that made forty-one years of work possible is now a bullet point in somebody else’s brochure.

Three reasons there is no next floor

Everybody who hears about this asks him the same question, and they usually ask it within about ten seconds: why not just move?

There are three answers, and any one of them on its own would be enough.

One: there is nowhere to move to. A floor that carries this much weight, with windows like these, does not go to a man sewing backpacks. It goes to whoever pays the most — which is exactly why he is losing this one. He has spent five months looking. There is nothing left in Pawtucket he could take on and still sell a pack at a price anybody would pay.

Two: his hands are finished. The arthritis started in his right thumb about four years ago and has been working its way across both hands ever since. He can still put in a full day at the machine. He cannot put in a full day and then get up and do it again the next morning. Every pack sitting in that stockroom was sewn while his hands still worked properly. There was never going to be a forty-second year.

Three: there is nobody to hand it to. Dana runs the shipping side, not the sewing. Twice over the years he trained somebody young, and both times they left inside a year for work that paid better and hurt less. Everyone he knows who can run a walking-foot machine all day is his age or older, and they are all stopping at roughly the same time. He is not being dramatic when he says the trade goes out the door with him. He has simply looked, and there is no one.

“People think I’m being stubborn about it. I’d take a new floor tomorrow if there was one going. I’d take ten more years in these hands. I’d take somebody standing behind me who wanted it. There isn’t any of the three. So that’s that.”

The last thing he still gets to decide

Which brings us to the price, and to the only real choice he has left in any of this.

“I’ve got two options otherwise. Rent a storage unit I’d be paying for out of a pension I don’t have yet. Or hand the whole lot to a clearance buyer and let them sell it on with my name cut out of it. Neither one is happening.”

So he cut the whole remaining run by 60% and started shipping. “Forty-one years making a thing you carry,” he says. “I want to be able to picture them. On a platform, on a site, walking somebody’s kid to school. Not stacked in a unit off Route 95 with a padlock on it.” He nods at the ceiling. “They’re getting the building. Fine. They’re not getting these.”

He is unhurried about most of it. On this one point he is not.

Three people who already own one

Who is actually packing the boxes

There is no distributor and no retail account. Everything goes out of the Marlow Street loading door, and the whole shop end of it is run by Kozar’s daughter Dana, 41.

“I have never once been on that website,” Kozar says. “She could be selling anything. Right now she’s mostly taping boxes and I’m mostly carrying them, and we are both behind.”

Dana has carried hers since 2017. “Mine has been through grad school, two apartments and a lot of airports,” she says. “People assume it’s a men’s bag because of how it looks in photos. It isn’t. Take the patch off, cinch the waist belt, and it’s just the best-built backpack most people will ever own. That’s the part that gets me — we finally had people finding us, and now we’re closing.”

September 30, and then it’s a building site

Between the price and the date, the remaining stock is going considerably faster than anybody here planned for.

After the thirtieth the floor becomes scaffolding and drywall, the machines go wherever machines go, and the number of Mill Street backpacks in the world stops going up permanently.

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 current evidence 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.

For the next few weeks it is also the difference between forty-one years of work walking out through the loading door, and forty-one years of work going into a storage unit nobody ever opens again.

What people have been saying since the news went round