Philly is an incredibly supportive community. A couple of people saw them and started asking us would we make bags for them. We were also going to alleycats as much as possible at the time. So we just started going there and telling people we could make them stuff. And that pretty much how it started.”

ON THE ORIGIN OF THE NAME

“We took a long time trying to think of a name. I am Roland, Elle is Elle, that’s R.E. and then we were thinking reloading, you are always taking things in and out of your bag. Figure it kind of fit as our name as it fit the function of the bag. That’s where the name came from. We started in 1997 kind of making stuff for ourselves and then we decided to start to actively trying to sell bags in early 1998.”

ON EARLY SALES

“We probably sold a couple of bags a month, all completely local and all completely word of mouth.What really turned it around for us was when the CMWC was here in 2000. That brought tons of people, all these people from other countries came in and at that point we were really happy with the bags we were making. I think the quality was there, customization was already there in a lot of ways. At that point no one else was really doing that.”

ON THE EXPLOSION OF BAG COMPANIES

“It is hard to imagine back then that it would spread out so much. I think bag company-wise it was us, Timbuk2, Chrome was around, Manhattan Portage, BaileyWorks, PAC and I remember PUSH. Now there is a bag company in every city.”

ON ALLEYCAT RACES

“That has gotten kind of crazy, in my mind. When it first started, there would be alleycats once a month, maybe. Now there are events happening every weekend somewhere. We get requests for all that stuff.”

ON THE MAKING OF A RELOAD BAG

“What the company is based on is the skills of the people who work here. There is no crazy machine that does stuff for us. It’s all done by hand and it’s all controlled by hand. By individual people, which is what I think sets us apart.”

ON THE FIRST MESSENGER BACKPACKS

“I remember Corey [Hilliard] got one. It must have been 2000 or 2001. At the time you’d see a lot of Ortliebs, like for the CMWC here. The German teams all had Ortliebs. People, if they wanted a backpack, they would use the Ortlieb, but in my mind they were too small. I didn’t see the point of having a backpack that couldn’t fit at least one cargo box, if not multiple cargo boxes. Then Ortliebs didn’t have pockets. They had that one removable pouch, so it didn’t seem like it had enough features. So Corey had us build a crazy back pack that I think was actually too big, but he rocked it and still uses it to this day. That was pretty much the start of us trying to figure out a real useable big capacity back pack. I am pretty sure we were the first company who started thinking about messenger back packs to fit real cargo.”

ON MOVING FORWARD

“Our main focus is in continuing to keep up the quality of what we have and trying to expand our image in terms of actually being artisans. We consider ourselves artists and craftsmen rather than just manufacturers.”

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