We don’t cover a lot of offline products, but when it’s locally made, somewhat tech focused, and when they give us a discount code for our readers, we shouldn’t pass it by. So definitely check out Hosewear, an Estonian company creating bags and tech gear out of rugged used firehose material. Hosewear was the first company funded by Hooandja.ee, the Estonian Kickstarter-style crowdfunding platform. Today they have a lineup of messenger bags, laptop bags, as well as iPhone and iPad sleeves to help you haul around your stuff and keep it protected.
Ivar Arulaid, the CEO of Hosewear, tells us that he got the idea to use firehoses after first first experimenting with billboard banners to make belts, but found it was too industrial looking for what they were looking for. He then somehow came up with the idea of fire hoses and contacted a firefighter friend to see if he could get some hoses to try the material out.
“I actually ended up getting about 10 km of fire hoses that no longer put out fires – ironically they would have burnt them otherwise,” says Arulaid. So right now we get fire hoses from fire departments all over Estonia. I check for additional hoses once or twice a quarter and go pick these up myself to talk to fire fighters and to let them see some new designs and give feedback. Very differently colored and textured hoses are used when putting out fires, so every time I go to pick up fire hoses, it’s a positive surprise.”
They also gave us a discount code for our readers – just use the code arctic20 during checkout to get 20% off all their products.
