Luggage Design for Women

Words by Clara Wooller, CMO at Travel Sentry

At a recent luggage trade show, my colleague Reine and I were asked for our opinion on concept designs targeted at women – did we like the material, the color, the features. I’m happy to report that none of the designs we were shown espoused the ‘pink and shrink’ approach, but it certainly got me thinking about what best in class design for women could look like in practice and how it might come about.

Luggage is a rare category where the user's physical strength, their route and their care responsibilities all collide; it seems to me that the industry has optimized for a traveler who has plenty of the first, an easy version of the second and none of the third. Designing for women is more than a styling exercise; it's a load, leverage and context problem. Solving it produces better luggage for everyone.

INT. NARROW-BODY AIRCRAFT - AISLE - DAY

Emma, 30s, 5'2", hugs a cabin case against her chest.

The bin lip sits above her shoulder.

She squats, drives up and lands the bag's edge on the lip. It balances there. Her arms are already straight.

Now the push. Nothing to brace against but the seat back.

She shoves. The bag goes in halfway and stops on the wheels.

Behind her the aisle has stopped. Eight people, ten.

EMMA

Sorry.

A MAN, 50s, taller, half-rises from 14B.

MAN

Want a hand?

She doesn't answer. She gets a shoulder under the bag and drives it in with her legs. Then jumps for the overhead bin door — catches it on the second try and pushes it down. It latches.

She sits. Nobody looks at her. The queue moves on.

From a user experience point of view, nothing about Emma’s interaction on the plane was designed with her in mind. It was designed, if that's the word, around an assumption about height, reach and shoulder strength that nobody in the industry has had to write down because it was written down for them, fifty years ago, by someone else.

Ever heard of ‘Reference Man’? Reference Man, created in the mid-1970s, is a white male aged 25–35, around 70kg and 170cm who became the default standard human used as the measure for everything. Women were historically excluded from research studies, so their measurements rarely entered the data that shapes design (e.g. female crash test dummies were only introduced within the last five years, when cars have been around for well over a hundred years) and even where female-specific data exists, the sample sizes are often small. The common shortcut when designing for women is to scale a man's measurements down by 30% - 40%, but short men are highly inadequate as a proxy.

The answer, of course, isn't a Reference Woman. She'd be a fiction too: the women in the airplane aisle with our fictional friend, Emma range from 4'11" to 6'1", from powerlifter to grandma. The problem with Reference Man was never only that he was a man. It was that he was one man.

Now, let’s have a look at particular pain points to fix, which have been crowdsourced from Travel Sentry’s female employees, seasoned travelers all.

Leverage, not strength. The overhead bin lift, the kerb lift, the stair carry. Design responses could include a lower centre of gravity, a proper second grab handle at the base, unladen weight treated as an accessibility spec rather than a premium boast. On a fixed 23kg allowance, every gram of shell steals from laden weight, which penalizes the weaker user twice.
Geometry. Telescopic handles that extend to a height suited to a taller torso force shoulder rotation and wrist strain over a long concourse walk. Handle diameter is usually sized to a larger palm. Handle release buttons needing thumb strength. Backpack luggage is where the scale-it-down fallacy bites hardest: sternum straps routed across breasts, hip belts designed for a narrower pelvis, torso lengths that don't adjust. We’ve already seen ride-on luggage with an electric battery – what about a modification of that where the luggage is designed to ‘walk to heel’ with its owner at close range, via a Bluetooth phone tether?
Payload. What's in the bag differs and none of it has a designated home: clothes that don’t pack flat or that crumple, heels (heavy, awkward, dirty), hair tools that are still hot, medication, period products with nowhere to put the used ones, breast pumps and expressed milk needing to be kept cold.
The pocket deficit.

INT. NARROW-BODY AIRCRAFT - AISLE - DAY

Emma, 30s, 5'2", hugs a cabin bag against her chest. The bin lip sits above her shoulder. Her hands are wrong. Phone and boarding pass pinned under one palm against the bag. Coffee in the other.

INT. AIRPORT - GATE - MOMENTS EARLIER

Emma stands. Dress, no pockets. She loads herself: passport into her teeth, phone and pass into one hand, coffee into the other. She looks at the case. There is nowhere on it to put any of this.

There’s a reason this Instagram account has become so popular – and it highlights a real opportunity to deliver genuine value and usefulness through mandatory external pocket inclusion on carry-ons and personal items. We demand more pockets, for our seditious pamphlets!

Route. Caroline Criado Perez’s book Invisible Women cites fear as a design constraint. She's emphatic on how the risk of harassment reshapes women's routes, timings and travel choices, a cost invisible in transport data because often the trip just doesn’t get taken. Applied to luggage: wheeling a case makes you slow, loud, one-handed, unable to run and visibly a tourist. Nobody designs for that. Quiet wheels, low-key branding, ease of manoeuvrability across a range of environments, luggage you can keep in contact with your body while seated alone at a station. Could luggage in the future be capable of having some personal protective or defensive qualities?

Pink it and shrink it is still out there – but that’s because color is cheap and fixing geometry and design problems is expensive, so colour is what gets shipped. Don’t even get me started on the pink tax point, which is where products get more expensive when they're targeted at women.

Returning to our partners from the start of this piece, who wanted our feedback – I think that is a promising start to better design for women. But to bring about true systemic change, these are the table stakes, which start from the drawing board and have women at the table throughout:

Who's in the room and in the user test: the ABC piece's designer, Alexandra Garland, makes the point that more women are needed across the whole process from concept and research through to delivery and implementation and also that this can't be left to women alone when most people in power are men.
Test protocols: recruit for the 5th percentile of grip and reach, not the 50th. Test on cobbles, stairs, and gravel, not showroom floors. Test with a child in tow.
Design for range, rather than installing a new single default. Adjustability is the honest answer to population diversity.

None of this is a concession. A case that a 5'2" woman can push into a bin unaided is the case that works for the 72-year-old, the teenager, the man with a shoulder that's never been right and anyone on a 6am flight after four hours' sleep (hello, that’s me!). Design to the far end of the range and the middle comes free. Design to the middle and you lose both ends.

The industry should know this already. Rolling a suitcase across a city only works because pavements were ramped and pavements were ramped because wheelchair users spent the 1970s demanding it. Wheeled luggage exists on the back of a fight for access it had nothing to do with. It's had fifty years to draw an obvious conclusion.

So, please keep asking us for feedback – it’s great to have a seat at the table - but ask earlier. Consulted at the prototype, all I can tell you is where it hurts. Consulted at the brief, I can tell you exactly what to build.