These days if you open your eyes “Big-Big” and look around, you may get some free stuff from marketing companies or startup companies who are trying to create a brand awareness for themselves.

Lately, I have been selected by ripplevox.com to join the AGVA Style Council. For more details on this, please check here.

To cut a long story short, as part of this program, I was given a free messenger laptop bag, and I was supposed to ‘road-test’ it and getting feedback from my family and friends about it.

You can view some images of the laptop bag here.

On first look after collecting the free laptop bag, I thought it look kinda big for me. Anyway I took it home to examine it and test it out.

First of all, on the looks of the bag, it looks too bright and youngish for me (read on because I think this can be changed without changing a new laptop bag). Maybe I am too old for the youngish look.
In any case, I took the bag apart to see how it was designed and how was the inner layout like.

Some good points about the bag:

1. It was quite spacious inside, and good enough to fit some larger-size laptop.

2. They have quite a good number of compartments inside for you to store whatever you want to store. Surprisingly, the inner compartments are detachable if you prefer to use the bag to ‘dump’ your things inside, without wanting the inner compartments to stand in the way in the interior of the bag.

3. The AGVA logo looks quite stylish. I kinda like it.

4. The outer flap of the laptop bag is detachable too and you can swap it with another flap with a different design that you prefer. I guess this is the key reason why this was the outer flap was designed this way. What this means is that you can essentially change the face and design of how your messenger/laptop bag looks by changing the outer flap for the bag!

5. The bag has a detachable “shirt-wrap” that I think can help to separate your shirts from the other things inside the bag, so that your shirt will not be “creased” all over while in the bag.

6. The inner cushioning of the bag feels quite comfortable though. Not too bad for me.

Some points about the bag that I do not like:

1. The outer flap that I was talking earlier on in this blog post has some printed design on it. If you accidentally ‘dog-earred’ one end of the flap where the design is, it will create a “crease” on the printed design, which looks so much less appealing to me. (Think of a very nice shirt that you are wearing but with a crease right where it was very prominent).

2. The shoulder strap was sewed directly onto the laptop bag on its side. I will prefer them to be detachable ones, somehow. At least it gives me an option to choose if I want to use the bag.

Suggestion for improvements:

1. The zippers on the bag and the zipper clips felt ‘cheap’ to me although functional-wise, I think they are fine (but I am not sure how long they can last). To increase the perceived value of the bag for consumers and for AGVA to sell the bag at a higher price, I think they can improvise on the zipper clips.

2. Somehow I do not quite like the shoulder strap, because it kinda feel thin (and maybe cheap?) on my hands. I think this can be improved too.

Overall rating: 6.5/10 (if they can improve on the above pointers, especially for the design of the outer flap or the colour of the entire bag, I will not hesitate too much to give it a 7.5 to 8 score)

About Donald Lim, the reviewer: I have been using quite a number of messenger and laptop bags brand such as Samsonite, Calvin Klein, Eastpak, MobileEdge etc. Along with each experience with all these bags over the years, I kinda know what I am looking for in a messenger/laptop bag.