Origin

Growing up I was inspired by my grandma’s plentiful stories of hitchhiking in her youth and hiking across Europe multiple times. In 2014 we went on a pilgrimage together and in 2018 I finally went on my first big solo hike. Shortly after the hike I did my mandatory military service and was left with a knee that was worse for wear. At the same time, I was yearning to go hiking more than ever. The best way for those two facts to coexist in the short term was to bring light gear.

After some research, I couldn’t find a suitable lightweight backpack and caught myself thinking “how hard could it be?”. I dug out my mom’s old sewing machine and went to town. The result (pictured) was frankly not a thing of beauty but it was freakishly light and survived a surprising amount of abuse. While the living room table and old domestic sewing machine have long been swapped out with a more professional setup, the ingenuity and lust for creating the best possible gear still remains.

The name?

I was riding my bike across Australia during the driest and warmest spring on record. On a desert stretch, I entered a haze and soon an epiphany hit me. I felt like I was thinking clearer than ever. I like making and tinkering with gear. I should just do that for a living. To hell with all the rest!

With that decided, I just needed a name. I had stumbled upon the song “No Rain” by Blind Melon. As I was certainly no Melon, I began pondering other fruits when I remembered I’d seen Australia’s biggest banana not once, but twice. Hmm. I was definetely more like a banana, being just slighly taller than average. Blind Banana… Bags? BBB. I liked the alliteration.

As you can imagine, I wasn’t in fact thinking clearly but rather dehydrated and sleep deprived. It was +40C degrees during the day, I had only access to slightly brackish bore water and I barely slept during the night to get the most out of the cooler temperatures. Luckily, when I hit a town some 4 days later and woke from what felt like a fever deam, the idea still seemed sound and of course the name stuck around too.