Miami · Atelier since 2024

We make one
suitcase, well.

BLN Travel is a five-person studio in Miami Design District making polycarbonate luggage the way pieces of furniture used to be made — by hand, in a single workshop, with parts you can replace.

01 · The shell

A single sheet, vacuum-formed.

Every BLN shell starts as a 2.4 mm sheet of aerospace-grade polycarbonate from Bayer MaterialScience in Leverkusen. The sheet is heated to 165 °C and pulled over a forming jig — one piece, no seams, no glue.

Polycarbonate flexes under impact and returns to form. It's the same material used in police shields and the canopy of the F-22 Raptor — strong enough to outlast a dropped overhead bin, light enough that a child can lift the case off the carousel.

02 · The atelier

Made in Design District, by five people.

Our workshop sits on the ground floor of a former bakery on Skalitzer Straße. Five craftspeople — two of them third-generation luggage makers from Trier — assemble each piece by hand. A finished case passes through their hands 11 times before it ships.

We don't run a production line. We finish forty cases a week and we like it that way. The bottleneck is the polishing — Reinhardt insists on doing every shell himself, and we don't argue with him.

03 · The hardware

German, Japanese, and lifetime.

The lock is a TSA-approved 3-dial unit from Travelsentry. The wheels are Hinomoto Lisof 360° silent runners, machined in Toyama, Japan — the same wheels Briggs & Riley uses on their President line. The telescoping handle is multi-stop CNC aluminum from Würth in Künzelsau.

Every part is replaceable. We keep ten years of spares for each generation. Crack a wheel in 2034 and we'll ship you a new set — free.

By the numbers

Times each case is touched by a craftsperson before it ships.

Cases finished per week. The cap is on purpose.

10y

Spares stocked for every generation. Wheels, handles, locks.

∞

Warranty. If we made it, we'll fix it.

04 · Repair, don't replace

A suitcase you'll hand down.

We design every BLN case so its parts can be swapped out — not glued, not riveted shut. Mail us your case from anywhere in the world and we'll repair it in our Miami atelier, free, for the life of the product. Then we ship it back, carbon-offset.

Shop The Carry-On

Founders

Three friends from Miami and New York.

We started BLN Travel because the suitcases we travelled with — German, Japanese, French — were all built to be thrown away in five years. We didn't want a logo case. We wanted a case that outlived its purchase, and a workshop we could walk into. That's all this is.

One hundred pieces · July 15

The list closes Thursday.

First access goes to subscribers 24 hours before the public link opens. Code FIRST100 at checkout for 10% off.

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