We carried nine nylon totes for a fortnight each — same commute, same contents, same weather — and graded them on four things: whether the handles held, whether the base sagged, whether the fabric marked, and whether we were still willing to carry them at the end. Five failed on at least one count. The winner was the second cheapest in the group.
What failed and how
Handle joins failed on three bags, all in the same way: the stitching that attaches the strap to the body pulled through the face fabric under a heavy load. Two bags developed a permanent sag at the base, because there was no separate base panel and the weight simply stretched the body. One marked badly and never recovered after a single encounter with a leaking coffee cup.
The £48 winner had continuous handles running under the base, a separate reinforced bottom, and a coated nylon face that shrugged off everything we spilled on it. It has no brand marking of any kind, which is either a virtue or a marketing failure depending on your view. After two weeks of abuse it looked essentially unused.
“Turn it upside down in the shop. If the handles stop at the body, put it back.”
Lex Amari, commerce editor
The rest of the ranking
Second place went to a £190 waxed-canvas tote that is heavier, considerably more beautiful, and will outlive everything else here by a decade — but it weighs 780 grams empty, which is a real cost on a daily commute. Third was a £92 recycled-nylon bag let down only by a zip pull that arrived bent and stayed bent.
The most expensive bag in the test, at £640, finished sixth. It is beautifully made and the leather trim marked in light rain within the first week, which on a bag sold specifically as a workhorse is a design decision rather than a defect. It will look wonderful in year five if it never goes outside.
What we would change about all nine
Not one of the nine had an internal divider that actually worked. Every bag in the test either had nothing, which means a laptop sits against a water bottle, or had a padded sleeve so tight it was unusable once anything else was in the bag. It is a solved problem in rucksacks and apparently an unsolved one in totes, and it was the single most common complaint from everybody who carried them.
The second universal failure was closure. Four of the nine had no way of shutting at all, two had a magnetic clasp that opened under load, and only one had a full-length zip that could be operated one-handed while walking. For a bag category that exists specifically to be carried through cities in bad weather on public transport, that is a strange set of priorities.
For the record, we have kept using the winner since the test ended and it is now at seven months. The base has softened slightly, the coating has a scuff from a bike rack, and nothing has failed. On current evidence the four-year estimate looks conservative, which would put the running cost somewhere around a pound a month for the thing we carry every single day.
The conclusion is the one we keep arriving at in this section: past about £80, extra money on a everyday bag buys beauty rather than durability. Buy the construction, not the price, and spend the difference on something that cannot be replaced for £48.
