Utah County couple creates ‘adventure’ bag for travelers
Alexia and Bentley Wilson pose together before discussing their new product, the Halton Commuter Bag, in a video in early 2019.
The Halton Commuter Bag is unzipped and laid flat next to a demonstration of what kinds of items can fit inside it, early 2019.
Bentley and Alexia Wilson have a semitypical Utah millennial love story. The couple met while attending Timpview High School in Provo, and afterwards, both served missions for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Alexia Wilson went to England while Bentley Wilson served in what’s called the Adriatic North mission, spending most of his time in Slovenia and Croatia.
After their missions, Bentley Wilson said, “(I) married her as fast as I could before someone else did.”
Alexia Wilson was attending culinary school and Bentley Wilson was studying at BYU. Alexia Wilson finished her degree, but Bentley Wilson said he felt “unfulfilled” at BYU. He dropped out at the end of his junior year.
“BYU is a great school,” Bentley Wilson said. “I guess the best way to say it is just that it wasn’t for me.”
The couple knew that they wanted to work for themselves, building products and “mak(ing) our mark on the world,” Bentley Wilson said. Alexia Wilson said they’re always trying to think of ideas.
“Our minds are always running,” she said.
Serving missions in Europe instilled an “obsession” for travel in the husband-and-wife team. Bentley Wilson said he and his wife are cliche millennials who would rather spend their money on experiences above anything else.
“A lot of our ideas kind of revolve around things that we love to do and one of the biggest things that we love to do is travel,” Bentley Wilson said.
Shortly after the couple was married, they went backpacking in Yellowstone. Alexia Wilson said they struggled with the typical backpack problem where they would try to get one thing out of their backpack and pull out 10 other things in an effort to find it. That was four years ago.
“We’ve been thinking about it for a long time,” she said.
So, the Halton bag was born.
The Halton bag is a 25-liter backpack that is shaped like a rectangle and opens like a typical backpack, with a zipper at the top — but then, it also unzips to lay entirely flat, exposing tons of different pockets.
“The whole goal is to make it so you can stay extremely organized the entire time you’re using it,” Bentley Wilson said. “It has tons of different pockets for different uses.”
The idea came from a desire to see everything they had packed in a backpack without having to get everything out, he explained.
The unzipped backpack also includes hooks so it can be hung from a hotel hanger or a tree branch, depending on the traveler, to become a hanging closet.
Of course, neither Wilson has a background in design, so putting the initial product together took some work.
Alexia Wilson said her husband sewed a very basic original prototype.
“It basically was fabric with a zipper that made this (rectangular) shape, but that was about it,” she explained. “We basically just wanted to see if the … full-length zipper around the corners and stuff was even possible … there were no pockets or anything, we weren’t even going to attempt that.”
She said they stayed up until 2 a.m. putting it together, and then reached out to Utah locals to see if someone could put together a better prototype. They found someone who made two prototypes for them, and used those two bags to launch their Kickstarter, which has since been fully funded, overshooting their goal to raise $25,000 by a few thousand.
Now, the Wilsons have worked with a manufacturer in China to mass produce the bags and received the first prototype from China a few weeks ago, before they took a two-week trip to Europe. It isn’t quite perfect — “(but) it’s very close,” Bentley Wilson said.
“With our daughter, we (had) her stroller, and multiple bags and we each have our own carry on, and (the bag) just became, it’s basically a part of you,” he said. “I didn’t have to think about it as I was holding (Gemma’s) stroller and her and trying to get off the plane and Alexia’s doing everything else …. It really is comfortable and I love that it can kind of feel like it’s part of you while you’re moving.”
“It’s gone all over the world … and it seems like it’s gone through a lot of tests,” Alexia Wilson said. “We’re probably a little biased … I would choose to use it over something else.”
The bags are still in “pre-order” mode and can be ordered through the couples’ just-launched IndieGoGo campaign or at their website, https://www.haltongear.com. The Wilsons expect to ship the bags in July.