FOR most people, travelling light usually means not packing that extra suit or five pairs of shoes for different occasions. At Rimowa, travelling light has meant more than a century of developing materials and technology to create the ultimate lightweight suitcase that has been key to its success as a leading luggage maker.
Even when the global financial crisis put the brakes on air travel and the economy in general, Rimowa chalked up a 26 per cent increase in sales in 2009, says Dieter Morszeck, Rimowa's current chief executive officer who was in town recently.
Mr Morszeck comes from a long line of bag-makers, starting from his grandfather Paul, a horse-bridle repairer who set up Rimowa in 1898 in Cologne, Germany. It specialised in making city bags, women's hat decorations and trunks of plywood covered with leather, and it did well in those early days of travel.
The company evolved in tandem with new modes of transportation. By the time Mr Morszeck's father, Richard, took over the business in the early 1900s, the golden era of shipping had begun. People were travelling longer distances to tropical countries, and leather suitcases could not take the weather. 'The leather got really ugly because of the high humidity,' explains Mr Morszeck.
In 1937, his father produced the first steel trunk for travel to tropical climates, quickly following up with ultra-lightweight cases made of aircraft aluminium when the first passenger aeroplane crossed the Atlantic in 1939.
'Early luggage was too heavy for air travel until my father came up with a case made of aircraft aluminium with grooves,' says Mr Morszeck. 'This was very lightweight in comparison to leather cases.' It was also pretty forward-thinking in terms of design, because that same template is today Rimowa's signature - and a contemporary looking one at that.
Still, the industrial look of the cases catered mainly to a niche market, made up mostly of the broadcasting industry, movie companies and air rescue teams who used the hardy bags for work. Says Mr Morszeck: 'Women, especially, didn't like it because it looked so strange back then.' So Rimowa experimented with other materials, until it struck gold ... well, polycarbonate, to be precise.
'In 1997, we came up with the idea of using polycarbonate, which is heat proof for up to 120 degrees Celsius and cold proof down to minus 100 degrees Celsius,' notes Mr Morszeck. 'You can smash it, freeze it ... and it won't break. We were like kids when we came across it for the first time - we had shells and we jumped on the shells and they popped back. And we thought, that's the next generation of luggage.'
Indeed, polycarbonate suitcases have been driving Rimowa's success since, holding it in good stead despite the recession. 'Even now, 10 years since we came up with the cases, there's no competitor with better quality,' says Mr Morszeck.
There are, he admits, 'so many copies from China', but because polycarbonate is such a difficult material to work with, imitators find it tough to reproduce the same quality. 'A lot of special treatments are involved - it's a very small pass you're going through and when you make a small mistake, you will get poor quality,' he says. 'Take, for example, the process of vacuum forming (which shapes the material into suitcase shells) - our polycarbonate is first made in Germany, then it goes to Sweden and they make it into sheets. Then we get the sheets and they are heated in a process controlled by computers into very thin sheets, between 1.6mm and 2mm. A lot of knowledge is involved and everything has to be very precise.'
In future, he predicts, luggage trends will roll towards bags that are even more lightweight and durable, as well as top-end pieces - 'we think there's room to grow for very exclusive luggage, especially in Asia where they like very exclusive things to buy', says Mr Morszeck.
Rimowa being the precocious label that it is, however, it's already manufacturing for the future: The company recently came up with a new Salsa Air range that is 30 per cent lighter than its usual pieces, and it will soon launch an Exclusive series of cases hewn out of solid blocks of aluminium. Three colour schemes will be available: silver trimmed with chrome; gold with gold-plated locks; and graphite with platinum-plated locks.
All in the name of travelling light, so you don't have to.
Rimowa is at #02-19 Mandarin Gallery and #01-68 Millenia Walk.
This article was first published in The Business Times.
