Our Strap Keepers are designed to be the lowest-profile and easiest to use solution out there for bundling and securing excess backpack shoulder strap webbing. They can be used with any brand of backpack that uses 1" webbing; of course, they'll work perfectly with all TOM BIHN packs. They're available in Black for most of our backpacks and also in Coyote to match Coyote trim backpacks like The Guide's Pack or Guide's Edition Synapse 25, Synik 30, or Synik 22.
It’s one of those to-may-to or to-mah-to kind of things: some folks don’t like the excess webbing from our backpack shoulder straps or waist straps and some of folks don’t even notice it.
Those of you who aren’t into the excess webbing have been asking us if we could offer a solution to wrangle it. We’ve been experimenting with different parts and options for a while now, and our Strap Keepers are by far the best option we've used. But that's us: to make sure the design we came up with would work for a majority of people, we sent a complimentary pair of Strap Keepers to a variety of customers (through our Forums; and also to those who pre-ordered a Synik 22 / 30 and received a pre-production batch bag) and asked for feedback. The feedback came back to us via email and in this thread in our Forums; overall, people liked the Strap Keepers enough that we've decided to offer them as an official design.
Here’s why we like our Strap Keepers more than the other solutions we experimented with:
- They’re low-profile with minimalist hardware.
- They’re not sewn in to the bag.
- They don’t fall off the bag even when they aren’t being used to wrangle webbing (if you install them the way we recommend; see below.)
- They can work to wrangle excess webbing on any bag (TOM BIHN or otherwise.)
- If properly used — see our photos and video above and the text description below — they don’t result in a dangly ball of strap hanging off the bag.
- It’s pretty easy to use the Strap Keepers to secure the webbing.
It’s important to secure the Strap Keeper to the length of webbing that is between where it is sewn into your backpack and the ladderlock (the buckle through which the webbing is fed). This way, if you pull on the bundled webbing, the Strap Keeper will remain attached to your pack and won’t fall off. If you use the Strap Keeper to bundle the length of webbing that extends beyond the ladderlock and hangs down to itself — resulting in a dangly ball of webbing — it, well, creates a dangly ball of webbing and, if you undo that ball of webbing, the Strap Keeper will likely fall off entirely.
