A father-and-son business that grew out of the import trade.

High Sierra is an American brand of backpacks, duffels and wheeled luggage, and its story starts in the import business rather than on a mountain trail. A company fact sheet published around 2010 sets out the history in a dated timeline. It says the business was founded in 1978 as H. Bernbaum Import & Export Company, with Harry Bernbaum as chairman and his son Hank Bernbaum as president, and that it was then privately held by the two of them. At that time the fact sheet gave the company’s address as Vernon Hills, Illinois, a suburb north of Chicago.

The same timeline reaches further back than the brand itself. It says that in the late 1940s Harry Bernbaum bought surplus army supplies and sold them on to wholesalers and retailers, and that in the early 1950s a chance order for an aluminium military canteen led him to write to a manufacturer in Osaka, which invited him to visit Japan. From 1958 to 1968, the fact sheet says, he built up Seaway Importing Company, which specialised in sporting goods for mass merchants, and in 1969 he sold it to U.S. Industries, staying on as president for several years. In 1971 he took Hank with him to the Far East.

The new company followed in 1978. According to the fact sheet, Harry Bernbaum began exporting Levi’s jeans to Japan to raise capital for H. Bernbaum Import & Export Company. Hank joined in 1979, and the business was “later renamed High Sierra Sport Company to better align it with its outdoor product lines”. The fact sheet describes the vision the two men set as providing the consumer with a “high-quality, price value alternative”.

Canvas bags, outdoor packs, private label and the slopes.

The company’s timeline places its move into manufacturing contracts in the mid-1980s. In 1985–86, it says, High Sierra set up contracts with companies in China to make canvas bags, while also shipping DuPont Cordura fabric to Asia to produce outdoor backpacks. The popularity of cotton canvas bags, the fact sheet says, took the company into the luggage business, and its production capacity brought in private-label work for other companies, among them G.H. Bass, J. Crew and Eddie Bauer. Tents were key items in its outdoor range at the time, and in 1986 it added a High Seas foul-weather gear line.

The fact sheet says High Sierra began to streamline its product lines in the early 1990s and expanded its overseas manufacturing contracts in the mid-1990s. Between 1997 and 1999 it introduced lines aimed at adventure travellers, winter-sports enthusiasts and sailors, entered event sponsorship and became the licensee for Vail Resorts logo fleecewear. In 2000–01 it added day packs and wheeled book bags, and reintroduced its Endeavors line with a design it called the S.U.T., short for “Savvy Ultimate Traveler”. In 2002, the timeline says, it partnered with the United States Ski and Snowboard Association as an official supplier.

By then the company was running several names side by side. The fact sheet lists four brands — High Sierra, Sierra Expedition, Sierra Sport and Georgian Bay — and product lines that ran from adventure-travel ranges and Cordura duffels to hydration packs, internal-frame packs, ski and snowboard bags and yoga bags. Among the trade bodies it named as memberships were the American Institute of Graphic Arts, the American Center for Design and the Color Marketing Group, alongside outdoor, sporting-goods and travel-goods associations.

In May 2012 the company moved again. SGB Media reported that High Sierra would occupy a new LEED-certified headquarters in Gurnee, Illinois, from 21 May 2012, with an administrative office, a design center and a larger distribution area. Hank Bernbaum, quoted as president, credited “the steady growth High Sierra has achieved”. The company also said a large illuminated High Sierra sign would face the I-94 highway between Illinois and Wisconsin, and described itself as the official supplier of bags and luggage for the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Team.

Design and documentation.

Backpack brands sit at many different points in the bag trade, from small workshops that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger luggage and outdoor groups, and a single name can be sold everywhere from a school-supply aisle to a specialist travel shop.

A backpack brand’s identity is usually carried less by any one bag than by a name, a logo patch, a colour range and a story about where the brand began, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or widened its range to shoes, luggage or accessories far beyond the pack it started with. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly, whatever the size or age of the business: who started it, who owns it now, and where its bags are actually designed and made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its bags are made and how its marks and labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A Samsonite brand since 2012.

Two months after the move to Gurnee, the family business changed hands. On 18 July 2012, in a media release issued in Hong Kong, Samsonite International announced that it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire substantially all of the assets of High Sierra Sport Company, which it described as a U.S.-based manufacturer and distributor of casual bags and adventure travel luggage. The Boston Herald reported the deal the same day. Samsonite said the purchase would extend its brand portfolio into the casual outdoor and sport segments of the luggage market, and that High Sierra’s backpacks, adventure luggage and sports bags appealed to outdoor enthusiasts, skiers and snowboarders, adventure travellers, students and young consumers. It also said it planned to open High Sierra retail stores and saw room for brand extensions, both directly and through licences.

Hank Bernbaum, named in the release as High Sierra’s chief executive, called it “a thrilling moment in High Sierra’s history” and said the company had found in Samsonite “a true partner”. Samsonite has owned High Sierra since 2012; at the time of the deal, the group’s release named Samsonite and American Tourister as its principal brands.

For a design guide, High Sierra shows how a name chosen to fit an outdoor range can carry an import business into backpacks, ski bags and wheeled luggage, and then into a global luggage group. Compare JanSport, the American backpack brand, and Eastpak, the backpack brand with an army-supplier origin. For this guide we use ridge blue, granite slate and trail orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep High Sierra’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.