A Cologne brand of children’s backpacks built around animal characters.

Affenzahn is a German brand of children’s backpacks that look like animals. The name is a German word meaning, literally, a monkey’s tooth, and the brand’s signature product is a small backpack whose front is a stitched animal face. It comes from Cologne, and it is a brand of the Cologne company FOND OF, which also makes the school backpacks ergobag and satch.

The brand was trading online well before many of the accounts that now describe it. A capture of affenzahn.com saved by the Internet Archive on 2 March 2014 shows a German-language shop built on the Magento platform. Its privacy text named the operator as Affenzahn GmbH, with an address in Cologne. The dates do not all agree: a FOND OF press text published on FashionUnited in July 2021 says Affenzahn “started in 2015” as a classic backpack brand with its distinctive pull tongue and animal designs. The archived shop itself is dated March 2014.

By 1 January 2015 the website had an English version, and it set out the idea in a few headings. The menu read Home, Details, Team and Shop, and the front page introduced the collection as “Chummy friends”, with a hover game titled “Where is Affenzahn?”. A section called “What are actually the features of Affenzahn?” explained the product one detail at a time, each with a heading written in the voice of the animal on the bag.

The tongue, the strap and the team.

The first feature on the 2015 page was the one that gave the brand its look. Under the heading “Little cheeky monkey!”, the company wrote that “as if by command, your Affenzahn sticks out its tongue and discloses the name of its best friend” — a fabric tongue that pulls out from the animal’s mouth and carries a child’s name. The FOND OF press text of 2021 still calls the Ziehzunge, the pull tongue, the brand’s unmistakable feature.

The other headings on that page described the rest of the bag in the same playful way. “Hold me tight!” introduced a height-adjustable chest strap with a closure the company described as child-friendly. “Hand it over! I’ll take care of it!” described the outer pockets for favourite belongings. “It’s dark? But I can see you!” said the bag was equipped with reflective material. Every line was written as if the animal itself were talking to the child who carried it.

The same page answered the question “Who dreamed the Affenzahn up?” with a joke rather than a founding story: “Actually we do not really remember how we hit on that idea.” It then introduced four people by first name only, each with a role: Sven for the idea, Annemarie for the design, Immi for the product and Nando for “the final touch”. The page did not give surnames.

The footer of that 2015 page tied the brand to its parent. It read “© 2014 Fond Of Bags GmbH”, stated that “Affenzahn is a brand of” Fond Of Bags with a link to fondofbags.com, and listed “further brands of FOND OF BAGS”. The cookie notice on the page still carried the name of ergobag, the school backpack with which the group began.

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.

One of the FOND OF brands, now with shoes as well as bags.

The parent company has changed its name as it has grown. English Wikipedia’s article on the Fond of Group says the business was founded in 2010 in Cologne by Sven-Oliver Pink, Florian Michajlezko, Oliver Steinki and Juliaan Cazin, began as ergobag GmbH with a school backpack of the same name, and was later renamed Fond of Bags and then FOND OF as it added other product categories. The same article lists Affenzahn among the group’s active brands alongside ergobag, satch, AEVOR and pinqponq, and says the group’s products are made substantially with polyester from recycled PET bottles. FOND OF’s own website, in 2026, lists Affenzahn with alvi, ergobag, satch and AEVOR, and describes Affenzahn products as “animal-themed friends that are fun for kids and reliable for parents.”

The range has widened beyond the backpack. The 2021 press text said Affenzahn had gone on to develop and sell children’s shoes and, from the previous year, children’s books, with its animal characters appearing across these product types. The current affenzahn.com shop is organised around shoes for babies and young children, bags including backpacks and little bags, accessories, and a section that sorts the range by animal character. Some products carry a Pure Edition label, which the company says adds genuine leather highlights. The company says its backpacks use fabrics made partly from recycled PET bottles, and the footer of every page reads “A brand of” beside “© 2026 FOND OF GmbH”, with links to the sister brands under the heading “More from the creators of Affenzahn”.

For a design guide, Affenzahn shows how a single character device — an animal face with a tongue that carries a name — can work as a logo, a product feature and a tone of voice at once. Compare High Sierra, the American backpack and luggage brand, and STATE Bags, the Brooklyn bag brand. For this guide we use banana yellow, jungle green and monkey brown with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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