A Cornish case maker that began with boards.

Protection Racket makes padded cases for drums and percussion, and is based in Cornwall, in the far south-west of England. Its website gives a correspondence address in Launceston, near the Devon border, and its tagline is “Getting you there since 1994.” The company says it “grew out of a love of the sea, surf, sun & good music,” and calls Cornwall “the surfing & windsurfing Mecca of the United Kingdom.”

Its own history begins with boards rather than drums. “We made our name making surfboard & windsurf board bags,” the company says, adding that its surfboard bags “are still travelling the world to this day.” Its instrument cases, it says, are built to “the exact same specifications from the exact same materials,” under the motto “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” An archived copy of the same page, captured at the end of 2010, said the company was then “fast approaching our 20th anniversary,” which would place its roots a few years before 1994; the website does not explain the difference, so we give both.

The website does not name a founder, and we found no published interview that does. The public record does show who runs it. In July 2014 Modern Drummer quoted Dean Bowdery as Protection Racket’s managing director: “We have been making cases for more than twenty years to the exact same specifications and using the exact same materials,” he said. Companies House lists Protection Racket Limited as a private company incorporated in April 2001, with Bowdery and Nicholas Nethercot as directors since then. At least three-quarters of its shares are held by a holding company, N.B.D. Limited, in which Bowdery and Nethercot are each recorded as owning more than a quarter. On that record Protection Racket is independent and privately owned.

Racketex, Propile and the Protection Racket Man.

Protection Racket’s cases are mostly soft cases, built from fabric, foam and webbing rather than moulded plastic, and the company names its materials as if they were products. The outer fabric is Racketex, which it calls “The Defender”: a 600-denier polyester that it says is waterproof and will not fade, crack or shrink, and which comes, in the company’s words, “in any colour you like as long as it’s black.” Inside is Propile, a synthetic fleece that it says removes surface moisture and “polishes & cleans your drums in transit,” with a padding layer it calls Propadd. Its rigid drum cases and its Classic and Deluxe guitar cases use a closed-cell foam it calls Rocket Foam, which it says is “strong enough to walk on.”

Much of the identity sits in the details. The website describes handles and seams stitched to webbing with a breaking strength of 1,500 kilos, double stitching at corners and edges, and nickel-plated zip pulls “embossed with the Protection Racket Man,” which interlock so that cases can be padlocked together. Every case, it says, carries a size label showing the drum’s diameter and depth as a simple graphic, and owners can add luggage tags — because, the company jokes, at a gig “all the drummers are inevitably using Protection Racket.”

The range has grown in layers. The core soft cases, which its brochure calls the Proline range, cover bass drums, toms, snares, hardware, cymbals and sticks, and extend to marching drums, frame drums, gongs up to 50 inches, repiniques and pandeiros. Nutcases are its entry-level line, revamped in 2018, with a 20mm foam core and egg-shaped snare and tom cases. Its AAA rigid cases — “Access All Area, All Accidents Averted,” as Modern Drummer reported in 2015 — use a polycarbonate frame; that year’s AAA Deluxe Cymbal Vault weighed 8.8 pounds and held cymbals up to 24 inches. The website also lists guitar cases, P.A. bags, luggage and motorcycle luggage.

Cases, bags and who makes them.

The seven brands here all protect instruments on the road. Two are best known for moulded plastic. SKB says it was founded in 1977 by Dave Sanderson and Steve Kottman in an Anaheim garage, and that its iSeries cases are made at its factory in Orange, California. Since January 2025 the private-equity firm MPE Partners has held a stake alongside Dave Sanderson and the management team, MPE announced. Gator Cases says it was founded in Tampa, Florida, in 2000 by Jerry Freed and his daughter Crystal Morris, and in 2008 bought the Protechtor Cases factory in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Two make rigid cases in Britain, by their own account. Hiscox says it has made lightweight hard cases since 1985 and lists “hand-made in the UK” among its selling points; its online shop now gives a contact address in Poland. Hardcase, of Chesterfield, Derbyshire, says it was established in 1992 as a family-run maker of rigid plastic drum and percussion cases and is “proud to remain a British manufacturer.”

Three are known mainly for soft cases and gig bags. Reunion Blues says it began making gig bags in 1976; Ace Products Group of Petaluma, California, lists it among its brands. Gruv Gear says it began in 2007 as a side project of the Los Angeles bassist Jay Baldemor and is now based in Murrieta, California. Protection Racket, in Cornwall, dates itself to 1994, says it began with surfboard bags, and is privately owned through a holding company of its two directors, Companies House records show.

Few of these companies say plainly where every product is made, and where they do, the claim is usually their own.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Black cases and a long artist roster.

The brand is sold largely through working drummers. Its website keeps a long artist roster that includes Billy Cobham, Carl Palmer of ELP and Asia, Abe Laboriel Jr, who plays with Paul McCartney, and the Japanese drummer Akira Jimbo; these are the company’s own listings, and we have not checked each arrangement. Its news page mixes artist stories with new products, from a YouTube channel of endorsers explaining their choice of cases to a compact 30-inch hardware bag.

Distribution reaches well beyond Cornwall. The website names Yamaha Music Europe as its UK distributor — a listing visible in archived copies from January 2022 — and keeps a dealer list organised by country and county. The retailer Thomann says it has carried the brand since 2024. The company’s homepage puts it more loudly: “big in Japan (and Italy, the UK, France, Australia, the USA…).”

Where the cases are made is not something the company states. Its website and brochure, as checked in October 2026, describe the materials in detail but do not say where the cases are sewn, and we found no independent source that does, so we make no claim about the place of manufacture.

For a design guide, Protection Racket shows how a small company can build a brand from named materials, a mascot on its zip pulls and a name that borrows, with a wink, from the language of gangsters. Compare Hardcase, the English maker of rigid plastic drum cases, and Ludwig, whose drums are what cases like these carry. For this guide we use black, a deep Atlantic teal and sand with a heavy sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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