A Lesson in Production
I’ve spent the past nine days in Vietnam working through product development and watching production for the upcoming season wrap up.
It’s been an eye-opening experience, to say the least.
The last time I was here was back in November 2023. At that point, we’d just launched the Weekend Warrior 1.0 and realized — fast — that when it came to product development, we were completely outmanned by other brands.
It was me versus teams of professional product designers and developers.
The only way forward was to invest in professional support — my iPad sketches alone weren’t going to cut it anymore.
So we connected with the amazing BagMe team, found Jion (our manufacturer and R&D hub), and moved our operations to Vietnam. We essentially went all in on.
Fast forward a year and a half, and the progress has been wild.
Not only is this our third production run with our manufacturer (you can still grab a few of the pre-tariff 2.0’s on the website), but this time we doubled our order from last season. (Yes, we’re counting on you to help us avoid bankruptcy.)
2.5 years after starting Diamant, I finally had the chance to be boots on the ground during production. What did it look like? Something like this:
I spent a few hours at Jion, our factory here in Vietnam, and it was surreal. Production is a completely foreign concept to me. Before Diamant, my entire career took place inside office buildings, surrounded by Excel formulas and PowerPoints. Seeing physical products come to life?
Mind-blowing.
The efficiency and precision of the process is on another level.
Every role has a purpose. The bags start at one end of the line, assembled piece by piece with supervision across every station. If there’s a problem, they can trace it back to the exact stitch where things went wrong. Each sewer owns a specific part of the build, with the most experienced handling the most complex steps.
Throughout the line, there are sample references that must be approved by an army of developers before the work can even begin.
At the end of the line, each finished bag is cleaned and then put through a multi-stage QC process.
In the two hours I was there, over a hundred bags weren’t just made — they were inspected and moved into the packing area, ready for shipment. The efficiency would make any Wall Street MD proud.
A quick note on how these bags come together. Technically it’s way more than two steps, but here’s the simplified version:
First, they build the front panel — where the packing cube, goggle pocket, and other features sit.
Once those are complete, they move on to the back panel, the part that holds the boots and laptop.
Finally, the two halves come together at the primary seams down the middle.
And the craziest part? To fully connect the bag, it gets turned inside out — just like a t-shirt.
Watching and interacting with the production line is the most humbling part of running Diamant. It makes you realize how little most of us actually understand about what it takes to build the gear we use.
Thankfully, we’ve invested heavily in product development support. Watching the team catch issues is like watching a doctor at work — they’ll spot a single stitch that could ruin the durability of the whole bag and correct it before it ever leaves the line. Meanwhile I’m standing there like a deer in headlights completely unaware of whats wrong or right.
I still can’t wrap my head around how much goes into turning a sketch of a bag into a real product. The number of ideas I’ve pitched that simply can’t be built, because of how bags physically come together, is honestly laughable.
Since starting Diamant, I’ve known production was a massive operation — but I never appreciated just how intensive it truly is until seeing it firsthand.
Hopefully, with enough visits, I’ll be able to call out bad stitches myself someday.
