BAGSMART Blast Compression Travel Packing Cubes Review

If there’s anything to take away from testing the BAGSMART Blast 28L-38L Extended Mesh Carry On Travel Backpack, it’s how spacious it is. Sagginess aside, packing a bag like that calls for a lot of packing cubes. We advocate for them since they can save you a lot of space and allow you to squeeze in even more essentials. While there are plenty of options out there, it’s always interesting to see first-party options and how well they integrate with the brand’s own gear.

In this case, it’s the BAGSMART Blast Compression Travel Packing Cubes. The package includes six pieces—three main sizes and a shoe pouch—all for around $50. Sounds like a good deal, right? But if you’re dropping around $75 for the Blast backpack, paying two-thirds of that price for the packing cubes alone raises a few questions about value. So, without further ado, let’s shed some light on those questions.

External Components

The main material for these cubes is polyester fabric, with a hint of ripstop pattern going on if you take a closer look. It’s not the most durable-feeling fabric. Then again, you don’t really want something super thick for compression cubes. Remember, the point with packing cubes is to save space, so thick fabrics and materials aren’t exactly ideal. On the other hand, we would at least like to have branded zippers instead of these unbranded ones. They’re functional and haven’t jammed or broken, but since we expect to compress and decompress throughout their lifespan, a trusted brand like YKK would boost our confidence.

A mesh window dominates much of the packing cubes’ top halves. This helps several things. It allows a degree of breathability and lets the compression system squeeze as much air out of the interior as possible, thus saving you space. Plus, it lets you know what’s inside. After all, if you have five of these cubes in your backpack, it’s understandably tricky telling which one has what clothing. For additional help, you can also go for the colorful colorway option rather than the monotone ones to help you color code when organizing.

As for extras, the cubes have a top handle, but the large one also has a very short buckled strap underneath. It’s somewhat puzzling why they’d include this. At first, we thought it was for even more compression since you can tighten the buckle, but it doesn’t help substantially with that. After a while, we figured it was for hanging the cube onto fixtures like hooks.

As a brief aside, the more we tested these cubes, the more apparent it became that there were loose threads around them. They seem concentrated where the zipper tracks are stitched to the fabric. That said, when we say concentrated, we really only mean a handful, not enough to call up the warranty. It is, however, indicative of what we’ve come to expect with BAGSMART and their budget-oriented build quality.

The included shoe bag is the sixth piece of the family; understandably, the most different. Far from being a cube, this pouch has a drawstring closure that doubles as a pair of shoulder straps. While you can carry it like a backpack, it’s about as basic a carry as you can get, so we still recommend stashing it inside your bag.

Inside The Packing Cubes

As we look inside, we’ll start with the single large cube. We can fit two rolls of pants and two rolled-up hoodies inside. You can technically fit another layer of clothing to get the most out of the cube’s compression, but this is as far as we can go without stressing the zippers too much. All of that said, the large cube is a bit overkill if you’re using a travel backpack in the 28-liter or smaller range. It gobbles up a lot of room and tempts us to pack even more clothing than we need just to make the most out of the space it affords. If you’re traveling with a lot of bulky clothing (like in winter) then you’ll get a lot of use out of it, but otherwise, you might not.

With that in mind, we’re leaning more toward the two medium-sized cubes for our packing needs. One was big enough for the tops we bring on trips, but we could squeeze enough pants in the other as well. In total, we fit ten tops and three pairs of pants between the two medium packing cubes. The compression system is the same, though we did have to put in extra effort since we were packing these cubes to the brim.

The small packing cube also comes in a pair, leaving plenty of room for socks in one and underwear in the other. Like the large and medium-sized cubes, the compression system is much the same. That said, the small cubes’ lengthy but slim shape already makes them very easy to fit inside even small travel backpacks, so you shouldn’t have much trouble accommodating them.

As mentioned, the shoe pouch is quite basic. You simply put your shoes in, pull the drawstrings to seal it shut, and off it goes into your bag—or maybe not. See, the bottom of the shoe pouch also has mesh. While this was a good feature on the compressible cubes, we’re unsure about having it on the shoe pouch. Dirt and odor can seep out from your shoes and onto your other gear through this mesh, and that’s obviously not ideal. It may be less of an issue if you use the shoe pouch as a laundry bag instead, but the point stands: we wish it didn’t have the mesh at all.