Pakt Everyday 22L Backpack Review

What do you look for in an everyday bag or travel daypack? If you like having a lot of different spaces to store your gear, Pakt has you covered. The company aims to create unique, responsibly sourced products for travelers to help you feel like a local wherever you are. With Earth friendly sustainable materials, plastic-free packaging, and the pledge of fair working conditions for their employees, Pakt has the environment and human rights covered. So what about the bag itself?

The Everyday 22L Backpack has four different compartments—not including the side pockets—and most of those have additional ways to organize your gear. That means that, theoretically, you can carry quite a bit with you along the way while having it within easy reach whenever you need it. To find out how that works out in regular use, keep reading.

External Components

We’ll start with the eco-friendly materials: there is 500D recycled nylon with a PFC-free durable water repellent coating on the exterior, with 70D on the interior. It definitely feels durable, if a little bit rough, to the touch, sort of like a heavy canvas on a travel tote bag. Because it’s so thick and sturdy, that’s a point in favor of your bag’s longevity, although if you’re like two-thirds of the American population and have a pet, it may give you pause.

The fabric attracts pet hair, dust, and lint like it is its job, and it’s not super easy to brush off, so you may want to choose Black if your pet has dark fur and Sand (tan) or Undyed (greige) if you have a white-haired furry friend instead of the Ocean we’re testing. The Ocean colorway is a nice medium blue, and there’s a Forest green available, too, if you like to blend in on the trail.

Looking around the outside of this pack, you’ll find several attachment points running in a horseshoe shape around the top of the pack. There are four on each side—three smaller loops and one larger one—and they all connect to the padded carry handle at the top. It’s comfortable to hold and definitely designed for carry, as there is also a smaller, unpadded handle centered atop the back panel where you can hang the bag on a hook. It’s nice because (a) your carry handle doesn’t develop a bend in the middle where you routinely hang it up, and (b) you don’t have to try and squeeze a fatter padded handle onto a hook!

There are two other attachment points on the shoulder straps where you can clip something with a carabiner. The one over your right side has the “Pakt.” logo stitched on it, and there is also stitched branding on the left side of the front of the bag. It’s pretty subtle, sewn as it is in white on our blue bag, keeping in line with the clean aesthetic of the backpack.

And in keeping with the theme of bag durability, Pakt uses YKK zippers throughout the bag. They’re all No. 8 reverse coil models and work well, although they obviously don’t provide additional water resistance to the bag. The zipper pulls are metal circles with cords looped through them, and they’re easy to grab but are so long, with some of the zippers so close together, that they can get caught in each other’s tracks as you try to close one compartment or another.

Additionally, while the zipper on the bottom front pocket is hidden by a fabric welt for some weather protection, the stiff fabric makes it nearly impossible to completely close that zipper without some effort. It naturally wants to stop about a quarter inch or so from the end, leaving an opening to that pocket, which is pretty frustrating.

On the other hand, the Duraflex hardware functions well, with the strap adjusters staying where you place them and the sternum strap clicking together without a problem.

If you’re traveling with carry on luggage, you can slide the Pakt Everyday 22L Backpack over the handle of your spinner so you don’t have to carry it through the airport. The back panel has gaps in the material on either side of the bag, so you can turn it horizontally and slide it on. Despite the inflexibility of the material, it’s easy to do so, and when you’re not using it, hidden magnets snap it to the back panel so it doesn’t gape open.

The carry handle and the luggage pass-through are great ways to carry this bag, but what about its intended use as a backpack? That’s a little less great, frankly. The shoulder straps are narrower than on the Pakt Travel Backpack, which is good, although they share the same overly stiff padding. We hope they break in with continued use, but they haven’t over our two-week testing period. Stay tuned to the Usage Timeline for updates!

The undersides of the straps are covered in breathable mesh, but it’s on the rougher side instead of the soft athletic-type mini mesh we see on other bags. In another effort at comfort, the straps attach via thinner webbing to the top of the bag, presumably to flex around broader shoulders. However, they tend to flip around as you put them on if you don’t have them adjusted at the perfect spot, i.e., tighter rather than looser. Luckily, if you need to tighten them, there are elastic strap keepers to hold the extra.

There is a sternum strap that clips onto a series of loops on the shoulder straps. It doesn’t provide the granularity of adjustment that a sliding rail would, but since this is a 22L backpack, there will be a lot of times when you don’t really need to use the strap. If you don’t need it or don’t like it, you can take it off, which we appreciate.

As for the back panel, it has the same stiff padding as the shoulder straps. It’s not as big of a deal here, but it doesn’t do a fantastic job of blunting the feel of your laptop when the rest of the bag has gear in it, too. We’re not talking about when it’s jam-packed; we mean whenever you have just about anything else in the bag. Let’s put it this way—we definitely know the laptop sleeve is suspended from the bottom of the pack because we can feel it and the bottom of the bag when we’re walking out the door.

Fit Notes

We’re digging the clean look of the Everyday 22L Backpack. It’s a bag that works well for casual situations like school, work, or as a personal item bag on the plane. Yet, it can also sneak into more professional situations, especially if you go with one of the more neutral tones. The zipper cords hanging all around the bag detract from any attempt at more formal situations, but for many office spaces, it would pass muster.

However, if you have to carry it for a longer period of time—say, as you commute from the Upper East Side to the Financial District—you may get irritated by the stiff padding throughout the harness system. It’s more comfortable than some other Pakt bags we’re testing, but it’s still not great. Plus, the shoulder straps can twist on you as you put it on, which can be annoying.

If you plan to use it for quicker jaunts or have transportation options that don’t require you to carry it so far, it’s OK. Plus, it has a nice slim profile that will keep you from bumping into your neighbor as you stand on a crowded subway.

Inside The Pack

There are a lot of pockets and compartments to get through here, so buckle up and enjoy the ride. Or not. One of our complaints with the Everyday 22L Backpack is that using all of the storage options has the unfortunate effect of impacting space in the main compartment, even though there aren’t any pockets in that part of the bag. However, your taste and mileage may vary, and it is satisfying to have a space for every tiny travel accessory we own, even an AirTag.

We’ll start with the front of the bag because there are two different pockets to choose from on this side. First, we have a larger lower pocket that opens with that horizontal zipper hidden under a fabric welt we mentioned earlier. It’s a large open pocket, which we find handy for holding small toiletry bags, gloves, and anything else you may want to toss inside. Just realize that anything you stow inside will fall to the bottom, so this works better for bigger gear than for tiny USB drives or other small items.

However, the pocket at the top of the bag does work well for organizing smaller items. It opens in a rainbow arc (i.e., not as deep as a horseshoe) via a dual-sided zipper so you can get to it on either side. The zippers don’t go so far down the pocket that gear has the potential to fall out, and fabric gussets on either side keep things in check, as well.

The pocket is an admin panel where you can store your tech accessories and other small gear you want to slot into a pocket. Against the back is an elastic loop for a pen on top, which holds it tightly without letting it run into any pockets or the zipper. Below is a wide liner pocket with a magnet in the middle to snap it shut. Pakt seems to like using magnets on this bag, and we’re here for it!

In front of that are two more squarish slip pockets. The one on the right is made with liner material and contains a tiny hidden pocket for an AirTag, and the one on the left is mesh to let you see inside. We’ve been using these three pockets for AirPods, a mouse, tissues, and a minimalist wallet, but they will work well for similarly-sized gear of your choosing.

On the opposite side (against the front panel) is a large zipper mesh pocket with a long key leash inside. It’s so long that you can leave it out of the pocket to rest in the middle of this area if you wish, and the bright orange of the leash makes it easy to find and pull out. We use this pocket for travel size bottles, snacks, and the like. There’s a bit of room left between the two sides that we find convenient to hold sunglasses or a phone.

There are two water bottle pockets on the Everyday 22L Backpack, one on each side. They easily accommodate standard-width travel water bottles and hold them in place. There is a piece of stretchy fabric along the back to help the pocket expand slightly, but wide-mouth bottles are tough to squeeze inside. A tab on the top of the pocket gives you somewhere to hold it as you try to wedge it in, but it’s still a lot of effort. However, magnets at the top rear corner of each pocket hold them flat against the bag when you don’t need them, giving the pack a much cleaner look.

Along the back panel, there is a large horseshoe zipper that opens to the laptop compartment. Inside is a nicely padded and suspended sleeve to hold up to a 16-inch laptop, and there’s a sleeve of stretchy material extending down to the top of the sleeve, as well, where you can, presumably, slide the top of your device to hold it in place. If you’re using a smaller laptop, you won’t have much use for this, and if you prefer not to have to unbury your larger device, you can just let it lay against the back panel as we do.

This section also has a padded sleeve for a tablet, wireless keyboard, or other slim device. Beyond that, there’s not much depth in this part of the bag; you can slide a folder or some documents here, but that’s about it.

Now, let’s head into the main compartment. It also opens with a double-sided horseshoe-style zipper, and the front panel flops down to give you better access, at least to the top (so be sure that the top pocket is closed before opening the main area!). You’ll see two daisy chains of loops parading down the back panel where you can clip modular gear like Pakt’s Clip-in Pouches. While we didn’t find a good use for them during our initial test, they don’t get in the way if you aren’t using them, so it didn’t bother us.

Packing cubes and pouches are a good way to use this part of the bag, though, as it doesn’t have much depth once you pack up the laptop compartment and the bottom front pocket. It’s hard to see to the bottom, so you may lose smaller items if you drop them inside. It’s OK if you’re packing it with a travel journal or other books, a tech pouch, and a packable travel jacket, but finding some way of organizing your gear here is preferable to just tossing things in.

Frankly, the main compartment is probably the part of the Everyday 22L Backpack we used the least. With so many organizational options and so little space in this area, it doesn’t seem to serve a great purpose. Your mileage will vary, though, so this could be a great everyday carry bag if you can pack it right.