Updated: How To Clean and Disinfect Your Bag

[Darcy]

Full post: https://www.tombihn.com/blogs/main/clean
Related: https://www.tombihn.com/blogs/main/seattle-efforts

We’re all being asked to do our part in stopping the spread of COVID-19 by washing our hands frequently and disinfecting commonly touched surfaces.

Many of us may want to wash or disinfect our bags on a more regular basis. In an effort to help, we want to share an expanded range of options for cleaning your bag.

Hand wash with dish soap, scrub with a wash cloth, and line dry

The same washing instructions we’ve always shared are the most effective — with one addition: add a wash cloth to the process and scrub down your bag. In many cases, especially with coronaviruses, the friction and the soap are what break down the relatively delicate virus.

Full Cleaning Instructions:

We recommend hand-washing your TOM BIHN bag with a mild detergent — environmentally friendly dish soaps work well, but as always, with any soap, test it on a small, inconspicuous area of the bag before you use it on the entire bag. (Palmolive® and Dawn® soaps may be too harsh!) Fill your sink or bathtub with warm water, add a little soap (a little goes a long way), and let the bag soak for a half hour. If there are visible spots of dirt, gently rub the area with a washcloth, or you can apply a little soap directly to that spot and let it soak. Rinse your bag thoroughly (this is a lot easier if you've only used a little bit of soap) and lay your bag flat on top of a bath towel to dry. If you'd like to disinfect your bag, you can spray it with isopropyl alcohol.

Spray your bag with isopropyl alcohol

Need to disinfect your bag but don’t have time to hand wash and line dry? Spray it down with isopropyl alcohol — that’s what we do with our own bags and it’s what we do with repairs that come in and are… a worrisome level of cleanliness. It has no adverse impact on the materials.

Though we haven’t done this ourselves, we have heard reports from customers who use disinfecting wipes to wipe down their bags — again, with no adverse impact on the materials. Wait! Actually.... Tim (Warehouse Lead here at TOM BIHN) uses disinfecting wipes on his bags and he says they work well with no issues.

And if you really must machine wash your bag….

Never dry it. Let the bag line dry fully. Putting your bag in the dryer will effectively destroy its urethane coating and DWR finish; it may melt Halcyon; and, in general, it’ll simply wreak havoc on your bag.

Less of an issue, but still an issue, is the washing machine. It could damage your bag. We ask that if this happens you tell us it was machine washed and we’ll charge you a very reasonable fee (we don’t make money on repairs!) to repair your bag (assuming it can be repaired). The thing we’re trying to avoid here is: because we don’t make money on repairs, it could become expensive for us to repair bags that have been machine washed or otherwise used not-as-intended under the lifetime guarantee (so, no charge for the repair). We can usually still repair bags even if they’re machine washed; we just want to be able to charge a reasonable cost to help us offset shipping and labor costs. However, in some cases, it may not be practical for some bags that have been machine washed many, many times; sometimes some bags are simply beyond repair. Additionally, we are not able to repair urethane coatings or DWR finishes that are destroyed or damaged by the washing machine. We evaluate each bag on a case-by-case basis; if you have a bag you're interested in asking us to repair, please emailus@tombihn.com and send photos of the bag in question.