Hello,
I’ve become slightly obsessed with all things Tom Bihn lately and I’ve been lurking here for a while. It’s been really helpful/enabling to see everyone’s descriptions and pictures.
I’ve been trying to downsize to smaller and lighter bags for every day use. The travel cubelet looked like a good option so, following some advice here, I taped together some cardboard and arranged/rearranged/pared down my daily essentials until I was able to fit everything in with enough room left over to be able to get things in and out without a problem.
I ordered one in grass and one in dawn and I love both colors. As soon as they arrived, I tried loading one up as planned and it was almost impossible. I barely got everything in and it was so over-stuffed I’d need to empty out the whole thing to get at anything. The largest item is my Kobo Clara, which is nicely sized for the bag’s width and height (not so big that it extends past the side seams at all), but it’s a full half inch thick (cover included) and takes up a large percentage of the available space. If I leave it out everything else fits fine but I generally like to have it with me.
I was pretty surprised, since I’d done all my experimenting before ordering, so I got out my tape measure.
The bags are fairly (although not totally) regular in shape, with separate side panels, so they are quite easy to measure. I don’t claim to be totally accurate in my measuring technique but I measured both bags several times and I think I’m pretty close. I was as generous as possible, measuring at the absolute widest, tallest, and thickest parts of the bags.
The measurements on the website are 5.7” (w) x 7.3” (h) x 3” (d).
The numbers I get are 5.5” (w) x 7.1” (h) x 2.3” (d).
That depth discrepancy seems pretty big to me (and at some points the bag is just 2 inches deep); the missing space would be plenty for my Kobo.
I sent an email asking about the specs and got back a reply saying that the bags were difficult to measure and the size would be affected by the size and shape of objects in the bag.
I get that the bags are flexible, but that explanation makes little sense to me. Now I’m wondering if this is a common problem with the measurements on the site. Given the shipping costs both ways I’m hesitant to order anything else where accurate measurements are important.
Have other people noticed measurements being somewhat off? I tried a few searches but I'm not very good at it.
Sorry for the long rant. I’m feeling a bit disgruntled at the moment.