Twig Hockey Bag

[start_today 779]

tl;dr - Good sizing. Actual bag material seems decent, but components feel cheap. Trash zipper, weak stitching. Main zipper useless after 6 months. Overall, feels like a cheaply produced and designed piece that looks good at first but falls apart quickly  

Picked up one of these last winter after looking at new bags for a while. I wanted a “nice” bag, and this seemed better than the high end bags from Bauer and CCM, and less expensive than those “designer” brands  

I held off using it a bit after I got it because I wasn’t sure I wanted it, been using it like 8 months, playing 3-4 times a week. 

Things I like:

Good sizing. The Medium bag feels slightly bigger than normal medium bags. All my stuff fits fine and I (mostly) don’t have to Tetris it in and there’s extra space. Big U shaped opening. Skate pockets are placed weird, which limits space (see below).

Lots of storage! This is what sold me. I love to have a place to keep tape, tools, extra socks and whatever else. Extra interior mesh pockets for stuff and two exterior zippered pockets for jerseys. Comes with additional laundry mesh bag.

Material: Whatever it’s made of seems sturdy enough, and doesn’t have a ton of mesh on the outside.

Nice shiny interior. Hockey bags have mostly moved away from dark interiors, which is nice so you don’t miss something when you’re unpacking. And it doesn’t (so far) flake off like some interiors.

The “eh, could be better”:

Skate pockets are both on the inside on the end of one side, which makes the bag kinda lopsided to carry, and also makes packing kinda weird because one end is noticeably more narrow if you have skates in the pockets. This seems strikingly ill-planned, like no one tried the bag before they mass produced them.  

Shoulder carry straps feel like they very slightly loosen if I don’t gently pick it up dead center and very slowly, so I have to readjust it because they keep getting longer  

The really, really bad:

Zippers are terrible. One pull tab broke off the zipper after 5 months, the other the next month. Stitching around the zipper ripped out, reserving the main zipper absolutely useless. 

Stitching on zippers is also really bad and tore from normal zipper use. And I’m honestly a soft nerd and very gentle on stuff like this. 

There is/was a bag on sidelineswap with the exact same broken zipper issue, and a few of the reviews on their site also complain about bad zippers and stitching. I’ve seen one other person with their bag and zipper was also broken. Maybe they hold up fine for some people. I personally absolutely recommend against these. 

I contacted them about the zipper and stitching issues and whoever responded said they only guarantee bags for 6 months. Partly my fault for not contacting them immediately, but I figured I’d rather work with a 90% functional zipper than deal with the return. Maybe I’m a naive sucker stuck in the past who thinks a hockey bag should last a whole year. 
 

I wanted this to be a solution for a “nice” bag, but not the (what seems to me) expensive cost of Conway and Banks or Mammoth. But, the actual construction of the bag is weak at critical points, and overall design is awkward. I wish I’d spent the extra on one of those bags and not wasted it on this. Another lesson in You get what you pay for and/or If it seems to good to be true, it is.