This Is Ground - MorningCalm March 2018

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SPACE AGE

From the outside, This Is Ground’s products look simply like elegant leather bags and organizers. But inside, Mike Macadaan and his team of Los Angeles designers have packed a sleek vision of the future.

Mike Macadaan has always had his head in the clouds. In his early 20s he worked on a blimp tour that took him across all the sublimely eccentric corners of America. It was a wanderer’s life. By necessity he learned to pack efficiently, in hot pursuit of the next adventure.

People have always traveled, and the way we carry our things has always been dictated by the mode of
travel. In the steam age, when ships were the only way to complete transoceanic journeys, travel trunks were made of durable, waterproof materials. Today, airplanes are cramped and checked baggage fees exorbitant. King Salman of Saudi Arabia carried 459 tons of luggage with him when he traveled to Indonesia for nine days last year, but most modern nomads need to figure out how to bring just the essentials. This Is Ground, launched in 2013, is Macadaan’s answer to travel in this day and age, and the company’s bags and organizers marry cutting-edge tech with timeless craftsmanship, providing some order in a mad world. All of This Is Ground’s products are designed in Los Angeles and use the highest quality Italian leather.

One of its best-selling products is the Voyager travel bag. Constructed with beautiful vegetable-tanned leather from Italy, which Macadaan calls “the Silicon Valley of leather goods,” the first version was released in 2015. The bag’s design started with questions of space — a mundane concern that often frustrates us in everyday life. How much space should a travel bag offer? How should the space be divided, and for what? In what space would the bag itself be stored? This Is Ground’s team conducted research for the Voyager for nine months. Macadaan took train rides to test out the prototype, discovering its strengths and weaknesses along the way. The team realized that one of the things travelers really wanted was designated spaces for frequently used items. It was important for the Voyager to have distinct spaces — for your phone, passport, writing tools and cords.

Macadaan is a problem solver. This Is Ground’s inaugural product addressed a commonplace modern headache: tangled cords. “A friend asked if I could design something from leather to organize tech cables,” he says. The same day Macadaan received this request, he enjoyed a delicious taco dinner in LA. “The next morning, in a lucid but dreamy state, the two concepts connected,” he says. “I remember thinking to myself that taco shells were these simple geometric forms that were responsible for so much.” The Cord Taco’s prototype was made of just tape and aluminum foil. “It took me one week to design, develop and bring the Cord Taco to a shop on the internet,” says Macadaan. “To this day, the Cord Taco embodies the spirit of all of the products we continue to design.” At first he worried that the Cord Taco was too simple; maybe it didn’t do enough. But the product was a hit when it first became available for purchase in 2012, and soon Apple began selling the Cord Taco in its online store. The lack of experience in creating leather goods was no deterrent for Macadaan. He taught himself to sew and create leather products in true 21st-century form — by watching YouTube tutorials.

Like the Cord Taco, the original Voyager was elegantly simple. It was also surprisingly roomy. You could, in a sense, pack the whole world inside it, if you ordered the version that included the Karma Go, a device that allows you to carry your own Wi-Fi network with you. The original’s successor, Voyager 2, addresses a different pressing problem of modern travel: having enough charge to power the devices you need. You can order a Voyager 2 that comes with a battery pack allowing high-speed charging of your devices wherever you go.

Macadaan and his team often look at spaceships when designing their products. “We look at spacecraft a lot, as they represent a very condensed set of utilities in a small space,” he says. There’s also an optimistic attitude toward the future, one often associated with space travel, that This Is Ground seems to embrace. The company’s name is in part a reference to David Bowie’s Space Oddity, a song that tells the story of a fictional astronaut.

Travel and tech have always gone hand in hand. The advance of technology expands how far we can travel, and dreams of journeying to seemingly unreachable places exercise the best of our imagination. This Is Ground envisions a future where we’re never without the tech we need to keep discovering and to keep sharing those discoveries. “We’re working with partners that develop tech gear like batteries and trackers,” says Macadaan. Moving forward, This Is Ground plans to integrate interactive audio into their products — maybe a talking companion like Samantha in the movie Her. “I love this area of tech,” Macadaan says, “as it minimizes the need for the computer screen and leverages our ability to be social.”

What’s inside a bag can tell you a lot about a person. Macadaan always carries a pen, paper and something to chew on. But the shape of a bag can tell you where we’re headed. This Is Ground signals that we’re going in the right direction — the future.