Made In The USA: Red Oxx

Given all of the posturing about American-made products that goes on in these pages, the reader would be forgiven for thinking that I had some sort of locally-sourced travel luggage. The sad truth is that for the past fifteen years I've been traveling using a pair of raggedy-ass Tumi duffel bags that, like the rest of Tumi's product line after the turn of the century, were made in a low-cost country. My lame excuse for this is that I was too stupid to look in the bags when I bought them; I'd owned American-made Tumi items in the past and I didn't realize that the company had gone overseas.

The biggest issue I had with my Tumi duffels was that neither of them could carry all of my race gear and a toothbrush, so I was forced to use both of them on driving-related trips. Still, I can be remarkably cheap where certain things are concerned. Even after the larger of the duffels split right down the seam, I planned to just keep using it until the seam got large enough to run the risk of my HANS device escaping during a flight. It took some radical action by Danger Girl to end my travel-luggage nightmare.

As a novice racer, and facing the same problem of not being able to fit all of her race gear into a single carry-on, DG decided to order herself a "Tres Hombres" bag from Montana's Red Oxx. Although Red Oxx is best known for their signature product, the exhaustively-engineered Air Boss business-travel carry-on, the Tres Hombres can do one thing that the Air Boss cannot, and that is fit a helmet and a HANS device without swelling past carry-on size.

The four or five trips that we took after her Red Oxx arrived had a decided element of black comedy to them; she strode from gate to gate with her purple Red Oxx bag and her backpack while I stumbled along behind her with two Tumi duffels and my Waterford messenger. This aggression could not stand, man. I needed a Red Oxx of my own.

There was just one problem; I didn't like any of the colors they had.

Red Oxx offers three different green color combos. One of them is boring and the others have a distinct military look, which I didn't think was appropriate for a guy who drives a Plymouth Neon. The black one is fine, but having a black bag is a nightmare on those occasions when you have to check your luggage. It looked like I was going to have to choose the yellow bag and just live with the fact that I would look like a human Checker Cab when I was carrying that and my Waterfield at the same time.

Luckily for me, I happened to come across the Red Oxx Instagram page, where they announced that they were going to start doing custom-shop orders. I called Montana the next day and talked to the people at Red Oxx. They sourced some lime-green Cordura and made two bags for me. The Tres Hombres pictured above is my race-gear bag; it's lime green so I never ever lose it. And since it's the only one they've ever made, if I see somebody walking away with it at the airport I'll have probable cause to tackle them.

My second custom bag is a black Air Boss carry-on traveler with a lime-green lining. I don't expect that I'll ever check it, so the black exterior is fine. The lime interior is just for my own personal amusement.

If you travel quite a bit, I'd recommend that you take a look at Red Oxx. The bags are engineered to an insane level and everything from the zippers to the shoulder-strap clips look like they could be fired into the sun without significant damage. And if you see somebody who looks like me in the airport, you'll be able to tell for sure when you see the one-of-a-kind bag make its appearance. Remember, however, that is not probable cause for assault, okay?