How Not to Start a Backpack Company is a book by Jason McCarthy, the founder of Goruck. I bought the paper back when they first announced it in 2020. It sat on my bookshelf, and since i’m trying to read 24 books this year, I ended up getting it on audible.

Background

GORUCK is a company that came into the world with the objective to make a bag that would perform well in Baghdad and New York City. It needed to be tactical enough if needed, but it needed to be sleek in a city environment. I don’t know why, but the first time I heard about them, I loved them. Now I have 3 backpacks, a gym bag and a few accessory bags.

I really liked how this brand carrying themselves, and how they had built this community and business around a backpack. He talks about this in the book, but he credits much of GORUCK’s success to setting up rucking events. Rucking events are endurance style training, where people where backpacks loaded with some form of weight and gear to get them through an obstacle. Around this time is when races like spartan and tough-mudder were popular and he capitalized on that and would give bags to his military friends to participate in these runs. It would go to show that the bags are tough and could withstand any abuse.

Review

There are moments that make ‘How not to start a backpack company’ enjoyable. It seems to be a book of one liners hoping that something would catch fire and blow up. This is a book is from journals when he was writing, so that could be the reason why it seems like it’s not as thought out. Maybe Jason wasn’t talking about the failures of the company, but I felt like there weren’t many failures. Just normal growing pains of owning a business.

In the book, he also shows photos of different things going on throughout the year. Food, group shots, rucking events. This was much more enjoyable from the book than from the audio book, for obvious reason.

Towards the end, I did skip a few sections because I was getting tired of his writing style. Not sure exactly what it was but I decided to move on and skim through parts that seemed interesting to me.

Conclusion

If you’re a GORUCK fanboy then I would recommend picking ‘How not to start a backpack company’ up. It does recount the highs and lows of how this brand came to be. I believe the goal of the book was to be a light, loose recount of what happened with photos and light commentary. Not sure why I got it in my big head that it would be a story about business. Overall i’d give it a 2.7/5. I’m still a fanboy and have to stop myself from buying anymore bags.