Our new Moon label is debuting on the Zeitgeist, one of two small backpack designs. 

Wait a second, though: the Moon label isn't actually that new at all. It's a revisitation of a label Tom used briefly back in the mid-1990s. The original Moon label was itself a new version of one of the longer-lived labels, which was simple white letters on a black background.

Above: the original Moon label.

Above: the simple label.

Note that these three labels — simple label, original Moon label, and new Moon label — are sewn at an angle, though the text/graphic still sits level on the horizon. When we asked Tom about this, he recounted: “I actually dreamed about this label. Maybe I saw something that inspired it in my waking life, so I cannot claim for certain that the idea is 100% original. But a crooked label with straight text came to me in a dream.”

At some point Tom got bored with the simple B&W version and added a mountain and a... moon? Or is it a sun? That's for you to decide. This, the newest iteration of the label, features some colors from the archive as well, to complete the retro look:

This new label, like all of our exterior labels, is woven on a Jacquard loom. The design / text literally is the weave of the material.

Sometimes folks think our exterior labels are embroidered labels, but it's not so: embroidery is an additive process, stitching a design into existing fabric.

We only point this out because we are occasionally asked why we don't embroider our logo directly into the fabric of the bag. Our answer is that we prefer the look of a woven label, and a big part of that is because the weaving process can yield a much higher resolution of the text or artwork.

Here's a video we made some years back about the various labels we've designed over the years: