The Henty Wingman has received rave reviews since it hit the market in July 2012 with its innovative garment bag design and we’ve appreciated hearing your thoughts on how it could be optimized for air travel.
We’ve often been asked about updating the Wingman to make it even better for two to three day business trips. Customers were asking for something to wear hands free through an airport, would keep your clothes crease free, fit within the overhead luggage constraints and hold everything you need for an interstate trip of up to three days.
We listened, and recently unveiled the Henty CoPilot.
“We’ve been developing the Henty CoPilot for quite some time now,” Henty co-founder Jeremy said.
“We spent a lot of time thinking about how best to deliver a slick and practical product that would meet the needs of a two to three day business traveller.
“We believe the finished product is one of the world’s best garment bags for travel.”
The Henty CoPilot is two bags – an outer garment bag and a 20 litre inner bag – and they can be used together or separately. There’s space for your clothes, laptop and other tech devices, shoes, toiletries and gym gear.
Customers choose between two outer bag options (this is the garment bag compartment): backpack style (two straps and holds a 15” laptop) or the messenger (one strap and holds a 13” laptop).
The Henty CoPilot comes with a swag of clever features to make it arguably the worlds best garment bag design, including a laptop compartment, phone pocket, ergonomic straps, rain jacket cover, reflective logo and loop for a bike light, toiletry bag and a unique clothes hanger, just to name a few.
The Henty CoPilot is also compatible with our sports bags. These can be used instead of the 20L Inner Tube, as they also clip into the centre of the CoPilot. This feature means the CoPilot is versatile and can be used every day, as well as traveling.
We decided to launch the CoPilot, a multi-purpose garment bag for active travellers, on Kickstarter to test the market before we started production.
“When you’re creating a high quality product, production is expensive so we decided to use Kickstarter to see whether it was a solution people were interested in,” Jeremy said.
“The response was phenomenal. People loved innovative design and have been willing to back us and the CoPilot.”
Two days after the campaign was launched on Kickstarter, the Henty CoPilot had received orders exceeding US$100,000. By the end of the campaign, we had US$320,000 worth of orders.
“Crowdfunding sites have a huge global reach and we realised we were introducing people to Henty for the first time, which was exciting.”
“We also have a well-considered, high spec product and because we have been in manufacturing for a while, people trust us to deliver,” Jeremy said.
The CoPilot moves Henty into the competitive business traveller market, where we hope our world leading garment bag design will strike the right note with business travellers.