For working professionals, it can often feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day. Between the daily work grind and handling essential responsibilities like buying groceries, walking the dog, and doing laundry, it can be exceedingly difficult to carve out time in our busy schedules for trips to the gym. Knowing this is a reality so many people face, the team over at DSPTCH has set out to streamline the transition from working to working out with its all-new Gym/Work Bag. Unsure if DSPTCH’s latest bag is a true game-changer or just a bit of clever marketing, we’ve gotten our paws on one of these hybrid gym-work bags to find out for ourselves in this hands-on review of the DSPTCH Gym/Work Bag.
Video Review: DSPTCH Gym/Work Bag
Interested in learning even more about the DSPTCH Gym/Work Bag? Then check out our 4K video review of the hybridized duffel for a more in-depth look at our time spent with the bag.
From Work To Workouts
A Style Fit For Both
Right out of its packaging, this item instantly announces itself as an incredibly rugged and robust bag, with a hefty, roughly 3-lb weight being owed to its hardwearing materials, ample reinforcements, and ultra-beefy padded carrying straps. Despite its bevy of features and functionality, the duffel-style bag boasts a fairly minimalistic outward appearance, with a myriad of small details that jump out at you the longer you take it in. And, with its briefcase-esque silhouette, this item looks just at home in an office or boardroom setting as it does in a gym or locker room.
Built-To-Last Properties
Toss-Around Bag
Made entirely in America, DSPTCH’s Gym/Work Bag is constructed around a 380-denier poly-nylon blend shell that’s fortified via a DWR coating. Measuring 18″ x 12″ x 8”, the bag also boasts a moisture-resistant 410-denier nylon packcloth liner that’s also backed by a DWR coating. What’s more, a coated mesh construction has been strategically employed in certain areas, allowing the bag and its contents to breathe better, thereby preventing odor buildup and bacteria growth.
Surface-Level Elements
Exterior Features & Hardware
Drawing some light influence from tactical military packs, DSPTCH’s Gym/Work Bag features a largely spartan exterior that’s adorned in vertically and horizontally-running nylon webbing, including a snap-secured MOLLE-style item on the bag’s rear side. The front face of the bag also sports an additional quick-access zippered pocket while the top of the duffel-style pack is equipped with a cross-body shoulder strap with a removable pad and a heavily-padded carrying/grab handle. Opposite the bag’s mesh-doored shoe pocket is an external quick-access mesh pocket with an elastic band closure. A single DSPTCH logo tag and custom-branded zipper pulls afford a little extra visual flair.
Interior Amenities
Room For All Aspects Of Your Life
Affording a collective 23 liters of internal storage space, the inside of the Gym/Work Bag features everything needed for life at both the office and gym. This includes numerous compartments, several mesh pockets, organizers for pens and other workday essentials, and dedicated padded tablet and laptop sleeves — the latter of which can accommodate notebooks of up to 16” — as well as a collapsible shoe compartment with mesh panels and its own zipper-secured external entry that can fit workout shoes up to size 13. The use of buckles set on adjustable straps also allows users to more easily secure and fasten down the bag’s contents.
Hybrid Duffel Perfection
A Tangible Argument For Single-Bag Living
While we’ve seen — and tested — a decent number of gym-work hybrid bags, few if any manage to deliver the utility of DSPTCH’s Gym/Work Bag. Rather than being an office bag that’s received a few concessions for the gym — or vice versa — DSPTCH’s take on the genre was engineered from the ground up to offer the perfect balance between the essentials needed for both the workplace and exercising. We wouldn’t mind seeing a slightly more rugged and robust construction — such as ballistic-grade nylon, X-Pac, or CORDURA — though the bag did hold up just fine in our experience. At the end of the day, the Gym/Work Bag objectively excels at what DSPTCH set out to do in the first place: deliver a purpose-built transportation and organization system for the gym and office that doesn’t compromise in either area.
The 15 Best Gym Bags
Want to get a read on a few more duffel bag options on the market from some of our favorite brands? Well, our guide to the best gym bags includes more than a dozen incredibly versatile and well-built bags from some of the most esteemed companies in the space.
