Topo Designs’ New Teardrop Backpack Recalls the Brand's Retro Roots

Author

Bob Myaing

Photographer

Bob Myaing

Colorado’s modern mountain lifestyle brand has a new daypack with a design reaching back to outdoor recreation’s boom

Published: 07-30-2026

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Earlier this summer, Topo Designs somewhat quietly introduced the Classic Teardrop Backpack. It's a new backpack with a shape that'll be familiar to those of us raised on Jansport book bags, with strong nods to daypack designs deployed by brands like Holubar, The North Face, and Sierra Designs in the '60s and '70s. Featuring an array of punchy colors and lots of lash patches, the level of vintage DNA sewn into the simple pack came as some surprise based on the expectations I’ve developed for the brand–an ascending scale of rectangular packs, color-blocked in a style leaning modern, but not overtly technical.

Outdoor brands with decades of skin in the game love a good throwback. We do too. In recent collections, Osprey has revisited the '90s, and Columbia scanned its archives for prints, but sadly, Abercrombie & Fitch likely won’t be restocking canoes and shotguns anytime soon.

Founded in 2008, Topo Designs had no archive of its own to draw from for its initial offering of simple, colorful packs. With a deep appreciation for the styles and hardiness of the gear they were raised on, Coloradans Jedd Rose and Mark Hansen looked to back catalogs of the gear world’s boom to inspire their own bags.

Topo Designs Classic Teardrop Backpack and Sierra Designs Daytripper (ca. 1972)

The brand’s best-selling Rover Pack has almost singlehandedly defined its current pack design style: bright, blocky, and formulated for practical, everyday use, if lacking some of today's cutting-edge materials and construction processes. The pack’s success has been so great that today Topo makes a 10-liter mini-Rover and a novelty half-liter Rover Micro (it's a keychain).

The new Classic Teardrop Backpack certainly feels familiar to the Rover, but the nod to the daypacks of yesteryear is more direct. Upon news of its release, the bright blue colorway struck me immediately for its similarity to a 1970s Sierra Designs Daytripper backpack that's in a collection of vintage gear I’ve acquired through sporadic eBay monitoring.

This modern rendition from Topo Designs trades out a leather base for thick 1000-denier recycled nylon, felt-padded shoulder straps for padded nylon webbing, and metal hardware for plastic. While these updated substitutes may feel a little less romantic than the classic spec, they offer no shortage of durability over its lifetime of navigating trails and terminals.

Inside and out, the new Teardrop sprinkles in conveniences that pack designers didn't have on the brain decades ago: an internal laptop/tablet sleeve, an exterior zippered accessory pocket, and a bright internal liner that makes it easy to find your things. You will, however, find a near-identical layout of leather lash patches—one on the pack's peak and two on the bottom—and a gear loop, originally designed for lashing on things like an extra layer of clothing and an ice axe for alpine approaches.

Preceded by the Teardrop’s debut, Topo Designs also reintroduced the Klettersack earlier this year–one of the very first backpacks in its collection, and one that was heavily inspired by vintage pack design. The Klettersack helped set the tone for Topo in the 2010s, when the brand was still young and a retro-seasoned outdoor boom began to put vibes on the same scale as performance. Also present: Pendleton blankets, Danner’s explosion into lifestyle footwear, and who could forget Poler?

In recent years, Topo Designs' offerings seemed to have grown away from those roots. The company dove into performance, fashion-driven apparel, and practical packs. Once on the edge, Topo found itself in the mainstream. The Klettersack reissue and, more so, the Classic Teardrop are a welcome return to form. The bar is higher for outdoor throwbacks, but the Teardrop clears it with ease.

$99 AT TOPO DESIGNS

For a more new school pack approach, learn how Gossamer Gear rebuilt itself as a modern ultralight frontrunner.