A few years ago, getting your base weight under 4.5kg meant either building your own gear or buying from a handful of cottage brands most hikers had never heard of. That’s not really true anymore.
Big-name retailers now sell genuinely lightweight kit at accessible prices.
Established outdoor brands are using materials that used to be cottage-industry-only. And for the first time, there’s real public data on what gear actually weighs, not just what the spec sheet claims. Ultralight didn’t get invented in the last two years. It got easier to buy into.
What’s genuinely changed
The clearest shift is who’s making the gear. Mountain Hardwear’s Alakazam pack uses ALUULA, a UHMWPE fabric that a couple of years ago you’d only have found on a small-batch cottage pack. REI’s Trailmade range does something similar from the other direction: performance-grade features at prices that were never really available before. Neither of those brands built their reputation on ultralight. Now they’re both selling it as a normal option, not a niche one.
The other real change is information. Independent gear-weight databases now exist that let you compare hundreds of products on actual measured weight, not marketing copy. That’s new, and it matters. For years the only way to know if a “lightweight” pack was actually light was to buy it and put it on a scale yourself.
What hasn’t changed
Here’s the part that’s less exciting to say out loud: a lot of what’s being sold as new this year isn’t. The ultralight market is mature enough now that plenty of “innovation” is really just an established idea at a new price point, or a familiar fabric with a new brand name on it. That’s not a criticism of any one product. It’s just worth knowing before you assume newer automatically means better.
Weight has also always come with trade-offs, and mainstreaming hasn’t erased them. A sub-4.5kg base weight is more achievable off the shelf than it used to be, but the compromises that come with very low weight, whether that’s durability, comfort or how a pack carries on a long day, haven’t gone anywhere. Wider access to lightweight gear doesn’t mean the physics changed.
Why this matters for how we build
We’d rather sit on the second side of that line than the first. Building at 869g for our 40L pack wasn’t about hitting a number for the sake of it, it was about what we were prepared to give up and what we weren’t. That’s the same question the whole market is being asked now that lightweight gear is everywhere: not “how light can this go,” but “what are you actually trading for that weight.”
More people having access to genuinely lightweight gear is a good thing. It just means the question worth asking has shifted from “can I get this light” to “is this actually well thought through, or just light.”
Over and Out