How Bogg Bags, the Crocs of Totes, Won Over America’s Moms

There are many varieties and colors of Bogg bags. Source: Bogg/Instagram

Vaccarella and her husband, Rosario, pushed Bogg forward with their own savings, and the company showed some early promise. Her first orders to manufacturers were a few hundred bags each, sold wholesale to a boutique near her family’s home in Ridgewood, New Jersey. They sold well, but at first Vaccarella worried that customers, many of whom she knew personally, were just trying to be nice. “You didn't know if people were buying them because they felt bad for you,” she says. The bags kept selling, though, and by 2011 they were enough of a hit among local moms that Vaccarella wanted to pitch Bogg to larger retailers. To do that, she made her biggest order ever: a shipping container full of more than 1,000 bags in shades of yellow and lime green—perfect, she thought, for families taking weekend trips to the Jersey Shore next summer. But making such a large order, at a cost of roughly $30,000, almost drained the family’s savings. “We weren’t, like, killing it,” Vaccarella says. “Spending that money was like spending a million dollars to me.”

When the trailer full of bags finally pulled up outside of the Vaccarella home—there was no business address to send them to—what she found inside felt to her like a sign that she was in over her head. The manufacturer had screwed up the dyeing process, and most of the bags were streaked with black. Figuring out how to recoup money from the factory while paying for a replacement order felt like a problem that the family’s finances couldn’t solve. “I can’t do this. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing,” Vaccarella says she thought at the time. Functionally, she thought, Bogg was done.

The damaged totes went into storage, where they stayed until the family finally had a reason to send them down to the shore, albeit for a reason far less joyous than a beach weekend. In the fall of 2012, in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, Vaccarella and her family donated the totes to disaster aid groups who filled them with supplies—granola bars, bottles of water, gloves, cleaning products—headed for people whose homes and businesses had been damaged. It felt like a fitting destination for bags that Vaccarella had always envisioned on the beach; they were, after all, resistant to grime and moisture, and could be hosed off when dirty.

It wasn’t long before the phone calls and emails started. As people who’d received the donated totes began to push their life back toward normalcy, they kept using the bags and wanted more, and they recommended them to friends and loved ones who wanted their own. Vaccarella put in new orders and started Bogg back up. The business grew slowly but steadily over the next few years, with orders coming in from larger retailers in more parts of the country. The bags proved to be a particular hit in the suburban South, Vaccarella found. Bogg’s bright colors jibed well with the region’s preppier, colorful wardrobes, and the bag’s utility outdoors fit with the abundant warm weather.

That’s how Christy Lax, a handbag buyer for the Little Rock-based department-store chain Dillard’s Inc., first came across a Bogg bag in 2018. Her sister bought one of the bags, which had experienced a spurt of local popularity near where she lived in Frisco, Texas, and Lax became immediately interested in getting the brand into Dillard’s, she told me. “Even though Dillard’s is categorized as a department store, we really try to offer many brands you would find in a specialty store,” she says, which gives her an opportunity to take chances on smaller, newer brands that the store’s competitors might view as too risky or unproven. She reached out to Vaccarella, and the two made a deal for Dillard’s to become Bogg’s first national retailer.

Before Bogg could make it into the almost 300 Dillard’s locations across 30 states, though, another disaster struck—the Covid-19 pandemic, which scrambled all kinds of consumer behavior and sent supply chains into meltdown. For many fashion brands and retailers in particular, 2020 was an exceptionally difficult period: People weren’t buying new clothes to wear to work or on vacation or out to dinner. Some brands couldn’t fulfill wholesale orders from retailers suddenly scrambling to stock very particular products in which consumers were suddenly interested, and some retailers canceled wholesale orders that had already been manufactured as their own revenue dried up. The fashion trade was not the place you wanted to be in 2020, unless you were sitting on large domestic inventories of sweatpants.

Or, as it turned out, unless you were selling Bogg bags. When the bags finally arrived at Dillard’s in August 2020, Lax marveled at the customer response. “We both had never seen anything sell like Bogg bags did at this time,” she says of conversations she had with her manager. “We would get a delivery, and then it would immediately sell out. There was so much pent-up demand.” Dillard’s ran through its Bogg inventory so quickly that year that there weren’t any totes left for the holiday season.

At the time, Bogg was still pretty small; it had sold less than $4 million worth of bags in 2019. But the product had managed to ingratiate itself to the exact right people, at the exact right time. According to Vaccarella, recommendations for the bag had started to spread in large social media groups of what she calls “Peloton moms.” On Facebook, in particular, Peloton’s fandom clusters into groups with tens or hundreds of thousands of members based on shared identities or interests—Black riders, postmenopausal riders, riders in the San Diego area, military vet riders—and as Peloton’s subscription numbers surged early in the pandemic, so did participation in those digital social circles.

As it happens, a lot of Peloton moms work in health care or education, professions that either never stayed home during pandemic shutdowns or that, in many parts of the country, sent their workers back to in-person duty long before the average office employee. And once nurses and teachers—people who carry a lot of stuff to and from messy jobs and who were especially cleanliness-minded during the pandemic—got their hands on Bogg totes, the brand started to grow in ways that no one really could have predicted. The company estimates that around 10% of its sales still come from people who work in health care and education. Lax confirms that women in those professions remain the core of Bogg’s customer base at Dillard’s, too.

Bogg’s success has been bolstered over the past several years by another otherwise unpredictable shift in behavior during the early pandemic: People joined TikTok in droves, and many users older than the platform’s then-dominant base of teens and twentysomethings have amassed followings by talking about their jobs. This includes lots of—you guessed it—nurses and teachers, professions full of relatively young women who are keenly aware of the methods and norms of social media influence. Vaccarella says that those users (first on TikTok, now on Instagram Reels as well) have helped push Bogg to an even wider audience. There hasn’t been any particularly big viral moment or specific influencer who stands out to her as having been crucial to the company’s growth. It’s been all of them, collectively, over time, she says, posting videos of themselves filling up bags with packed lunches, extra scrubs, sanitizing products, work shoes, their favorite insulated water bottles, laptops, tablets and who knows what else. Alongside them are a lot of people offline who tell a friend, rave about the bag to a co-worker or evangelize to the other moms in the softball team group chat.

Expansions in Bogg’s product lineup have helped keep the videos coming. As with Crocs, the perforations in Bogg tote bags allow for customizable accessories to be affixed to them, both on the interior and exterior. There are, of course, lots of decorative bits and bobs: tassels, colorful strap pads, pop-in charms to identify your little athlete by number or sport. But many of the options are practical. The company makes cup holders and inserts that turn your tote into a cooler, and Vaccarella says a phone holder is on the way, as is a panel that expands across the tops of two Bogg totes to form a mini side table at the beach or on the sidelines at a soccer game. In some cases, third-party companies have beaten Bogg in developing these sorts of accessories, including clip-on phone caddies and zipper pockets. And there’s a thriving market for guerrilla Bogg mods on Amazon.com and Etsy—proof, in its own way, of just how much utility that the company’s working-mom customer base is trying to wring from the things they carry every day.

If you look closely, you can see the fingerprints of these same women on many of the seemingly out-of-nowhere trendy products that have emerged over the past few years. Megaviral Stanley cups and sneakers from Hoka and On are prime examples. These products have caught on at least in part because they serve a practical purpose for a subset of early adopters who have physically demanding jobs doing care work. Then they move quickly through networks of young moms; the physical demands of motherhood, of course, have many things in common with more formal types of care work, even if that labor is unpaid.

Just like all those other products, Bogg has started to move beyond moms of young kids and into wider popularity. In particular, Lax mentions that smaller versions of the bag have started to catch on with the store’s teen and twentysomething shoppers, who may not need to schlep quite as much. In the end, Vaccarella’s idea, rejected repeatedly as too utilitarian for women, seems to have been fully vindicated. A lot of people, it turns out, can find utility in a bag that weighs very little, holds more than you’d expect, doesn’t fall over and can handle a once-over with a disinfectant wipe or a rinse under the kitchen faucet when it gets a little gross. Add Bogg bags to the long list of things that Mom was right about.