With much time spent traveling, living life off
suitcases, Chris Pratt stands to be the perfect face for the regional campaign
of Tumi. Packing skills, product know-how, and sage advice included, he tips us
off on how to perfect that journey we embark on
Related: Unpack The Magic Of The North With Tumi
One would assume that for someone who spends half, if not most of their time dodging international date lines and hauling an arguable fraction of their lives in strategically packed suitcases that they would have it mapped out and exacted to a precise science. This should be of an extreme expectation for someone who counts zipping through the realms and the known galaxy as just another day at work. But for Peter Quill aka Star-Lord, or better known as Chris Pratt within the confines of planet Earth, he is admittedly not as good as he would hope to be—just yet.
“The truth is, I’m getting much better at packing, but I’ve not always been great with packing. It helps that my fiancé is really great with packing and she helps me pack and one thing she’s really excited about—if you don’t know about it, you should know—are these Tumi packing cubes,” says Chris Pratt as he was introduced as the newest ambassador and face of the Asia Pacific and Middle East campaign of New York-based global travel brand, Tumi in Hong Kong. “They’re these zippered cubes you can roll. I’m a roller of clothes. I’m not a folder like you saw in the video, I roll my clothes up, i.e. Katherine rolls my clothes up, but you can have like one cube just for your pants. Roll them up. One just for shirts, one just for workout clothes, one for socks and underwear, and then one for your dirty laundry. And you can stack all this stuff up in your bag, it’s really organized, it’s really sleek. I like the way that it works and you can actually fit like—I have these two bags and I’ll fit an entire week’s worth of clothes in two carry-on bags so I don’t have to check any bags.”
It is a little bit of a known fact that typically, although this can be discussed, that men shy away from packing as much as they can. So, it is very refreshing to hear a man who should be basking in the glow of the worldwide record-smashing success of Avengers: Endgame talk in great detail about everything up to the slightest details of his luggage. “I feel like I travel a lot, I spend about I think half the year on the road and I have for several years now. And so my luggage is really important to me, you know, I live out of my suitcase,” he says, exacting what are his essentials when on-the-go. “And so a) it has to be TUMI and then I like to take a note with me that I carry around that my son will give me so I have a little piece of him, like a note or a toy of his. I bring a Bible, I bring my necklace that I wear everywhere, I bring a Rubik’s cube, and I bring my laptop.”
So, while he is still sharpening his packing skills, as seen in the comically fictionalized one-on-one with a man named Ruben in the Tumi campaign primer that was unveiled at the engaging Tumi Loft in Pacific Place, Queensway (it even had a virtual reality simulator where you could interact with Chris Pratt himself. Yes, dancing is necessary.), he is definitely more adept with his know-how on the products of the brand. “Well I mean, they’re very specific. I think that you look at a Tumi bag and you know that it’s a Tumi bag,” he begins. “I think a lot of other bags; they’re not distinct like this. So, I think the logo, the bag tag is very specific. The feel of it—I mean, you pack your stuff and for me I pack and say I’m going to do a job in London for six months. I have a bag full of everything that I love that I’m giving to some baggage handlers at an airport who, let’s be honest, are probably going to throw the thing like 40 feet through the air and it’s like going to fall off the back of a truck and then get run over…You know, they don’t treat your luggage with the same respect that we treat our own luggage, and so the durability factor, I think that’s it—they can drop it off a building and all your stuff is going to be safe and sound.”
Photo by Magic Liwanag
He definitely isn’t joking around with the way baggages are handled, so his sign-off on the durability of Tumi, especially evidenced by its timely update on its iconic Alpha collection, is one that highly matters. Chris Pratt definitely knows his way around Tumi luggages, as he himself is a longtime fan and actual patron of the brand. This is, of course a far cry from his youth and incidental introduction to the brand where his then girlfriend told him straight out that he was too old to carry around a backpack and instead, upgrade and become a man with a briefcase. Well, she hasn’t seen backpacks expertly crafted by Tumi.
“I’ve probably got over a dozen. If you count the packing cubes, over 20. I’ve got one for a suit, I’ve got one that I can fit two suits – so if I need to travel somewhere with a suit. I’ve got this huge extended trip bag, it’s the big one and I can fit – honestly, I can probably move my house in this bag, I fit a ton of stuff in there,” he says of his growing collection. “Right now, I’m using the Alpha 3 carry-on and the Alpha 3brief pack. They go together, it’s really nice. You can actually charge your phone off of it, which is really helpful. Yeah, it’s so dope because my phone is always dying. And then I’ve got like a Tumi briefcase that I’ve had for about 10 years. It’s a black standard briefcase. Yeah, I’ve got a bunch of Tumi things.”
Photo by Magic Liwanag
More than just the physical aspect of it, encased in its patented, ultra-durable FXT ballistic nylon, the coming together of innovative design, superior performance, and finessed functionality, Chris Pratt relates to the brand on its long-held credo of perfecting the journey. When the opportunity presented itself to ask the Hollywood A-lister and perennial funny man how he ensures he has perfect journey each time and everywhere he goes, he turns pragmatic. “The truth is, there’s no…perfection is probably unattainable… So, just rolling with the punches like understanding that sometimes you can plan your journey and choose your journey and sometimes your journey is going to choose you,” he explains. “And so, understanding the difference and rolling with the punches when you have to.”
And he speaks the truth, too. While the quest to perfecting every journey is paramount, encouraging one to truly maximize going beyond the confines of a comfort zone, there is no actual perfect extreme to speak of. There will always be that misstep or missed opportunity that will lead to an unplanned but totally memorable discovery. This is where the journey becomes something off the itinerary to a lasting moment in time. And in these expeditions of the personal sort, Tumi ensures that you get to live in that particular instant, forever sealing it within the wirings of your soul.
Photo by Magic Liwanag
It’s a little too kum ba yah, but think about it. This is where traveling ends and the journey begins, just ask Chris Pratt as he sets his sight on yet another journey to another exciting locale in some far-off corner of the world to tell yet another story we cannot wait to hear and see—this time with better packing skills in the bag, hopefully.
