XPLR™ [ explore ]
The XPLR™ Modular Duffel - 50L, 1100mm when open, with a quick-clip hang system, removable Velcro packing cubes, and 300gsm RipTech outer - is the debut product from XPLR Media (Pty) Ltd, a South African gear brand est. 2024 & built entirely on field experience.
Our Story
Craig Kolesky has never been able to sit still. That is, in large part, how he ended up here.
Over the past two decades, his camera has taken him to places most people only see in the magazines and web features he shoots for. Chasing Red Bull athletes into the dunes of Namibia. Shooting Oakley and Salomon campaigns in mountain ranges across multiple continents. Documenting some of the world's best action sports talent in conditions that demand as much from the crew as they do from the athletes — remote, exposed, logistically complex, and almost always spectacular.
That life — of constant movement, tight schedules, and gear that either performs or fails publicly — gave Craig an education no product designer working from a studio could buy. He learned what kit actually does when the road runs out, when the weather changes at 3000 metres, when the vehicle is two hours from the nearest town and you need something you packed four days ago. He learned, trip by trip and season by season, that the difference between a good day in the field and a chaotic one is almost always organisation.
It also gave him a deep and lasting love for overland travel. Between commercial shoots and race seasons, Craig was in his bakkie — pushing into remote corners of southern Africa, living simply and moving constantly, finding the places cameras tend to go and then going further anyway. That world of self-sufficient travel became as central to who he is as the photography that took him there.
And through all of it, he was always the gear guy.
If a piece of kit existed, Craig owned it. If it didn't exist yet, he was the first to know about it. He has spent more hours than he'd sensibly admit reading spec sheets, testing materials, modifying bags, and improvising solutions to packing problems that no manufacturer had quite cracked. Overland travel, photography expeditions, stage races — the context changed, but the problem was always some version of the same thing: too much kit, not enough organisation, and a packing system that worked in theory and fell apart somewhere on a dirt road between here and there.
When Craig's family started joining him on overland trips, the problem doubled. Suddenly the question wasn't just how to keep his own kit organised across multiple terrains and mission types — it was how to keep an entire family's gear accessible, separated, and sane across the kind of trips most families would consider logistically ambitious. The bags that almost worked before now definitively didn't.
So he built one that did.
The XPLR™ Modular Duffel is not a product invented to fill a gap in a market. It is a solution built by someone who ran out of patience with the available options — someone with the specific experience to know exactly what was wrong with them and the obsessive attention to detail to fix every single thing. It is, in the most literal sense, the bag Craig always needed and couldn't find.
And now it exists for everyone who's been looking for the same thing.
