The short version: Troubadour, the London maker of work and travel bags, has raised £3.2m to grow in North America and Europe and to launch its first women’s collection and a full luggage range. It turned over £8.4m in 2025. For buyers, the question is whether a fifteen-year-old brand can grow without losing what made its bags worth buying.
Troubadour, the London-based bags and accessories brand founded in 2011 by Abel Samet and Samuel Bail, has closed a £3.2m funding round led by Harlo Equity Partners, according to a report by TheIndustry.fashion on 29 October. Pembroke VCT, which became the company’s first institutional backer in 2013, put in £1m of the total. No valuation was disclosed.
The money is earmarked for four things: expansion in North America and Europe, a new marketing and customer-acquisition push, a dedicated corporate and wholesale sales team, and product development — including a first women’s collection and a full luggage range. Samuel Bail, co-founder and chief executive, said the founders set out “to make the bag we couldn’t find”. Pembroke’s investment director, Alicia Taylor, said the fund was pleased to welcome Harlo as lead investor alongside other co-investors.
The numbers behind the round
Troubadour is a small business with an unusually international customer base. Revenue in 2025 was £8.4m, and more than 70% of its direct-to-consumer revenue comes from the United States, according to TheIndustry.fashion. Its wholesale partners include Harrods, Nordstrom and Bloomingdale’s.
The fastest-growing part of the company is not the one most shoppers see. Its corporate arm, which makes branded bags for clients including Nvidia, J.P. Morgan and OpenAI, grew 141% to more than £800,000. That is roughly a tenth of turnover, and the round funds a sales team built specifically to grow it.
The product reputation rests largely on one bag. The Apex backpack has been named the best laptop backpack by The New York Times’ Wirecutter five years running. Troubadour is a certified B Corp, says its bags are made largely from recycled materials, and sells them with a five-year warranty.
From crowdfunding to private equity
This is not Troubadour’s first raise, and the earlier ones tell you something about who owns the brand. Before this round, the company went to its own customers. In 2019 and 2020 it ran equity crowdfunding campaigns on Seedrs; the 2020 round passed £600,000 against a £500,000 target, at a pre-money valuation of about £5.4m for 8.41% of the company, Crowdfund Insider reported at the time.
The new round is a different kind of money. A lead investor named Harlo Equity Partners, a venture capital trust that has been on the register since 2013, and a plan built around customer acquisition, wholesale and corporate sales: this is the playbook of a brand moving from founder-led craft to managed growth. That isn’t a criticism. It is a change of phase, and phases change products.
The Faz read: growth is the risk, not the reward
Troubadour earned its place the slow way, which is why this round deserves attention rather than applause. Founders who began, by their own account, visiting tanneries and zip makers in Italy, Spain, France and England to source the parts for a single bag have spent fifteen years building one hero product that independent testers keep choosing. That is the kind of reputation Faz looks for: specific, checkable, earned by the object rather than the campaign.
The math compounds in both directions. A small brand that adds a women’s line, luggage, a wholesale team and a corporate sales desk in the same period is adding categories, channels and suppliers at once. Each is defensible. Together they are exactly the stretch that has hollowed out bigger names, where the range widens, the hero product gets less of the founders’ attention, and the warranty becomes a cost line rather than a promise. We have written before about how to tell a small brand that will survive from one that will not; the warning sign there was a brand targeting four times its size in three years. Troubadour has not said anything like that, and £3.2m is a measured sum for a business of this size.
The corporate business deserves a second look, too. Branded bags for technology and banking clients are steady revenue, and they fund the consumer side. But they also pull a brand toward volume and logos — the opposite of what made the Apex worth recommending in the first place.
What it means if you own or want a Troubadour bag
If you already own one, the five-year warranty is the thing to watch. A funded company should be better placed to honour it; a company chasing growth targets may quietly make repairs slower or claims harder. Register your bag and keep your proof of purchase.
If you are buying, buy the product with the track record. The Apex has years of independent testing behind it. The women’s collection and the luggage will have none on launch day, and first-generation products from a brand entering a new category deserve the same scrutiny you would give a stranger. Judge them on materials, stitching and hardware, not on the name.
And if you are weighing Troubadour against the alternatives, it sits in the channel Faz recommends: independent and craft-led makers, alongside accessible-luxury leather names such as Mulberry, whose full-price sales rose 18% this autumn, and heritage specialists like Swaine, the 1750 London leather house now opening in Paris. Skip the logo-heavy mid-market bag that costs nearly as much and is built to last a season.
What happens next
Troubadour has not given dates for the women’s collection or the luggage range, and no new stores were announced. The signs to watch over the next year are whether the Apex keeps its independent recommendations, whether the five-year warranty survives unchanged, and whether wholesale growth arrives with discounting. A brand that grows on those terms is worth following. One that grows by trading them away is not.
Where this leaves you
A £3.2m round is a vote of confidence in a brand that built its name on one well-made bag. Whether it stays that brand depends on what it does with the money, and you will see the answer in the product before you read it in a press release. Keep buying the proven piece, give the new ones a season, and let the warranty tell you how the company is changing.
The next move is yours.
Sources: TheIndustry.fashion · Crowdfund Insider
