Mous UltraTex Optimal Lid Backpack

The Mous UltraTex Optimal Protective Lid Backpack is an unashamedly high-end offering aimed at the commuting and travel markets. It is not a cycling-specific bag but Mous says it’s well-suited for cycle commuting, and it certainly offers a huge number of pockets and compartments together with a tough exterior with good water-resistance. The high price will limit its appeal, though.

> Buy now: Mous UltraTex Optimal Protective Lid Backpack for £299.99 from Mous

If your algorithms are anything like mine (bikes, coffee, travel, tech) then you may be aware of the UK brand Mous, as it seems to spend heavily on social media promotions for its phone cases and the like. As well as phone accessories it has now branched out into bags and luggage, with a range of backpacks from 18-40 litres.

The Optimal range of backpacks starts at £219.99 (currently £159.99) and runs up to £349.99 for the official Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 Team version. Mous sent us the 25-litre UltraTex version that’s priced at £299.99. It is sized to suit use as carry-on luggage or for commuting (on or off the bike).

UltraTex? Mous describes it as an ultra-lightweight ripstop material, combining durability and strength with low weight. It’s made by combining two different yarns – Robic nylon and ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene (UHMWPE) – into a ripstop weave, where the UHMWPE provides the ‘grid’ that stops tears. The fabric is coated twice with polyurethane to add water resistance. Mous says that this makes the UltraTex version much tougher than the standard version made from ballistic nylon. It is also lighter, although only 120g lighter, at a £70 premium over the basic model’s RRP. For context, the combination of nylon and UHMWPE is not new, and is used quite widely in outdoor gear, but it is a more expensive fabric than nylon on its own.

The Mous Optimal has a whopping 18 pockets to accommodate everything from an Airtag tracker through to laptop and water bottles. Really, there are more pockets than any other bag I’ve used. Mous’s target customer for this is definitely the sort of person who likes to have a specific place for things when they’re commuting or travelling. If you’re the ‘lob it all in there together’ sort of person then this bag just won’t be your sort of thing.

I think the ideal customer is the sort of person who lays everything out for the Insta pic before they pack it, and each thing has its own place in the bag. And if you’re one of those, you’ll definitely appreciate this amount of storage options.

Starting at the back, the laptop compartment is accessed via a water-resistant PU-shielded YKK zip. There are two zip pulls, each with nice chunky Mous-branded pull loop, and the zips themselves have those little eyelets so that you could lock this compartment closed with a small padlock. Inside there are two stacked pockets, one that will swallow my 15in laptop (and will apparently accommodate up to a 16in MacBook Pro) and one that will take even a large tablet like the 13in iPad Pro.

According to Mous, the contents of these are protected by a material it calls Airofoam, which acts as a non-Newtonian fluid to protect your stuff in the event of a drop. There’s a whole blog post on it, though I should warn you it does mention ‘exceptionally intelligent molecules’, which is clearly absolute bollocks. There is a block of this material roughly an inch by an inch in section that extends right across the bottom of the laptop compartment positioned to protect a laptop if you drop the bag upright.

I’d say laptop protection is an area where the Mous Optimal performs extremely well – the block of Airofoam at the bottom and EVA foam on all the other surfaces around the laptop really do cosset your computer. Mous says that it has been designed to protect laptops and tablets from drops of up to 1.2 metres and I’d be pretty confident it would do this time after time. Its marketing vids show bags being thrown off the top of buildings and the like and laptops apparently surviving, though Mous told me that it wouldn’t recommend that its customers do this!

To access the main compartment, you lift the lid, which is secured by an aluminium hook. I’m a sucker for a smart metal catch on a bag, though I can’t say I found the one used here by Mous a particular joy to use. It’s a two-handed job that I don’t think improves on the Fidlock catch it used on its earlier Extreme commuter backpack.

Occasionally, the webbing loop which it hooked through would get folded in on itself and make it almost impossible to open, and this was most prone to happen when I was trying to get a child’s coat out in a hurry in a sudden downpour. These touchpoints are what can elevate an expensive product and give you the warm feeling of ‘this was awfully expensive but isn’t it lovely to use’, and this one is a let down.

It is adjustable, though, and I appreciated the ability to cinch the lid down whether the bag was full to the top or not. Under the lid is another weather-proof zip, and it opens the bag all way down to the bottom on each side. This means you can open up the bag and pack it like a suitcase. This feature is one I’ve seen on a handful of other rucksacks lately and it is really handy if you have a lot of stuff to get in there.

When commuting I could fit a change of clothes and lunch in this main compartment with tons of space to spare – it’s a good size.

Here’s a rundown of the pockets inside this main compartment. On the back, there is a half-height full-width pocket for a magazine or A4 pad above which is a large zipped mesh compartment which could take a laptop charger. On the inside of the opening flap there is another zipped mesh pocket (which worked well for a passport and boarding card), a couple of small mesh pockets in which you could store something like wireless earphones, and a large zipped pocket made of a stretchy material – of a size for over-the-ear headphones, for example. On the sides of the main compartment (we’re still inside here, keep up!) there is a tiny pocket designed for your Airtag if you want to track where your back has got to, and an internal water bottle compartment.

Moving outside, there’s plenty more. The lid itself has a zipped pocket which – like all the external zipped pockets – uses a lined weatherproof zip. This one is a good size for a small book but the fleece lining suggests it’s probably intended for a phone or sunglasses. There’s another zipped fleecy pocket on the front, just underneath the lid that again would accommodate sunnies, a small camera or powerbank.

On one side of the bag is a water bottle pocket, which held my one-litre bottle without complaint. This can also be used to hold something like a camera tripod, with a cinch strap above it to keep it safely in place.

On the other side there’s a zipped compartment you can open up to take another bottle – it’ll hold something like a 500ml Coke bottle with the zip closed, or you can have it half open and then fit one of those half-litre insulated metal water bottles. On the outside of this pocket there is yet zipped another pocket, roughly phone sized. Don’t worry, we’re nearly done, there’s just one more.

The final pocket is what Mous calls the secret pocket, though it would help if Mous didn’t tell people about it in its YouTube vids. This is actually on the back of the bag, the side which sits against your back. The zip is visible from the side when you’re wearing it, but it would be a bold and extremely skilled thief who managed to get something out of it while you were wearing the bag. Mous recommends you use this for your passport or other items of particular value. For completeness, there are also a couple of cinch straps on the bottom that could be used to hold something like a yoga mat.

That’s a whole lot of zips, fabric, fleece, foam and a little bit of metal, and you might have guessed by now that what Mous calls ‘effortlessly lightweight’ is what I’d call not far short of one and half kilos. That’s very much not the lightest 25 litre bag you can get, but you can see why – it has masses of storage sections and feels substantial and very well made. Lightweight hiking rucksacks of this capacity can be well below a kilo, but that’s not really what this is, and I think there’s a place for both types of bag.

The shoulder straps are comfortable and well-shaped with a mesh fabric on the underside to breathe better against your skin. There are also the usual padded sections either side of the spine and I found the Mous bag comfortable on my back whether walking or riding.

There’s no waist or sternum strap, though Mous does have a sternum strap available at an additional £19.99. I tried it and found that using the sternum strap did improve stability when the bag was more heavily loaded or if I was riding out of the saddle.

I had expected to miss a waist strap more than I actually did, if I’m honest. A waist strap is essential for a bag that you’ll wear all day, on a long hike, for example, as it means that most of the weight of the bag can go straight into your hips rather than tiring out your shoulders. I reckon Mous is aiming this bag more at the sort of use where you might carry it for an hour and then set it down when you get on a train, or into your meeting.

Mous’s website makes reference to the water resistance of the UltraTex fabric and I asked Mous whether it had done any testing to give a hydrostatic head rating, but it hadn’t. In my testing I found that it did indeed shrug off a shower without any ingress, and when I spilled a bottle of water over the outside of the bag by mistake, none at all got in. Again, it’s not aiming at the hiking-all-day-through-a-downpour market, so I think the protection is sufficient.

I used the Mous Optimal bag as carry-on luggage when flying and it was pretty good – I appreciated having ample safe places for tech, passports and so on, and it was comfortable and feels substantial enough to cope with a lot of kicking around in airports. For travel use, there’s also a vertical piece of strap running down the centre where your spine would sit – this is designed so that you can thread it over the pull-out handle of a wheely suitcase, although that means it sits on its side. The STM Myth backpack I tested a few years ago addressed this need a bit better in my view, with its PassPort system where the backpack could sit upright on top of the suitcase and was better held in place than the Mous.

But we’re a cycling website, so we should also cover how well suited it is to use on a bike. When riding I found it comfortable and more stable on my back than I’d expected without waist or sternum straps. The webbing down the centre of the bag has highly reflective details in it, and there’s a loop at the bottom of that webbing that you could clip a rear light through. I appreciated the fact that there were elastic strap tidies on the main shoulder straps so the ends aren’t loose and flapping in the wind.

Rivals

In fairness, though, there are bags that have more of a focus on cycling use, and probably the most prominent among those is the Osprey Metron 24, which has a good range of storage and some additional cycling-specific features such as a helmet attachment and a waterproof cover.

If you want crash protection, the Evoc Commute Pro 22 has an EN-certified spinal protection panel built in, though we’ve not tested that yet.

Both of those bags, and all of the bags in our best cycling backpacks buyer’s guide are cheaper than the Mous, and at £299.99 I think that the market for this bag will be fairly limited.

A direct competitor would be the GoMatic Travel Pack that comes in at a similar price.

As with anything, you can always find a more expensive option and this McLaren collab from Tumi was my best effort – yours for over a grand!

Is the Mous worth £299.99? For me, I think it’s a tough sell, especially when there are hundreds of good alternatives ranging from Decathlon’s budget offerings at as low as £20, via the excellent Osprey bag and on to chunkier options from the likes of Chrome and Mission Workshop.

I asked Mous why a cyclist should consider its bag instead of the lighter, cheaper Osprey, and was told that its selling point is class-leading protection of your kit, robustness and strength. That’s fair enough, and – as I mentioned before – if you like a pocket for everything, you will appreciate the 18 pockets here.

Conclusion

If you’re buying a bag mostly for use on a bike, then I’d suggest the Osprey is hard to beat as it’s lighter, much cheaper, has a rain cover and is just a more bike-focused design. For a more general business use-case with some bike commuting thrown in, then the Mous performs really well, but there are a lot of good options in this market. If you can live without the UltraTex fabric, the version of this bag made from ballistic nylon is presently available for just £159.99. At that price, I’d say the value proposition starts to become quite attractive.

> Buy now: Mous UltraTex Optimal Protective Lid Backpack for £299.99 from Mous

Verdict

Business-class carry-on luggage with a pocket for everything – albeit at business-class pricing

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