Cabaia: the French label turning recycled plastic into colourful backpacks

Cabaia began with a hat. In 2015, founder Bastien Valensi introduced beanies fitted with interchangeable pompoms, letting a single hat change look depending on the day or the outfit. The idea spread quickly enough that, within a handful of years, the brand had built a network of a thousand retailers across Europe. In 2022, Cabaia became B Corp certified, a status it still holds. What started as a woolly accessory has grown into a full catalogue of bags, backpacks and luggage, all carrying the same instinct for colour and modularity.

How it started

Bastien Valensi founded Cabaia in 2015 around one simple mechanism: pompoms that clip on and off. It meant a customer could own one beanie and several moods. That logic of interchangeable parts didn’t stay confined to knitwear. By 2018, the brand had partnered with the French SPA animal welfare association on a solidarity collection, an early sign that Cabaia wanted its products to stand for something beyond design. In 2019, the label launched its Adventurer backpack, developed together with its own customers rather than in isolation. A year later, it counted a thousand retail points across Europe. In 2021, Cabaia opened its first physical shop, in Paris, and the same year it adopted mission-led company status in France — a legal commitment to pursue social and environmental goals alongside commercial ones.

What’s in the range

Cabaia’s catalogue centres on backpacks, bags, luggage and accessories, all designed with the same visual identity: bright colours, modular components and pieces that can be swapped or personalised. The Adventurer is the line that defines the brand. According to Cabaia, it is co-created with its own customers and comes in a range of sizes, colours and materials that are renewed each season, rather than fixed once and left unchanged. In 2023, the brand extended this approach beyond backpacks into luggage and accessories, broadening what a Cabaia customer can carry from a daily commute to a longer trip. The result is a range built less around a single hero product and more around a system: bags and bits designed to be mixed, matched and replaced piece by piece rather than thrown out whole.

Materials and making

Cabaia states that 67% of its products contain recycled plastic, and that its Adventurer line specifically is made using 70% recycled plastic. Those figures are the brand’s own, but they point to a clear material choice: favouring recycled inputs over virgin plastic across much of the catalogue. That choice is backed by a warranty that is unusual in the bag and luggage category — Cabaia’s own bags and luggage carry a lifetime warranty from the manufacturer. For a customer, that combination matters in a very practical way: a backpack built from recycled material is only genuinely lower-impact if it is also built to be kept, not replaced within a season or two. The B Corp certification the brand has held since 2022 sits on top of this, functioning as third-party recognition of the wider social and environmental standards Cabaia applies to how it operates, not just what it makes.

What the brand stands for

Cabaia’s move to mission-led company status in 2021, followed by B Corp certification in 2022, marks a shift from simply making colourful accessories to formalising commitments around them. In 2024, the brand created Care & Give, a dedicated endowment fund, extending its involvement in social and charitable causes beyond the earlier collaboration with the SPA animal welfare association back in 2018. Alongside the certifications, the brand’s own claims about recycled plastic content — 67% across the range, 70% within Adventurer specifically — are presented as evidence of a material strategy rather than a one-off green product. Taken together, these are the pieces of a brand that has chosen to build its accountability into its legal structure, not just its marketing.

Right now

Cabaia has kept expanding both its physical presence and its product system. In 2024, it opened its first shops in Germany, extending its retail footprint beyond France. On the product side, two launches are worth watching. From September 2026, the brand is introducing interchangeable side pockets designed to fit all its backpack formats, extending the modular logic that has defined Cabaia since its earliest pompom beanies to an entirely different part of the bag. The same month, five new backpacks join the Adventurer family under a new Slim designation, suggesting a slimmer profile within a line the brand describes as being renewed season by season with customer input.