Fjallraven Farden Necessity Bag Review

What’s essential to make a great trip? Whether you need to carry a lot of tech, a decent amount of toiletries, or wrangle another type of travel accessory, Fjallraven has made the Farden Necessity Bag to organize it for you. With a handle that connects to some Fjallraven luggage and adaptable organization, it could be a great new pouch for your next trip. Is it? We’ve been testing it for weeks to find out.

External Components

The entire Farden line from Fjallraven is made with the same material: recycled polyamide. The exterior is 500D, while the interior liner is the same material, only thinner—210D. The interior has a PU coating, as well, so it has a slightly shinier finish that should hopefully be easier to wipe clean, though it’s not waterproof.

There’s an adjustable handle at the top that opens with a Woojin buckle. We don’t really see the need for an adjustable handle on this type of bag. However, if you have a Fjallraven Farden Roller 35 (or the larger Roller 75 or Roller 120), there’s a strap inside with a buckle inside the main compartment; it connects perfectly to the buckle on this strap. Connect the two, and you’ll know exactly where to find your bag inside your suitcase, which is especially convenient in the larger bags, but also if you have to pull your toiletries out of your carry on to get through security.

The Farden Necessity Bag’s YKK zippers have cords woven through their metal pulls for easy grabbing. They all work well, as we’d expect from our favorite zipper brand.

There’s not much more to talk about on the outside of this bag, except that it’s beefed up with padding to protect the gear inside and make it easier to stand upright on a counter or desk.

Inside The Pouch

Things get much more interesting inside the Farden Necessity Bag. It opens completely clamshell, so it lies flat on the table, though there’s also a hook at the top to hang it.

It’s simple—there’s no swivel or any other bells and whistles—but it gets the job done if you want to hang it over a towel rod or a hook. When you don’t use it, it folds down over the top half of the bag, blocking the organization, so you’ll want to flip it out of the way to get at your gear.

There are three layers of pockets here. The furthest back, at the top, is a zippered compartment that’s best for flatter gear. Though it spans the entire half of the bag, it doesn’t have much depth, and there are more pockets in front of it fighting for space. We used it for cotton swabs and tissues when using the bag for toiletries, and for pens and a pad of paper when we filled it with the contents of our tech pouch.

In front of that pocket is a wide slip pocket that can act sort of as a shelf for your gear when it’s hanging. However, what you put here fights with the items in the three elastic-topped mesh pockets on its face, so you have to kind of pick and choose when filling this side of the bag. We used the slip pocket for our deodorant and a travel hairbrush, and stuck a pill container and two Cadence Capsules (V2) in the mesh pockets. The Capsules were a tight squeeze in the mesh pockets, but our deodorant slotted nicely in the space between them and the pill bottle since it didn’t take up the entire width of its pocket. The brush, alas, was a bit of a problem, as it kept falling out of the slip pocket whenever we opened and closed the bag.

When using it for tech, we easily fit cables and a wall charger in those mesh pockets, leaving the slip pocket empty. None of our items seemed to work well there.

The bottom half of the bag has more open, unique organization. There’s a grid of elastics at the bottom where you can slide in more oddly-shaped gear, as well as long, thin items. We really liked it for toiletries, as we slid makeup brushes facing one way, a toothbrush facing the other, and then stuck a travel bottle of toothpaste upright to make use of some of the horizontal elastic. Everything stayed nicely in place while traveling, yet was still easy to take out and use.

It didn’t work as well for tech, mostly because our tester doesn’t carry flash drives or dongles; those would work well here.

Behind that is a horseshoe-shaped zipper that opens the remaining space. Here’s where you can make the most use of the bag’s depth, whether for a razor, scrunchie, makeup, and other toiletries that don’t fit elsewhere, or for bulkier cables, wall chargers, batteries, and other tech accessories that didn’t work well in the other pockets. It’s a large dump space, and we appreciate the mix of organization and space offered in the Farden Necessity Bag, since the things you have don’t always fit the pockets that bag manufacturers provide.

To paraphrase the saying, a Jack of all trades is often master of none, and that’s kind of true for the Fjallraven Farden Necessity Bag. It can be a toiletry bag or a tech pouch, but it’s not the best at either. However, the end of the quote also applies here: With its flexibility, this bag can often be better than a master of one, since it can adapt to what you need instead of requiring you to own multiple bags.