WAYKS The Compression Packing Cubes Review

You have options when it comes to packing cubes. Do you want something lightweight? Ones that compress? What about cubes that keep your clean clothing separate from your dirty gear? The Compression Packing Cubes from WAYKS pack all that into one cube.

How well does it work when you opt for packing cubes that aim to appeal to multiple types of travelers, combining features into a single piece of gear? Let’s find out.

External Components

The Compression Packing Cubes from WAYKS come in two sizes: small and large. The large is square-shaped, while the small is the same width but about half as tall.

They’re both made with bluesign®-approved recycled polyester, and you can buy them individually or as a set at the time of this review. You can’t choose the color, though. These cubes are gray with one black zipper and the WAYKS logo in black on the front.

They each have long, thin webbing handles to help you pull them out of a travel backpack or carry an outfit to the changing room. While they extend quite a bit from the top of each cube, they’re so thin that they don’t take up any extra space in your bag; they just lie on top or next to the cube when you stuff it into your luggage.

YKK makes the zippers, and they’re slightly color-coded. The top one is black, and the other two are gray. Presumably, this helps you know which side is clean and which is dirty. Still, it doesn’t differentiate between the zipper that opens the opposite side of the cube and the compression zipper, and that’s the mistake we often make with cubes—trying to open the compression zipper to get our gear instead of the correct fastener.

Plus, while we love YKK zippers, these just don’t feel strong enough to go around the cubes when you stuff them to the brim. And since it’s not easy to know how much you can fit inside without trial and error, we often struggled with the zipper when trying to compress an overpacked cube. We also found the extra material getting stuck in the zipper as we tried to close and compress it because there’s just so much of it. Between the divider that keeps your clean clothing separate from your dirty ones and the material that has to squish inside when you compress the cubes, there’s a lot of extra fabric to avoid—and that’s before you put any clothing inside.

That’s it for the exterior, though, so let’s go inside to see what these cubes have to offer.

Inside The Packing Cube

The first thing that struck us when we opened the packing cubes was how much material was inside. It honestly looks like a T-shirt’s worth of fabric jumbled in the center, a fact that will become relevant in a moment.

The extra material is there because these cubes have two sides with a very flexible divider between them, plus compression. When you undo the compression zipper to fill them, they get a few inches taller, so you can fill them with clothing. The material is very flexible, though the sides mostly stay upright as you try to fill the cubes.

There aren’t any other features to talk about on these cubes: one zipper that opens the top, one that opens the bottom, a flexible divider in the middle, and a compression zipper in the center. No TPU coating to keep dampness or dirt contained on one side or the other, and no label as to which side is clean or dirty. That’s OK; they’re basically the same size, so you can fill whichever you like and swap throughout your trip.

However, we struggled to pack these cubes simply because they seem to hold much more than they actually do. If you want to compress them, you have to play the guessing game of “what will fit,” pulling out items until you can close them and cinch them up. We began with five T-shirts and one tank top in the small, which seemed to fit with a bit of room to spare. We rolled our clothing, but that didn’t leave any extra space for compression. OK, we’ve had that happen before. We ditched the tank and folded the remaining five tees flat. Nope, still no go, so we pulled out another T-shirt, and that did the trick. Mind you, our tester is a woman who wears a size small, so you may fit even less inside, depending on the size of your gear.

In addition to the deceptively small capacity, our clothing was also quite wrinkled when we unpacked. While we’re aware of that issue with compression packing cubes, the WAYKS Compression Packing Cubes seem worse than average.

While the center divider can be convenient as your clothing gets dirty throughout a trip, this seems like much more material than average, and the capacity you lose seems like a bigger con than the organization is a pro. So, overall, we think these cubes would do better if they weren’t trying to do so much at once.