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How a Former Dyson Engineer Reinvented the Buckle

by Laurence Fry | Director of Carryology, April 22, 2026

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The side-release buckle. Ladder lock. COBRA. Fidlock. The carry hardware canon is a short list, until an engineer who used to design hair dryers for Dyson showed up and started asking questions.

A different kind of thinking

To understand what Alasdair MacLaine has built, you need to understand where he came from: Dyson. A brand famous for its meticulous approach to design and engineering. At Dyson, intuition is a starting point, not an answer. You map every way a product might fail before it exists. You reduce variables systematically so you know exactly what you&rsquo;re testing. You run Taguchi matrices — a statistical method for designing experiments that finds the optimal combination of variables with the fewest possible tests — and you apply &lsquo;FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis) thinking&rsquo; , which Alasdair explains means sitting down before a product launches and asking, methodically: what could go wrong here, how likely is it, and how bad would it be if it did? Then you design against those answers.

It&rsquo;s a culture of systematic iteration that produced 5,127 vacuum prototypes before James Dyson was satisfied. You don&rsquo;t guess at Dyson. You test to failure, and then you understand exactly why something failed before you decide how to stop it failing again.

The specific moment that matters came while MacLaine was working on the Airwrap which uses the Coanda effect, directing air using precisely designed fins to remove the need for a brush which is prone to tangling. One of the processes explored to test the invention was electro-discharge machining: a process where electrical sparks erode material with extraordinary precision, cutting geometries that conventional tooling can&rsquo;t reach. No contact, no cutting force, no distortion. EDM wire cutting, borrowed from aerospace and precision engineering, was the answer. It worked.

&ldquo;I was kind of fascinated by the process and that&rsquo;s obviously stayed dormant as anything I&rsquo;ve used for over 10 years,&rdquo; MacLaine tells me over the phone.

He carried all of that out of the door with him. Then he founded Wingback — first as a leather goods brand, then almost accidentally as a stationery brand, and now a steadily evolving carry brand with something genuinely new to say.

What&rsquo;s actually broken

Most people haven&rsquo;t thought critically about the buckle on their bag. It&rsquo;s just there. It works. But look more carefully at what&rsquo;s actually happening across the hardware landscape and a pattern emerges — and once you see it, you can&rsquo;t unsee it.

Injection-moulded plastic is the workhorse of the category. Cheap, light, and functional enough for the vast majority of applications, it&rsquo;s what you&rsquo;ll find on everything from a $30 daypack to gear that costs considerably more. But the failure mode is inherent to the design. The mechanism works by applying clamping force through a fixed geometry — and that geometry has limits. Apply enough load and you get slippage. Apply more and you get breakage. The material is doing the job, but it&rsquo;s fighting its own nature to do it.

Metal hardware is a genuine step up. COBRA&reg;, developed by AustriAlpin by way of parachuting rigs, became the gold standard for a reason — bomb-proof, tested to extraordinary load ratings, earned its place in everything from military kit to premium technical luggage. Fidlock brought magnetics into the conversation and made the everyday click-in feel genuinely satisfying. Both are real innovations. Both moved the category forward.

But here&rsquo;s what&rsquo;s curious: most are still built on the same fundamental logic as the plastic buckle. Multiple components. Springs. Assembly points. Each joint is a potential failure point. Each spring is a moving part that will eventually fatigue. The...