Heather Sutton

Editor of Trundlo

About

The spare bedroom at the south end of the house has become a home office and, over time, something else: a testing room with a pegboard on the wall holding wheel axles and zipper pulls from bags that failed, a rolling rack where current test bags wait between trips, and a cleared strip of laminate floor wide enough to roll a spinner end-to-end and see how the wheels actually track. That's where most of this site gets made.

Regional account manager, suburban Indianapolis. The job runs on Tuesday morning departures and Wednesday night returns to Midwest secondary cities: Columbus, Louisville, Kansas City, the kind of trip where you come back with the same shirt and slightly less faith in hotel room closet hooks. Eleven years on that schedule, which has produced strong opinions and several broken carry-ons.

Denny Abara, a neighbor who spent years in logistics consulting before going fully remote, helped haul a broken-wheeled spinner out of the garage one Sunday morning. What started as a quick favor turned into two hours on the driveway talking through what actually kills wheels: floor surfaces, axle tolerances, the difference between a wheel that dents and one that shatters. He thinks about bags the way engineers think about load tolerances. That conversation changed how I evaluated the next purchase, and every one after.

Trundlo started because friends kept texting asking which bag to buy, and the answer was always longer than a text message. Not a travel blogger. Never worked in the luggage industry. What I know comes from eleven years of overhead bins and a home office built around gear that's mid-test. My husband owns exactly one carry-on and treats it like a family heirloom. The dog has, on two documented occasions, taken a serious interest in duffel handles left on the floor. Both have contributed data points in ways they probably didn't intend.

Posts by Heather Sutton

Disclosure

Some links on this site pay me a commission when you buy through them. Your price stays the same either way. The commission goes back into buying the next bag to test. If something falls apart before I'd want it to, the review says so, paid link or not.