A Mother, An Artist, A Great Spirit
There are moments when Manami Ito wishes she had one more hand.
In the video she made, the moments she described were close to home. In smaller, more ordinary moments.
When she is out with her children. When one of them wants to be picked up. When there is a bag to carry, but also a small hand waiting for hers.
「ちょっとした時に、もう一つ手があればなーと思う時があります。」
Sometimes, in little everyday moments, I wish I had one more hand.
Then she says something even simpler:
「荷物じゃなくて、子どもの手を握ってあげたい。」
I want to hold my child’s hand, not my bags.
Manami is often introduced through extraordinary achievements. After losing her right arm in 2004, she returned to the violin, represented Japan as a Paralympic swimmer, performed at the Tokyo Paralympic Opening Ceremony, and became the first violinist with a full prosthetic arm.
Those facts are remarkable. What moved us even more, once we began speaking with her, was the person around them: a mother, an artist, an athlete, and someone who seems to carry work, family, performance and ordinary life with unusual composure. She is generous, gracious and self-possessed. Her strength does not feel like a performance of strength. It feels lived in.
We first came across Manami through one of her violin videos on Instagram. The performance stopped us. We reached out because one-handed use had been part of BareBag’s design foundation from the beginning, and we wondered whether the product might be useful in her life.
We had not told her BareBag’s founding story. We had not explained the deeper reason the product existed. Her first reply went straight past the product itself: when her available hand was occupied by something she had to carry, she could no longer hold her children’s hands.
That was the moment the design became personal in a way we had never anticipated.
The Invisible Cost of Ordinary Design
Most everyday products carry an assumption so ordinary that it is almost invisible: two hands are available.
For many people, that assumption creates small inconveniences. For someone with one usable hand, the same inconvenience can become a trade-off. A tote in the hand can mean no hand left for a child. A child’s backpack can mean asking for help. A bottle, a door, a phone, a shopping bag: each object can quietly compete for the same limited capacity.
This is why Manami’s sentence stayed with us. I want to hold my child’s hand, not my luggage. It makes the cost of an ordinary design assumption visible in a single line.
BareBag’s founder only began noticing these assumptions after a cycling accident in 2021 left his left arm immobilized for roughly three months. Cooking, opening a door while carrying something, holding a coffee while needing a phone, moving everyday objects from one place to another: ordinary actions suddenly revealed how often the world expects two hands.
Three months cannot approximate Manami’s experience. They were enough, however, to change the questions behind the design. The earliest BareBag experiments were built around a simple requirement: everyday carrying should demand less from the hands.
When Inclusive Design Disappears Into the Experience
One-handed independence was treated as a design constraint from the earliest development of BareBag. A person should be able to put it on, open it, attach something and remove it without needing another person to complete the interaction.
As the design developed, another thing became clear: the same friction exists far beyond disability. Parents run out of hands. Commuters run out of hands. Travelers, shoppers and anyone juggling several small tasks at once run out of hands.
That realization changed the ambition. Accessibility did not need a separate visual language. A product designed around inclusion could still be the product someone chose for its form, material, proportion or simple usefulness.
Inclusive design can be beautiful.
It can be desirable. It can feel ordinary. In its most mature form, inclusion does not announce itself as an accommodation. It disappears into the experience and becomes one of the reasons an object simply feels better to use.
A person with two fully usable hands does not need to know why an interaction works well. A person with one arm should not have to adopt the visual language of medical or assistive equipment to gain the same thoughtfulness.
This idea is larger than bags. Clothing, furniture, appliances, interfaces, packaging and spaces can all pursue it. Accessibility and beauty do not need to be separate ambitions. They can be part of the same definition of good design.
The Life She Was Already Living
Manami chose a Classic 2 in Tokyo and began fitting it into routines that already existed.
A short-handled tote that could not sit on her shoulder could go on the Open Hook. So could a water bottle. On hot days, when a child took off a backpack that was too small for an adult to wear, that backpack could hang there too.
On the morning trip to the kindergarten bus stop, that meant her available hand could stay with her child. If her child became fussy and wanted to be held, there was less to rearrange first.
When we later invited Manami to create an Instagram Reel, we compensated her for her time, but gave her no script or talking points. The scenes, the story and the words were hers. She chose to show these everyday moments, and she chose the words:
Sometimes I wish I had one more hand.
She did not know how BareBag had started. She did not know about the founder’s broken left arm or the months that shaped the earliest design decisions.
When he watched her finished video and heard her say she wanted to hold her child’s hand instead of her luggage, his eyes became a little wet.
“This is why we made BareBag.”
Later, after the collaboration had ended, we saw Manami using the bag again at Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai, where she had been invited to perform. While spending time at the Expo with her child, she carried things from the day on the bag and kept moving through the experience on her own terms.
There was no content obligation left to fulfil.
That detail mattered to us because BareBag had not given Manami a new life to live. She was already taking her children to school. She was already traveling, performing, caring, creating and participating fully in the world around her. A useful tool can do something much more modest: reduce the friction between what a person wants to do and being able to do it comfortably, independently and without unnecessary effort.
Free People to Do What Matters
Manami did not give BareBag its design foundation. She gave us renewed conviction in it.
Her experience reminded us that inclusive design is worth pursuing far beyond a category called “accessible products.” It is a discipline for making ordinary products better, and for allowing more people to use them without being singled out by the design itself.
It also gave us a reason to keep pushing. Not toward more features for their own sake, but toward fewer unnecessary demands between a person and what they want to do.
Design cannot decide what matters to someone. It can make fewer things get in the way.
Free people to do what matters.
Sometimes that means a stage. Sometimes it means holding a child’s hand on the way to school.
