JanSport founder Janis Lewis collaborated with UW’s book store to create iconic backpacks
Did you know the first JanSport backpack was called the "University Book Store Rucksack"? Learn more about JanSport's UW origins.
JanSport founder Janis Lewis displays one of her iconic backpacks at a special University Book Store event in September honoring the UW alum-created phenomenon.
In the late 1960s, Janis Lewis, ’69, and Murray Pletz (later McCrory) walked into University Book Store with an idea that forever changed the way students carried their books.
The young couple met at the UW, where Pletz won an Alcoa Corp. award for designing a lightweight aluminum-frame backpack. Together, and with his cousin, they started JanSport, an outdoor gear company.
“As we came to the bookstore to get supplies, we thought it would be really cool to have a backpack for books,” says Lewis, who returned to University Book Store this fall to be honored with a plaque, a ceremony and a special-edition backpack celebrating the innovation that freed students everywhere from briefcases, tote bags and armfuls of books.
A JanSport bag signed by Jan herself.
When Lewis and McCrory first approached Ed Bergren, manager of the bookstore’s sporting goods department, he loved the concept of a “University Book Store Rucksack.”
As an interior design student, Lewis had learned about ruler-scale patterns and precision cutting. Drawing on those lessons—and on sewing skills taught by her grandmother—she refined the rucksack’s dimensions so each piece could be cut efficiently from a single width of fabric “without wasting any material,” she says.
Demand took off immediately. Students snapped up the packs when they bought their textbooks. And from a small factory on Aurora Avenue, the family worked nonstop to keep up. Within the first three months, 400 backpacks had sold.
McCrory, who died in 2024, and Lewis eventually sold JanSport, but their creation remains a campus icon. Decades later, University Book Store continues to celebrate their ingenuity.