Shirt Folding Packs and Shirt Folders for Compact Travel
Some of us are casual clothes travellers, some of us prefer a bit more style and like to bring along dress shirts on our trips.
While t shirts are easy to fold and pack, dress shirts can be a bit more trouble. Long sleeves, buttons, collars and sleeves all add to extra volume which means you may not be able to bring along as many.
One travel accessory I’ve found helpful for carrying half a dozen or so dress shirts in a compact size are the folding shirt packs made by many of the travel accessory manufacterers. Folding packs are essentially a flat bottomed pack with a flexible plastic base and nylon flaps that fold out into sort of an X. The shirts or pants go into the center and the outside flaps wrap around it.
While the carry on sized units may not be made for holding as many as six shirts I have found you can do it with a bit of precise folding and packing. Here’s what I do.
- button up the shirt completely, lay flat, then fold each shirt carefully to the width of the folder, fold the arms behind then fold in half or thirds
- place first shirt on the bottom of the folder, most have a thick but flexible plastic sheet on the bottom
- carefully place the second shirt upside down with the shirt collar opposite to the first
- keep doing this until all six shirts are on top of each other
- now carefully, (keeping the shirt tower from leaning) fold the flaps as tightly as possible after placing the plastic cover on top ( you may need to put some muscle into it
Your shirts will obviously get squashed a bit but if you unpack the shirts immediately after settling into your hotel and put them on hangers they should be fine with a minimum of wrinkles.
Of course getting a sturdy folder pack is required as you are essentially forcing the shirts in place.
Here are a bunch of quality travel shirt folder packs.
Tumi’s folding pack makes one with an exterior mesh pocket.
Ebags has one called SmartPack folding pack that is made for two shirts. Hah! Sure, if you putting everything in spacy box containers. I say my trick can fit at least five shirts in there.
The one I use is the Eagle Creek Pack-It series 15.