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Covering Samsonite's history, even with the limit of pre-1973, is extremely daunting. It was manageable when I had the limited scope of US LEGO Samsonite, as I was already intimately familiar with the landscape and owned most of the materials I needed.

This expansion required me to completely start over, but that doesn't mean it'll be years before you see progress. Research is already underway, with the first step (information gathering) nearly complete. I've already added 500 images to the site, including scans of magazine, newspaper, and catalog ads, Samsonite products, internal ephemera, and much more.

Below is an example of the 100+ magazine ads this site will soon boast, covering all types of Samsonite products from the 1930s to the 1970s. It will include, but is not limited to Samsonite card tables, chairs, outdoor furniture, toys, and all luggage brands including Royal Traveler and the usual trunks, Streamlite, Contoura, Saturn, and Ultralite like below:

The goal with this is as I've said before: cover all Samsonite products and build a resource to definitively identify a particular Samsonite product including when/where it was available, what a proper example looks like, variants, etc. I also want to document promotions, demonstrations, and even things like all Samsonite plants (again, pre-1973).

The hope is that all of this information will remain freely publicly available and be refined overtime, giving Samsonite enthusiasts a resource by which to branch from in their own research. That is why I'm so adamant in utilizing contemporary materials and documentation, rather than depending on untraceable research of modern third parties or even Samsonite themselves.

These materials, including a very rare dealer catalog from 1930, an invoice from 1935, and even a privately printed book distributed within the Shwayder family, have all been uploaded to the site. Scanned from my personal collection, and free for anyone to access and use in their entirety. No more circulating low quality scans, and soon, no more estimates between 1940s to 1960s, we will be able to get much more granular. My most anticipated adventure is mapping out exactly what styles were introduced when, as that will be immensely helpful in dating materials. Different styles were also unique to different lines of luggage as well as between men's and women's cases, so that'll also have to be sorted out.

I've also come across several new words developed by Shwayder Bros. for use in marketing such as Samsonhyde in reference to their card tables or Fashiontones, as seen in the image below (also look at all the available styles as of 1949, or at least the ones mentioned in this advert):

There's a plethora more things to explore, one of the weirdest ones I didn't expect to be so interested in was Samsonite's institutional seating division, with at least two catalogs in the 1950s advertising an entire assortment of classroom furniture:

In the grand scheme, this all also helps me in my original mission in understanding LEGO Samsonite and its various quirks. Originally, I thought this sidetrack was largely a waste of time, but I've come to find there is immense value in understanding how exactly Samsonite operated outside of the LEGO sphere. Samsonite may have not been successful in breaking into the toy market and was subsequently sold off, but LEGO was a tiny part of that entire situation.

It does lead to some issues, however, as the site's organization was never built with this expansion in mind. So now I must deal with materials such as below, which are more focused on Samsonite's various dealings, but also technically mention LEGO, via the picture of the 113 Motorized Train:

With this in mind, after consulting with professionals, I am working to organize this site a little differently. A little more professionally. While the site's collection is certainly manageable thus far, and I'm quite proud of what we've accomplished, we need to be planning ahead. The scale I've proposed for this project is well beyond how it is organized now, and more standardization is necessary to maintain the site's integrity as an archive.

In short, there's plenty of room for the site to grow, and plenty more needing to be done. Once I've finished giving all the new images proper metadata, as well as finished reviewing other resources (more on that later), we can dive into all of this headfirst.

One of the primary issues we're going to have moving forward is a lack of physical examples. While I am actively looking for them in my own daily life, I am not a pack rat nor do I feel compelled to purchase every last product Samsonite ever made. Only those that were never documented, and only those that are reasonably priced.

But ultimately, that is the least of my concerns at the moment. For myself, I am more eager to lay out our foundations from which we will fill in the cracks. To dive in too early, I wouldn't be able to properly identify things and will likely make mistakes.

What I'm scared of, being the first to do something like this in the Samsonite space, is to fall into blind authority as we've seen with lots of LEGO history. I've written ad naseum about the problems LEGO historical research faces here: The Entire History of LEGO By Samsonite - Historiography. In short, the problem is never malicious intent. It always boils down to diligence of the researcher—to not fill in a blank space with something that makes sense and present it as fact, but instead to signpost it as unknown or to look for more materials.

The answers have literally always been accessible, it's just that we've reached a point with the internet and hobbyist circles that we implicitly assume we have everything figured out.

That is far from the truth, and I've already proven that hundreds of times with all the new discoveries we've made in LEGO Samsonite while building this site.

I'm very confident I'm going to again prove that to you hundreds of times before the end of 2026.