Karrimor exists because a Lancashire bike-shop owner went blind in 1943 and could no longer buy stock — his wife Mary and her sister Grace, both machinists, sewed the panniers instead, and the company was registered in 1946. Their son Mike turned it into Britain’s biggest rucksack maker and put the closed-cell foam Karrimat on sale in 1966. Sixty years on, karimata is a lowercase headword in the standard dictionary of Polish.