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Five years ago, Patti Cazzato took the helm of San Francisco bag maker Timbuk2 knowing that the company had not kept up with the times.

The chief executive had two options when she arrived in July 2014: continue making Timbuk2’s core product — the messenger bag — for a niche, disappearing and largely male bike messenger market, or embrace the growing popularity of backpacks among office workers and cater more to women.

Cazzato, who has previously held executive posts at Gap Inc. and Levi Strauss & Co. over her 33-year career, chose the second option.

“I walked into a building where I felt like it was a wholesale messenger bag company and that’s great, but it was not what was going to propel us into the future,” she said in an interview at the company’s headquarters in the Mission District, where backpacks and bags hung on the walls.

She assembled a mostly female executive team, including an international general manager who worked for Nike for more than 18 years.

Now, as the company marks 30 years in San Francisco, it counts 24 stores and 130 employees and can produce up to 70,000 customizable bags per year at its 23,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in the Mission. There, in the heart of San Francisco, workers cut and assemble made-to-order bags above the hum of sewing machines and clanks of equipment. Timbuk2, which also operates factories in Vietnam and Indonesia, sells directly to customers but also makes bags for corporate clients such as Facebook, Google and Tesla.

When Timbuk2 was founded in 1989 by Rob Honeycutt, it primarily made messenger bags, a favorite among local bike messengers who transported documents between law offices and courthouses, and paperwork for other industries. Messengers liked the one-shoulder bags because they could swivel easily during a drop-off.

Honeycutt initially named the company “Scumbags” but changed it a year later to Timbuk2, a shoutout to his favorite band Timbuk3 and one of his favorite cities, Timbuktu in the African country of Mali.

Bike messengers numbered in the hundreds in San Francisco during the heydays of the 1990s and early 2000s. Now, the San Francisco Bike Messenger Association counts only 50 members. There are four major employers of bike messengers in the city today — Zoom Legal, Nationwide Legal, Bay City Express and Special-T-Express — and all also offer car deliveries.

“The industries that used us have gotten a lot smaller, and that makes it hard to get work,” said Timothy Maguire, president of the association. “We used to be commission-based but now many of us make minimum wage. It’s bad.”

Tech brought two big changes. First, the rise of electronic services like DocuSign and Adobe Sign reduced the need to shuttle paperwork around. Second, more adults donned backpacks as part of the tech culture uniform, according to Kirthi Kalyanam, director of the Retail Management Institute at Santa Clara University.

The shrinking market was a concern for Timbuk2 which ironically enough was ahead of other retailers in setting up a robust website in 2000, complete with a feature called the “bag builder” that allowed people to design their own bags. The company was largely a manufacturing and online operation. It did not open its first store until 2006, in Hayes Valley.

The shift to women and backpacks seems to have paid off. Eighteen months after Cazzato joined the company, the “femme line” of backpacks, fanny packs and satchels was introduced in fall 2015. It was the company’s first line of bags made expressly for women — a change from the messenger bag, whose buyers had been 80% men. This year, Timbuk2 said that 60% of its revenue comes from backpacks and 50% of purchases are made by women. The company — which still makes messenger bags, too — said it was profitable though it declined to give revenue figures.

“We didn’t want to just shrink it and pink it,” said Brandon McCarthy, global merchandising manager at Timbuk2. “We wanted to make backpacks more fashionable but still have the functionality our bags are known for.”

Sales of women’s backpacks are up by 28 percent in the U.S. in the past year, according to NPD, a market research firm.

Comfort drove Lesley Manchamee, 29, a technical recruiter at K2 Partnering Solutions, to switch from a purse to a backpack.

“It feels better on my back, the weight is even. I can also fit more in here,” said Manchamee, who recently wore a Timbuk2 backpack with a logo for Facebook, her former employer, on BART. The backpack held her laptop, bottled water, keys, wallet, several notebooks, sunglasses, hand sanitizer and homemade chicken pasta for lunch.

But Timbuk2 is hardly the only company to focus on backpacks. Competitors include local bag makers like Tortuga, Rickshaw and Baggu. And it plans to expand into travel bags, another highly competitive product.

“Travel is a crowded space, and purchases here are made by people who’ve put in a lot of thought about what meets their needs,” Kalyanam said. “Because of Timbuk2’s size, they’d need to be making a lot more in quantity or something very different in order to succeed.”

Shwanika Narayan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: shwanika.narayan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @shwanika

Shwanika Narayan covers workplace discrimination, income inequality, and poverty, at The San Francisco Chronicle. She previously covered retail and small businesses on the business desk. Before joining the paper in 2019, she worked at The Los Angeles Business Journal and freelanced for AJ+, NBC News, Quartz, and Hyphen magazine, covering national and global news and writing about Asian American identity. Shwanika has a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University and a bachelor's degree in political science from UCLA.