HONG KONG - MACAU: ₱22,000 Budget | DIY TRAVEL GUIDE

Packing is an art form, and in today's video, I wanted to share steps and tips on how to pack a carry-on suitcase like a pro. Now, each trip can be different, between the season, the destination's weather, your activities, the shape of your items, but these are some universal tips that will help maximize your space and minimize your stress. So, as always, everything mentioned in today's video will be down below in the description box. I also have my travel playlist here, so you can see all my past Pack With Me's and travel product reviews, and we also have a sponsor for today's video, Carl Friedrich. They are the makers of this beautiful luggage I'll be using as examples today. They make beautifully designed luggage, bags, and accessories made out of premium materials for an elevated and smooth travel experience. Their products are made with superior durability, but also thoughtfully designed details. Amazing for my business professionals or anyone looking for upgraded travel essentials. Here I have their classic carry-on suitcase in gray cognac, along with their Pallacy Weekender bag. This set feels vintage with the matching leather details, but also modern in the clean shape and design. So, the suitcase is made out of German-engineered polycarbonate shell, along with aluminum lock frame and vaqueta leather detailing. The inside comes with two compression straps and a compression pad, and the Hinomoto wheels give you superior glide. The vertical lines, the rivets, the leather details even on the handle make this an incredibly chic bag. I've already taken this suitcase out a couple times. It is incredibly secure, smooth, sleek, compact, easy to use, and the design details make it incredibly unique for my collection. And the Pallacy Weekender is a gorgeous vaqueta leather bag. It has a spacious main compartment with a couple interior pockets and one sleek external slip pocket. The nylon canvas lining makes it very usable on the inside. Capacity surprised me. This is a great weekender bag that you can pack clothes and shoes very easily. I even was able to fit my 16-inch laptop in here. I was able to use this as a personal item on Frontier and United, but please use your own best judgment. Overall, this is a gorgeous leather weekender bag that reads Luxe and Professional all in one. It comes with a shoulder strap. Over time, this leather is gonna get so gorgeous and worn in as I take it along my adventures with me. So, if you're interested in trying Carl Friedrich, they come with a lifetime warranty, a 100-day trial, and free shipping and returns. I'll include all the details for you guys down below in the description box. All right, so there's two phases to the operation. Phase one is to get all of your items and pieces of clothing into their respective organizers. Phase two is to place all of the organizers into the suitcase in the best possible way. So, let's start with phase one, packing of the items. So, let's start off with the biggest category, clothing. Instead of going with a packing list of all these individual outfits, it's to go with a capsule wardrobe. Because it's a core set of items that all correspond to each other, top and bottom-wise, all the colors harmonize, you don't really have to predetermine what every single outfit's gonna look like. You can just kinda do a grab bag of a top and bottom. You're minimizing the amount of items you have to pack, and honestly, you're probably maximizing the amount of looks that you're creating, too. So, if you need some guidance, I'll link my video where I talk through my 12-piece formula. So, once you finalize a capsule wardrobe, you're going to use compression packing cubes. Regular packing cubes are just fine, but in the context of this video and mastering packing like a pro, compression cubes are going to be such a game-changer for you. So, when you open the sucker up, you've got a nice, big, empty space where you can stack your clothes, and then when you zip the second zipper and kinda shrink that gusset, it compresses all the air out of it and makes a nice, compact square or rectangle. When it comes to folding methods, I honestly don't have a strong opinion because it really depends on the season, what types of clothes you're bringing. Some people prefer folding, some people prefer KonMari. Some people like rolling. Me, personally, I like just to do a simple square fold, and it really depends on the cube, too. So, if there's a rectangle, I'll try to do two squares. I think that the most important thing, no matter what folding style you like, try to pack as modularly as possible, height-wise and width-wise, so you can maximize the space of the compression cube, and then when you zip it up, it maintains a solid shape. Like, if you got one side really high and one side really low, you're gonna be creating diagonals and you're gonna be hard to fill in later. Go with rolling, go with folding, go with super flat, just as long as at the end, you have an even plane at the top and on the sides. That's the goal. I have several favorite sets from Affordable to Premium. I'll link lots of options for you guys down below. Next thing are socks, undies, swimwear, intimates. These are fun things to pack because there are a lot of smaller volume items. So there's two ways I like to go with it. The first way is to pack it into very flexible, pliable, zippered pouches. You can put everything in one big one or you can separate it into smaller ones. But these become amorphous blobs that you can use as fillers for other things. So if I happen to have a handbag that I want to preserve the outer shape, I can stuff it with one of these pouches of undies and socks or other caves that you can fill are inside your shoes. So you can keep your shoes and your socks together by stuffing your shoes with the socks. Or the second option of how I pack these things is with a long, slim packing cube and double bonus points if it's also compression. So if I don't have anything I really need to stuff or keep its shape, I like going this route because it does keep everything nice and organized. Like if you need any of your intimate stuff, it's all right there in this long cube, almost like a little buffet. So let's move on to category three, I'm a huge advocate of using shoe bags and dust covers. I'm Asian, we don't like shoes in the house in general, but for hygienic purposes, it is really nice to cover all of your shoes whenever they're nestled next to other intimate things. Some of my favorite ones have been the ones from Baize, but you can get any affordable ones on the internet. Essentially what you want to do with your shoes is to either put them sole to sole, especially if you have like very flat shoes. I like to stick that into a nice thin sleeve of a shoe bag or the other way, like if you have heels, something with a deep vamp, I like to invert them so that they fill each other's empty space. So you can create a nice modular shape that's easier to fit into the rectangle suitcase. Another great tip too is if you have bigger feet, you can separate the shoes, give each one of them their own shoe bags. And then for purses, I am like a dust bag collector. When you buy stuff and they give you like a nice dust cover bag, or even just shoving it into a reusable tote bag, just something to protect your bags, especially if your bags are delicate like leather or their rattan have a lot of texture that could scrape other things. You want to not only protect the bag, but you want to protect anything that it touches. Then the last tip is that if you have bags that fit into each other, nest them like Russian dolls. Category four is toiletries and makeup. I've made a lot of content around my favorite products in this category, but in terms of toiletries, I like to go with either a hanging toiletry kit. Think about your destination and if you're going to have a lot of counter space. If you're on a cruise or you're in Europe or Asia where you have a teeny tiny bathroom, definitely get something that has a hook where you can hang everything. Second favorite is to do a nice modular, clear, quart size type of container. I also have really fancy ones from Truffle, which I always love, but there's such a wide spectrum between affordable to expensive. You don't have to go full luxury on this, but I like to pick things that are modular because they're gonna fit so nicely into the bag and make it also very aesthetic. Recently, I've been loving these affordable, clear, quart size modular ones. They fit so much in there. You can see everything. They're crazy affordable and the modularness, but still the pliability of these makes it really easy to pack. And then for makeup, I've been using the clear Truffle jumbo jet set case for so long, but I recently tried this other style from Amazon and I think I might like it more. I'm sorry for cheating on you, Truffle. This style is like a dop kit, which is more cylindrical with a wide zipper. I love this one because it's crazy lightweight and when you open it, everything is folded so nicely for you on one singular plane. There's organizers for your makeup, for your thin things, little pockets on the side, and I'll even use this to fill inside of a purse and put it in my personal item too. From affordable to expensive, it just depends on my mood, where I'm going, and I love all my children. Category number five is all of your miscellaneous bits, bobs, odd shaped things. I'll kind of start to gather these things that don't naturally fit into those main buckets. Things like my curling iron, miscellaneous tech products, tripods, my press on nails, bulkier pieces like sweaters or hoodies, sunglass cases, and then of course, a extra little laundry bag for my dirty clothes at the end of my trip. Gather all of these things in a nice pile next to you, get your carry on suitcase, crack it open, and we're moving on to phase number two. It is time to pack the actual suitcase. You've got your mountain of things that you wanna put in there. I love gathering all the items next to the suitcase first so you know what you're working with. This is like your inventory. The game is to Tetris all these things into your suitcase and to do it methodically and intentionally. So my first step is to look at the side of the suitcase that has the handle. As you'll notice, there's these nice divots and ridges that the handles create in the suitcase. I love to fill those divots first so that it creates an even plane. Some of my favorite go-to things to fill the space is my curling iron. I have like the Dyson Styler Airwrap and most of the time I'm filming in my destination so I'll have my slim tripod that I can also slide in here. If I ended up packing that tube cube, that slim cube with all of my intimate items, that fits perfectly in one of these canals in the suitcase that can fill one space. Shoes, especially like sandals that are already really flat but might be the width of the channel. If you have sturdy hardcover sunglass cases, I also have these rectangle press-on nails. I like to jam those in there. Point being is that I try to line all three of these empty lanes as much as possible so that I have a big rectangle space on both sides to work with now. Step two is to go with the packing cubes and oftentimes my clothes are pretty bulky compared to the smaller size toiletry items so I will put the clothing packing cubes on the other side where it's completely flat. Normally the large packing cube fits really well hamburger style on that side of the suitcase and then if I have smaller packing cubes, I like to fill in that empty space in front of that. Then for the last one third of the space on this side of the suitcase, I can either do a makeup bag or another packing cube full of other articles of clothing and then going back to the side where we filled in all the empty lanes because you probably ate up a lot of the vertical depth of that part of the suitcase, that's where like your thinner items will go in so that can be the quart size toiletry bag, it could be your purses and then we went to step number three, you've got a really good sense of what you're working with at this point, you have the majority of your items in the suitcase, if you have any residual things that are odd shaped, this is the time to fill in the nooks and the crannies. I want you to think about all the corners of the suitcase, there's a lot of potential there to stack items in each corner and then if you're going with the compression cubes, normally they'll create a slight curvature on the edges so you have those spaces to fill up and stack things flat to fill in that empty volume and if you've forgotten something to pack and you're in a rush, this is also a great time to jam anything you need in there, whatever it is, leverage all of your corners laterally and lay down anything to fill horizontal gaps too and then step number four, if you have a sweater or a light piece of outerwear that you wanna pack, I do it two different ways, I'll either try to wear it onto the plane, you obviously need something in case it gets cold on the plane anyway and you wanna minimize the heaviness and the weight of your suitcase, you can wear it tight around your waist, you can wear it around your shoulders, you can wear it all together sometimes, especially in the winter, I will wear two coats on the plane straight up. I need two different looks, I can't pack it into the carry-on and it's already cold anyway so I'll wear two but because we're in spring and summer, if you have a sweater or a cardigan, you're like oh shoot, I should pack that for nighttime, this is a great way to fold it nice and flat and lay it on top of everything and it could be on either side, very helpful if you put it on a side that has a compression panel on top so you can really crunch it down. By having it nice and flat, you can preserve its shape and you're utilizing that last gasp of air at the top and my final step number five is to close the suitcase, take the top handle and give it a nice jiggle shake. If you are desperate and you wanna squeeze every last bit of your suitcase, the shaking compresses everything down to one side so it reveals the actual empty space you have left over so if you're desperate and you wanna pack that thing to the gills, I'm not here to judge. That's where you're gonna get your last real gasp of air, fill in those corners with whatever you need or maybe you just wanna see what leftover space you have because you wanna buy something at your destination, that is where you can really see the leftover space you have for your suitcase so that you can mentally prepare and not overbuy so that you don't overpack. All right, so that does it for today's video. Those are my methodical steps and tips that I have for packing your carry-on suitcase like a pro. If you guys like this content, please give me a thumbs up and subscribe. It helps my channel out so much and if you wanna look at any of my past archive content, I've made so many different capsule wardrobes and pack with me travel videos. I'll link those playlists for you guys down below in the description box along with options for all of today's items and of course, our sponsor, Carl Friedrich and the beautiful pieces that I mentioned today. I love you guys so much. Hope you're having an amazing day out there, sending you so much good energy and I'll see you in the next video. Bye! Muah!