A Review of the Matador Gear Cube Set

Most packing cubes are built for tidy people with tidy clothes. The Matador Gear Cube Set is built for the other half of travel: wet swimsuits, muddy shoes, hostel laundry, a rain jacket that never fully dried. Matador makes ultralight outdoor kit, and these cubes feel like that lineage showed up in your suitcase. Bucket-shaped, weatherproof fabric, sealing zippers. Not mesh windows and pastel colorways.

We have been stuffing a white set into a 35-liter carry-on for months now, through city weeks, beach days, and one sticky stretch of humidity where nothing wanted to dry. They became the default organizers in the bag. Not because they make everything look neat. Because they keep the messy stuff from ruining the rest.

• Set includes5L large, 3.9L medium, 2.5L small (compressed volumes)
• Weight3.3 oz / 3.1 oz / 2.8 oz (94 g / 87 g / 79 g)
• Dimensions10x8x4 in / 10x6x4 in / 10x4x4 in
• Material100D Bluesign recycled nylon, PU coating, PFAS-free DWR
• Zippers#5 YKK sealing zippers
• Water resistanceWeatherproof fabric + sealing zippers; not submersible
• ColorsBlack, Arctic White
• Warranty3 years
• Price$59 for the set
• Best forOne bag travel with mixed wet/dirty/clean gear

Product page

What actually fits in each cube

Matador lists the volumes as compressed capacities, and that matters. The large cube is 5 liters. That is not a cavern. If you are used to Eagle Creek or Peak Design cubes where the large size swallows half a wardrobe, you’ll have some adjusting to do. These are denser, shorter bricks. In practice that is fine for one bag packing, where you are not trying to cube an entire closet anyway. But go in knowing the set is compact on purpose.

Here is how ours actually get used:

• Large (5L, 10x8x4): a pair of trail runners or sandals plus socks, or a rolled rain jacket and softshell, or three to four days of dirty laundry. Pants fit if you roll them tight. A bulky hoodie eats most of the cube on its own.
• Medium (3.9L, 10x6x4): three or four t-shirts, or shirts plus underwear and socks for a few days. Sandals and compact travel shoes fit; full-size sneakers usually do not without playing tetris.
• Small (2.5L, 10x4x4): underwear and socks for the week, or a toiletry dump, or cables/chargers/adapters. It is the cube we open ten times a day.

Across all three, the whole set weighs about 9.2 ounces. Empty and flattened, the three cubes roll up to roughly the size of a tall pint glass. That is a useful party trick when you fly out light and shop on the road, or when you want quarantine cubes available without dedicating permanent volume to them.

The bucket opening, and living without mesh windows

Every cube shares the same architecture: 10 inches long, sits upright like a little bucket, zipper runs most of the way around the top so you can see the whole pile at once when it is open. Grab handles on top. Compression straps on the ends. Four tiny tether loops on the corners.

Loading them feels closer to packing a grocery bag than sliding shirts into an envelope. Stand one on a hostel bed, drop stuff in, zip. The speed is real but you do give up visibility. The fabric is fully opaque. There is no mesh panel, clear window, or internal dividers. If you put chargers in with clean socks, you will dig. We learned early to give each cube one job and leave it that way for the whole trip. Large = dirty or bulky. Medium = clean clothes. Small = toiletries and tech. Break that rule and you have built an expensive stuff sack.

Weatherproof, not a dry bag

Matador is careful with the wording, and we should be too. The cubes use waterproof-coated 100D recycled nylon (Bluesign-approved, PFAS-free) and #5 YKK sealing zippers. That combination shrugs off rain in a pack pocket, contains a damp swimsuit, and keeps muddy shoes from seasoning the rest of your clothes. We have had a cube ride through a real downpour in an external pocket and stay dry inside. We have also zipped a wet swimsuit into the medium cube overnight with no seepage into the shirts next to it. That second direction of protection, keeping moisture in, is the one packing cube marketing almost never mentions and one bag travelers need constantly.

They are not built for swimming. Matador says outright these are not for sustained heavy rain or full submersion, and points you to their FlatPak dry bags if you need that. Treat the Gear Cubes as weatherproof organizers, not as a place for a phone next to a river. For containing laundry, beach gear, and the general damp of travel, they do the job well.

Build quality over months of use

In hand, the fabric feels closer to a lightweight dry bag than to the tissue ripstop on ultralight cubes. Slick, tightly woven, the kind of nylon you can wipe mud off of. The zippers still run clean on ours when a cube is packed hard enough to feel like a small drum. That is usually where cheap cubes start fighting you, right when you are late for a flight.

Hardware is Woojin on the compression straps, with quick-release tabs. The top handles are webbing wrapped in heat-shrink tubing. Not plush, but they do not dig into anything in the pack and they make yanking a cube out of a stuffed bag straightforward. The corner tether loops exist but we almost never use them. They do not snag or add meaningful weight, so they stay in the ignore-happily category.

After months of being jammed against water bottles, shoe heels, and laptop corners, our set still looks fine. A couple of light scuffs, no blown seams, no zipper tape peeling. Matador backs them with a three-year warranty, and they are machine washable on cold if you hang them to dry afterward. We have washed the laundry cube once. It came out smelling like a packing cube again, which felt like a small miracle.

Those compression straps

Each cube has straps on both ends that cinch the packed shape down. When a cube is genuinely full of soft clothing, they work. You can see the large cube shrink and firm up into a brick that stacks cleanly. When a cube is half empty, the straps have nothing to pull against. They just flap, and every so often one catches on a neighboring zipper. We stopped buckling any cube that was not packed tight. The system got quieter immediately.

If you want packing cubes that compress hard every time, something like Eagle Creek’s dual-zipper Pack-It cubes or Peak Design’s stretch cubes do that job more consistently. Matador’s straps are a bonus at capacity, not the reason to buy the set.

In a one bag kit

This is where the Gear Cubes earn the money. In a clamshell pack like the Cotopaxi Allpa 35L, the shared 10-inch length means the three cubes brick together instead of leaving weird triangular gaps. In a narrower daypack, measure first. Ten inches is long for some 20-liter bags, and that is a real constraint, not a footnote.

The bigger win shows up after day three. When your whole wardrobe lives in one bag, a damp towel or trail-muddy socks can contaminate everything you own. That is one of the quiet stresses of living out of one bag that packing lists skip. A weatherproof cube is a containment unit. Wet swimsuit in the medium. Laundry in the large. Clean clothes stay clean. Empty, the insurance policy weighs nine ounces and packs to nothing.

How they compare to cheaper (and prettier) options

Matador sells its own Packing Cube Set for $35 and a Mesh Organizer Bag Set for $19. Those are better if you want to see your clothes, sort by color, or stretch a budget. They will not quarantine a wet swimsuit. Classic mesh cubes from Amazon or Eagle Creek win on price and visibility the same way. Peak Design packing cubes win if you want a clean/dirty divider and that peel-back lid people love. None of those options do the weatherproof containment trick as cleanly as the Gear Cubes.

So the honest comparison is not “are these the best packing cubes.” It is “do you need packing cubes that can get wet.” If the answer is yes, $59 for three cubes that weigh nine ounces and survive years of abuse starts looking reasonable. If you mostly pack dry folded clothes and want to peek inside without unzipping, spend less elsewhere.

Who should buy these

Buy the Gear Cube Set if you travel with a mixed bag of clean clothes, shoes, and things that get wet or filthy. Beach trips, humid climates, hiking-into-town itineraries, long stretches between laundry days, the same scenarios that show up in how to pack one bag and two-week carry-on packing. Anyone doing serious one bag travel will understand the pitch immediately.

Skip them if you want a tidy, transparent cube system with mesh windows and a place for every sock. Traditional cubes do that better and cheaper. Skip them too if you need true submersion protection for electronics or documents. That is a dry bag problem, and Matador already makes those.

We stopped deciding whether to bring this set. It just lives in the bag now. Give each cube one job, ignore the compression straps unless something is stuffed, and packing gets faster while the wet half of travel stops contaminating the dry half. For one bag kits, that is the whole job.

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