FAQ’s

  • Cinch designs and manufactures magnetic and mechanical buckle hardware, fasteners, and adjustment components for soft goods, bags, pet gear, medical and adaptive products, and outdoor equipment. We're a hardware company, not a finished-goods brand. Our components are built into other companies' products.

  • Cinch hardware starts from a specific problem: how do you build a buckle or fastening solution that someone can operate with one hand, even if that hand has limited strength, dexterity, or anatomy that makes a two-handed closure difficult? That is the starting design constraint, not an added feature, and it is what makes Cinch hardware simple, reliable, and intuitive to use.

    The difference is also physical. Our hardware is built from stronger materials, with simple, solid construction designed to hold significantly higher loads than a standard plastic side-release buckle. It is also built to handle real-world abuse better, including impact, crushing, drops, and rough use in the field. The result is hardware that is easier to operate and far more durable than the commodity parts most brands are used to working around.

  • Some of it. C-Series, S-Series, and R-Series all use magnetic guidance to help align and initiate connection, which makes hardware easier to engage, especially one-handed. G-Series is a mechanical triglide, no magnets involved, and it's just as ergonomic as our magnetic lines. Every Cinch product, magnetic or not, still relies on mechanical engineering to actually hold under load. We're not a magnetic hardware company; we're an intuitive, ergonomic hardware company, and magnets are one tool we use.

  • Yes, that's the starting design constraint for our hardware, not an add-on feature. Our background is in prosthetics and orthotics, working directly with people who have limited hand strength, dexterity, or mobility, and that shaped how our mechanisms are engineered to engage and release. In practice, that's also why the same hardware works well on bags, packs, pet gear, and outdoor equipment: gloved hands, occupied hands, and hands in a hurry run into the same problem limited-dexterity hands do, so the same mechanism solves for all of them

  • Yes. We're scheduling custom projects now, whether that's color, branding, or full custom product development. Submit our contact form and we can talk through the project. We're genuinely interested in hearing how brands want to apply the hardware in ways we haven't built yet.

  • Yes, you can talk to us directly. Cinch is founder-led and based in the Pacific time zone in the US, and we work directly with the brands we build hardware for. Submit our contact form and you'll hear from a real person.

  • Submit our contact form. We typically start with a conversation about the application and what the hardware needs to do, then move to samples.

  • Fair question. Cinch hardware is built as simple, one-piece construction, so there's nothing fine or intricate to break. A lot of hardware on the market relies on multi-piece construction with small pins, springs, and other moving pieces, and those are exactly the parts that wear, crack, or snap over time. Our designs remove those pieces, eliminating many failure points. Magnets handle alignment and initial engagement; mechanical geometry is what actually holds the connection under load.

  • Ours do. A lot of magnetic buckle hardware uses fine channels and thin profiles to seat the magnets, and those tight gaps are exactly where dirt, dust, lint, and fine metal debris get pulled in and jam the mechanism. Cinch hardware uses open, broad magnet faces instead, so the surfaces are easy to wipe or knock clean if they pick up snow, sand, or lint in the field.

  • Every design goes through the same process: design, test, listen, refine. We run pull and load testing to find real strength and failure points, put parts through repeated open/close cycles to simulate years of use, and test against impact, water exposure, and temperature swings before anything moves to production tooling. Final, injection-molded production parts go through that same testing again, so we can confirm they hold up exactly the way the tested prototypes did, not just the way they were designed to on paper

  • Yes. Our hardware designs are patented or patent pending, reflecting mechanisms developed through our own design, testing, and refinement process, not off-the-shelf hardware with cosmetic changes. See our IP Statement for more detail.

  • Cinch hardware is designed in San Francisco, California; the company itself is based in Olympia, Washington. Production runs in East Asia, which gives us better logistics and product flow with the factories and customers we work with there. We're currently working on Made-in-USA options as well.

  • Everyday bags and packs, pet collars and harnesses, medical and adaptive equipment, outdoor gear, hunting and fishing, EDC, cycling, apparel, footwear, and more. The roots of the hardware are in in medical device, specifically the orthotics and prosthetics industry. The same problems that we aim to solve in medical device also show up in those other categories: limited hand strength, gloved hands, urgency, and poor visibility.