MIKAFEN Strap Pad

★★☆☆☆ - Meh

Cheap, but slides around, has minimal padding, and is kinda ugly

Pros

• Very inexpensive ($7 at time of writing)

Cons

• Doesn’t stay put - slides and spins around the wrong way

• More like a thick cloth than a pad

• Inner beige and white colors stand out against the black and highlight the seam

Review

I got this pad for my smaller cross-shoulder laptop bag, which had just a nylon strap with no padding. While the bag is not terribly heavy, this pad is quite thin. The listing says it “protects against chafing”, which I suppose it would do, but as a pad it doesn’t do much. The photos also make it look like they want the seam against your body. While this would thicken the pad a bit due to the layers, it also means you can feel the seam on your shoulder.

More problematic though is that the thing will not stay put. I have a hard enough time keeping it in place on a bag, I can’t imagine how annoying this would be in the seatbelt configuration. And worse, the pad would often twice around on the strap, meaning I would have to manually flip it back. [Oddly, one Amazon reviewer complained that they don’t slide and actually kept the seatbelt from retracting properly 🤷🏻]

The seam itself is not very attractive (probably why they hide it against the body in the photos), and this is exacerbated by the fact that they didn’t match the inner color to the outside color. As a result, if the velcro isn’t perfectly lined up (and actually, even if it is), you see bright white edges in striking contrast to the main black.

The pad does function and will work in some applications, but there are a number of questionable design choices that for me make this a poor buy and one that I would not repeat. I haven’t bought the bullet to replace it yet, but I’m close.

Conclusion

If you want a super cheap solution, this’ll do. But you get what you pay for, and can probably do better without too much more money.