Gold bars, Samurai swords, robots and the curious business of lost luggage treasures
Matt Owens knows better than to describe what “typical” items in a suitcase should include. That’s because his family’s unconventional retail business, built over decades of buying lost and unclaimed luggage, has found that people pack quirky, sometimes eccentric objects when they travel.
“With the number of years we’ve been doing this, you would think that we’d found everything under the sun,” Matt Owens, senior vice president of commercial strategy with Scottsboro, Alabama-based Unclaimed Baggage, told Bagable.com.
”But then, over the past year, we’ve received everything from Samurai swords to gold-plated [teeth] grills, a mysterious robot that we’re still trying to figure out what it was used for, and several great historic pieces of World War II memorabilia,” he said.
These are only a handful of items that appear in the company’s third annual “Found Report,” which highlights a wide range of products — from the most common to the most valuable, and the weirdest — that were pulled out from last year’s lost and unwanted luggage.
“We even found the Miss North Dakota USA 2025 state costume pageant dress,” Owens said. “We got in touch with her to let her know that we had it,” he said, adding that the dress ultimately stayed with the company.
Items that end up with Unclaimed Baggage are “kind of a time capsule into society,” said Owens. “It’s one of my favorite things about what we do,” he said. “We look at trends over the years and have noticed that what we received 10 years ago is very different from what comes in baggages today,” he said.
According to Owens, lost luggage trends in 2025 provide a snapshot of “how our habits, values and priorities are evolving.”
“We’re able to glimpse into what was popular in 2025, and also get a sense of what’s popular in 2026,” he said. Last year’s trends strongly pointed to the growing dominance of collectible culture, for instance, said Owens. “Travelers packed Labubus, even ‘Lafufus’, or fake Labubus, lab-grown diamond jewelry and travel cameras and microphones, which shows us that the influencer culture is not going away anytime soon.”
Trader Joe’s tote bags also made it on the list of popular “viral” travel products.
According to Unclaimed Baggage, nearly 10 billion passengers traveled by air globally in 2025. While most checked bags are reunited with their owners, a slim percentage isn’t. “A fraction of a percent of total checked baggage is still a pretty large number,” said Owens.
After a 90-day period, bags that could not be matched with their owners are set aside and travelers are compensated for their belongings. “We buy those bags by the tractor-trailer load and bring them to our warehouse in Alabama, where we process millions of items annually,” he said.
“We deal with all the major US airlines and we’ve also expanded the business to bus lines, rental car companies, casinos, hotels, public venues, really anywhere where things are lost or found,” said Owens.
Other noteworthy finds that made it into the 2025 annual report included a beekeeping suit, a $35,000 Rolex, a $10,800 Chanel handbag, a $12,500 Balenciaga leather jacket, more than 200,000 men’s T-shirts, more than 40,000 headphones, and a suitcase packed with rat poison.
$300 and a pickup truck got it started
Unclaimed Baggage, started by Owens’ grandfather Doyle Owens in 1970, bills itself as “the nation’s only retailer of lost luggage from airlines.”
“My grandfather, who was from rural Alabama and had served in the Korean War, was working as an insurance salesman in the 70s,” said Owens. One day, through a friend, Doyle Owens was introduced to a warehouse filled with lost luggage.
Owens said the friend, who at the time was working for Trailways Bus Lines, told Owens that there really wasn’t a set plan for the lost bags, which would probably end up in a landfill.
“My granddad, coming from a long line of entrepreneurs, decided to buy the bags,” he said. “He scrounged $300, borrowed a pickup truck, and drove up to Washington D.C. to collect the first load of bags. That’s kind of our origin story.”
From a scrappy family business that sold lost luggage items initially through a giant yard sale model, Unclaimed Baggage five decades later sells millions of lost baggage items a year (at a steep discount from their estimates retail prices) from its 50,000-square-foot physical store in Scottsboro and online.
“The store stretches more than a city block and stocks 7,000 new items a day. It’s become one of the top tourist destinations in Alabama and attracts guests from all 50 states and more than 40 countries every single year,” said Owens. The store includes a museum featuring some of the most unique items found over the years, such as a Gucci suitcase filled with Egyptian artifacts.
Donating items, such as unclaimed wheelchairs, sunglasses, coats, and socks is also a core mission of the business, said Owens. “Socks are one of the top requested items from homeless shelters.”
Through a program called “Love Luggage,” the company also donates hand-painted suitcases to foster children.
“Oftentimes, these children don't have anything other than a black trash bag to carry their possessions. Suitcases are essentially our business and we’re able to give the children a personalized suitcase of their own,” he said.
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what a fun read! I love that they're philanthropic, too.