With more airlines charging for carry-on bags, making upcharges a painful downside of flying, Detroit entrepreneur Stephen Davis today debuted a more compact travel solution.

Called Take OFF Luggage, Davis designed a carry-on in which the wheels easily pop off, allowing the bag to be stowed as an under-the-seat personal item which passengers can take onboard for free.

Davis, a native Detroiter who earned a B.S. in business marketing from Oakland University in Rochester Hills in 2006, used his background to research and design a solutions-oriented travel product, putting in more than a year in development and testing to get the final product ready for market.

Take OFF Luggage, which retails for $119, is available at takeoffluggage.com and on Amazon. The hard-shell luggage features TSA-approved locks and interior double-sided storage compartments.

“Being a frequent budget airline passenger, to save costs, I could not believe when they started actually charging me to roll my own bag to my flight and lift it up into the overhead bin,” says Davis, founder of OFF Luggage. “Since under seat bags are still free, I tried to find a bag that size that would still hold everything I needed to carry.”

Davis says he couldn’t find a suitable alternative, noting that he once traveled with a friend who solved his problem by packing a book bag. But Davis wanted a sophisticated luggage-style bag that was small enough to qualify as a personal item.

Then the realization struck him — without the wheels many of the smaller high-quality carry-on rolling bags would fit under the seat of the aircraft.

From there, Davis developed a compact bag equipped with four 360 degree spinning wheels that can be removed by pushing a button. With the wheels off, the suitcase has carry-on capacity but is still the size of a fee-free personal item.

The Take OFF Luggage bag measures 20″H x 14″W x 8″D inches and comes with four removable wheels. The wheels are removed by pressing two yellow tabs on each wheel to reduce the length of the bag from 20” to 18” — allowing it to fit under most seats.

When the plane lands, the wheels can be reattached by aligning the two yellow tabs with the openings on the wheels and pressing it together until the wheel clicks back into place.

Take OFF Luggage currently comes in five colors, black, blue, rose gold, champagne, and silver.

For more information, visit takeoffluggage.com.