Away CEO’s New DTC Playbook: Amazon, TikTok Shop & 300% Over Plan

This is the first time I've got a bag lady and a bag man. So, we don't actually normally get people that are close in category because most of us sell weird things. Jess Scanazzi from Away.

Hi.

This is great. Away is one of the OG, Gen 1 DTC brands.

Yes.

And you're fresh in the CEO job and you took it to Amazon.

Yes.

Please explain.

And that has been so exciting.

Okay, why? Was this a battle? Like, was this a fight internally?

Like, it was not a battle because I came to do that very specifically. We're celebrating 10 years this year, 10 years in, an OG brand of DTC, absolutely one of the earliest darlings of what it means to be direct-to-consumer. I came in '24, we opened Amazon in '25. Amazon has been amazing. to us and we opened Amazon and a lot of others, Nordstrom, Dick's, Shields, Bloomingdale's, et cetera, et cetera.

All at once or did you kind of layer them in?

All in 18 months. Yeah, and we're, we're still going, but when I joined, Amazon told us we had hundreds of thousands of people looking for the Away search terms on amazon.com.

Oh, that's not surprising at all.

Hundreds of thousands of actual demand on the platform that competitors were bidding against. They were going into private label, Amazon Basics, and then they were not coming to the website. So, when we joined on Amazon, immediately we captured that degree zero demand that was there so fast. And today we own 8 to 9% of the Amazon market share in our category in less than 12 months, and it's still growing month on month. So, It's incredibly exciting to be there, and I don't think of it as not DTC anymore. I think of it as an extension of the website, the business model that we're into on Amazon, which is an FBA 3P model, how much we are able to start retargeting those customers to also bring them back into the website. Truly for us, Amazon is becoming this great, like, acquisition moment, And then it's coming back to the site.

Huh, okay, this is what you wanted to go into.

So yeah, 10 years. I'm at 10 years too. They bought it for 90% of the time, and the people have always been out there on the largest marketplace in the world buying this stuff. Why didn't they do it, and what fight did you have to get them to do this?

So I think that you actually have to wait a little bit before you go to Amazon because you are building 10 years of community insights, behavior understanding, preferences that you get. When we went there, we were super thoughtful and intentional about what kind of products we're going to put, not the full assortment, limited bestsellers at first, kind of like testing it out in that way. And so, the entire argument, the battle that you're talking about, frankly, no battle, because when you're looking at the channel economics of it, everything that you're not spending in your acquisition costs to your website, you're now shifting into trade terms or referral fees to Amazon. And beyond that, it has compounding effects actually below the line as well that you don't have to subsidize on your, on your own website. So flipping the narrative into, it's not again like one or the other, it's one that's gonna compound the other and the entire game, the winning this is building the bridges between the 2 platforms. That, that's how I'm thinking about it.

That's the way you look at it. It's not how everybody looks at it. And we have all these D2C experts and they're always fighting around about I'm like, if I get 'em to Shopify, I know I pay more, but I know their name, I know their address, I know their email.

It's a little like I own my customer thing.

I have their cell phone number. I can send them, like, I can go over and deliver flowers to these people, right?

Sure.

On Amazon, they're trying to control all of those people. So, I'll tell you what we thought. We thought, how many of those people can we use AI and knowledge to find out who they really are and move 'em over to our side? So, you had to tell people, This is what we're going to do. We're going to make them our true customers. That's just one channel, right?

Yes, but what I think we might be missing is that when you're thinking about omnichannel or expanding your DTC business, it's not just opening all of those other channels, including Amazon, it's architecting in the back the bridges that go from one to the other, and that's what you're talking about, right? And that's Those systems, they take multiple forms for us. It's packaging. How do you get people to scan a QR code to register their luggage, to find their warranty information way more easily, for example, back to the website? It's selling you luggage on Amazon, but if you want the matching packing cubes or backpacks that go with it, you have to go to the website. It's selling you something on Amazon, but if you want to use a referral fee for your spouse or your friend or your colleague, Mm-hmm. you go to the website. So, architect those bridges between your different channels and platforms to, yes, at the end of the day, bring them back to a place where you're going to get to know them a lot better, but think of wholesale as a different kind of acquisition channel at a highly efficient CAC overall.

Can I ask you like a very specific question?

Yes.

Do you have product that is just for Amazon And do you have product that is just for Nordstrom's or?

We don't have specific products that are different. However, we have colors that we sell into specific exclusive moments.

So, like style variation, not SKUs.

Exactly. So, for example, during Prime, we might have a Prime color exclusive. During Nordstrom Anniversary Sale, we had 2 gorgeous colors only at Nordstrom. It's part of the excitement of if you're a loyal customer of that channel, which people are, they have their Nordstrom cards and they to redeem their Nordi points, et cetera, they're going to be able to only find it at that retailer. And we find that that works really well. It's not an always-on strategy. For us, it's going in and out at specific moments in time, usually anchored around the promotional calendar of those retailers.

What I am curious about then, so you talk about this like building bridges thing. I love that analogy. How do you, and how is Away thinking about this whole like AI, agentic commerce, people are now finding product Like, I actually tried this this morning. I went and I said, like, I'm looking for a new carry-on bag, and I went to ChatGPT for that, and you guys were like one of the first ones up. I'm like, good, good to be 10 years old and have so much like social proof. Is this another bridge? Is this how you're thinking of it? Like, how is it layering into your strategy as a playbooks team?

So, as much as we're talking about how we want wholesale to be the acquisition moment, and then that customer is making their second purchase on the website. At the same time, with AI, we're seeing the website getting decentralized more and more and go meet those customers wherever they're shopping. It'd be social commerce, it'd be agentic conversations, et cetera. On the topic of AI, it doesn't even start with the Away strategy on how we're thinking about AI. It starts with how AI is changing travel, generally speaking. And how it's changing travel is that now we're all using ChatGPT or Claude to plan for trips, to plan Itineraries, packing lists. For me, the best dream use case that I still haven't seen, and I would be willing to give my credit card away to an agent to do that for me, is to book flights for my family, to get the best possible flights, and to redeem the best possible points in the most convoluted way that you have to, like, redeem points on these portals, right?

Sure, yeah.

It's so complicated to do, but that's now how customers are starting to think about it.

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So, it's during those moments that now as a brand, we do want to show up. What's the best carry-on? What's the carry-on that's going to fit most of the European airlines? Like, those are actual queries that we see all the time, right?

Oh my gosh, yeah, yeah.

And so, we've done a few things. One, enhancing visibility on those platforms is super key for us, and we are front and center, and I'm glad you had that experience, and we're investing in the organic content that those LLMs are scraping, but we're also actually doing ads now on ChatGPT, for example. So, we're just testing those things. Have you made it work?

Like, this is such a thing right now. I mean—

It's early.

It's early.

Okay, that's the answer. It's early, but here's the deal though. We're learning about it, right?

Sure, yeah.

And if you're not doing it, you're not going to learn about it. So, it's very small dollars that we're putting in. It's virtually no dollars that we're getting out of it, but we're learning how it works, how it shows up, does it matter for customers, et cetera.

Yeah.

So, that's how. It is. In the website itself, we also now have some AI agents where you can just use natural language to ask, is this fitting in my overhead? Is this a personal size item? And more and more customers naturally are using those conversation agents on the website to ask this question. When we see all of the questions that they're asking, 82% of the questions that they're asking are related to airline compatibility.

Yeah.

So, that teaches us how to enhance our PDPs, how to enhance our packaging, how to enhance our assets and copy and content online and in other platforms as well. And so, it's interesting. We're back to 10 years ago of trying to win SEO. And it's again, it's the same logic.

Everything comes back around again.

And so, you know, when I talk to my teams internally around like, this is hard and we have to figure it out and everyone is learning from day one today. It's true, but at the same time, I tell them, hey, we've done this before. It's not the first time. And not only we've done this, but we mastered it. Like, Away is really, really, really, really good at it, right? So, it's about like doing it again with slightly different rules, a slightly different playbook. Overall though, it's about winning on the visibility, winning on the relevance, and just doing that with different tools that we have 10 years in.

So, I've got a question because a lot of the people that listen to this, just mathematically, their business is not as big as yours. So, they're like, I'm doing Shopify, I'm going to go into Amazon, I'm going to do the SEO for chat and for Claude. Do you take the same people or do you say, we're going to hire a division of people, a leader who's going to do that? What did you do with Amazon and what are you doing with AI?

Yeah. Amazon, we hired dedicated people who understand how Amazon works.

In-house?

In-house. They are supported by an agency that's helping us to optimize the catalog, the store, understand how we bid differently in like real time. It's a lot of time. It's very intensive. And I love hiring Amazon people to do Amazon work because you have to understand the mindset. You have to understand the rules. It's a retailer like no other, right? And they have their own rules and they have their own price-matching algorithms that you need to understand how it works if you want to really be good at it. So, this we hired people and I'm very happy with the team. AI, we are doing in-house with people that we already had and people who are coming from every single function in the organization who now are championing how AI is impacting their job, their role description, their function, their department, and they are building all of those use cases. internally, and they're building the inspiration that everyone else is now following, right? And so, I'm thinking about, we have someone in our production and development team on the physical products who's automating all of our processes and SOPs with agents, and it's amazing to see that. Of course, we have some tech teams who are leaning in like very naturally into it. We have people on the brand and creative side who are getting super excited about how to iterate on the briefing processes between growth and creative and brand teams. So, it's truly coming from everywhere in the organization, and it's being shepherded by our head of technology and operations, who's also responsible to train everyone, to provide access, to provide governance. So, that's how we're thinking about it. How have you done it?

Well, not as well as you.

No, but I was hoping you were.

We're all trying to figure it out as well, right?

Yeah. So, that's the thing with how I did it. So, I started my little company that's, you know, pretty big now, in a garage. And so, I've just been making this stuff up the whole time, okay?

Like all the best companies, by the way.

Like all the best companies.

That start in a garage.

But once you get $100 million, $200 million, $300 million, you're like, oh, I'm supposed to be doing it this way. And then I hear this new CEO of Away who seems like you're killing it. We don't know the numbers, but from the story you're telling, from what I read and what I see, it's like, wow, this thing is taking off. This is gonna put these— they've always been sitting there on the table. Nobody put 'em together, organized them together in a way with a system and a plan to make this thing take off. So that's literally amazing. I'm like, God, I gotta ask her about being a real CEO here. I mean, I'm a CEO 'cause that's what they call me.

No, listen, we're learning every single day.

Yes. It's humbling, right? Like AI, I need to learn from my team. I'm watching YouTube videos at 11:00 PM trying to like understand how people are using it, which is, by the way, so exciting, right? Like you get to learn again from ground zero in that way. I love it. I have learned in my last couple jobs that I am very often the least qualified person in the room on that specific topic.

Yes.

But where my superpower is, is that I can get the best of you to do the best job you can do in that job that you were hired to do, right?

Sounds like a CEO and a good one.

Good, good. That's great. But, and on AI, we're all learning into it together. And actually, there is something culturally significant that's happening at Away right now where when you're putting all of those people with different tenure and experience levels, et cetera, in the same room, and it's truly the mindset of, us versus a problem to fix without anyone coming with prior experience. It doesn't exist. Strong knowledge, strong conviction. Like, it's truly all of us rolling up sleeves, trying to figure it out. I've been loving those meetings and those moments. I haven't felt like that in a while.

Have you had pushback? So, has there been any part, any person, not a person, but have you noticed a department or a function in the business that is like less into it?

At the beginning, yes. We had some people who were more, I just don't see it, how it's going to help my job, right? And I was attending an AI clinic recently, and they were talking about closing the imagination gap. And that really resonated. I thought that that was a really powerful statement of it's not about what it can do or cannot do. It's the possibilities. And do you understand how to close that imagination gap? So, we've been doing a lot of those inspiration moments. people in your role in other companies. Let's learn from them. How are they thinking about it? And then suddenly you see the spark. You see the moment that something is ignited of saying, oh, I didn't even know that that was an option, that that was on the table. And that's powerful. Those moments are great to witness. And I see a convergence between our best performers at Away, and those are the same people who are actually curious and excited and hungry to learn about AI as well.

You see, my first company was a software services company, and we used to do these things called hackathons. So, like, when we wanted to, like, mess around, we would spend a weekend. I would buy pizza and Red Bull, and, like, you know, we're all in our 20s, and we would just hang out for 3 days and just, like, build stuff. Was super effective. And then I got into this stupid consumer game, and then that went away. But now what I'm noticing is companies are starting to do this again. And not software companies. They're saying like, oh no, I gotta get a bunch of people really excited about this new technology. We're gonna take every Friday for a month or whatever it is, and we're just gonna like put everybody together. And it's this imagination thing. It's like, what is possible? Because I find the hardest thing for people right now is like, well, I don't know how to do that with AI. It's like, well, just ask the AI. That's like, it's like that little thing right there. It's like, well, just why don't you ask it?

Yeah.

It'll tell you how to use it. We've never had technology like this before. Like when you bought Shopify, originally, or Salesforce, or pick a thing. It didn't teach you how to use it. You had to go get somebody else to come in and use it. Meanwhile, these tools are like, I got you.

Teach me, ask AI, teach me, how do I ask you the right questions so you can give me the right answer? That's one of those things, those little tricks like, oh yeah, that would be pretty smart.

Rewrite the prompt so that it's better for you to give me like a better answer. The iterative process. It's incredible. And you're absolutely right. We are doing hackathons now again.

Oh, that's good to hear.

And I haven't done them in like 10 years, right? And we're— because the other thing is not only not knowing where to start, it's also the idea I'm hearing a lot that I don't have time to teach it how to work, which takes time at the beginning, right? And so, it's actually preserving and forcing time in the schedule for everyone to say like, no, we are actually going to dedicate the time to do that. It's a Friday afternoon and it's working really well. We brought in a company recently that helps us to patch all of our data systems together and it's very AI native in that way. And we actually forced a 1-day sprint with all of the different teams together. And in 1 day of work, like a 9-hour day, we were able to hammer out 25 new automated workflows that if I didn't have that single day where people were dedicated to do that, would have taken us 3, 4 months to actually get there. Yeah. Because the day-to-day work, the real work, the existing responsibility, it's still happening in the background. And so you have to close the imagination gap. You have to know where to start. And you have to actually dedicate the time for it at the beginning as well.

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I've always loved consumer goods so much because at the end of the day, when you have this incredible world of SaaS and digital products that are coming, when we sell consumer goods, you're actually selling for that tangible product that's gonna allow you to experience the world with your product in a better way.

And they're culturally important.

And it's so culturally important. And when you talk about travel specifically, you are talking inherently about a very like intimate and cultural experience that everyone is experiencing.

Something you do with your family and your friends.

In different ways.

Yeah. So, that tension, I think, exists. The way that we try to reconcile it is to make it as easy and as fast to then get offline with the best product for you at that moment in time.

Hmm.

So, the digital component, the AI component becomes the enabler, becomes the accelerator that allows you to pick the perfect luggage much faster and then go on and discover the world and hopefully not have to come back. As much as I'm excited about AI and all of those advancements that we're seeing, I'm perhaps even more excited by this other trend that's happening of going back to in real life interactions, meetups, meetings, and the physical component of all of it, right? And so, you're seeing it on both sides with amazing advancements and new sort of transformation that's happening on both sides these days.

Yeah, I mean, it's the laws of the universe. I've said this on the show before, but like, AI is probably the most powerful thing that we will— it's crazy. Every 10 years I'm like, oh, this is the biggest thing I've ever seen. I'm like, now it's got AI. This is the biggest thing I've ever seen. I'm sure the robots are going to come along and be like, bro, hold my beer. So whenever you have this like big force, you always have an equal and opposing force. So like one of the best places to invest, I think right now is like, well, what's on the other end of this AI movement?

100%.

Which is like in real life stuff. I've seen, I don't know, 6 or 7 investor decks in the last 3 months, 4 months for like longevity and wellness centers, like basically taking the Four Seasons and like, we're going to build a health component into it. But it's this slow, you know, come here for a week and you're going to sit in a bath for— it's like the most opposite to AI thing ever. And I kind of see what you do as a brand as like almost positioned over there.

Yeah.

Right. Like it's this travel, family time enablement. Like I think all consumer goods are, but I think you guys specifically, this is why I want to ask you.

I think we enable that, and I see this, the suitcase, the suitcase is a product that at the end of the day is the gateway to travel. The, the moment that you pull your suitcase from under your bed or from your closet, you know you're going somewhere. And just that feeling—

And your dogs know you're going somewhere.

And your dogs know you're going somewhere. Wait, did you know we have an amazing pet carrier that is crash tested? I say that to everyone because I am obsessed with it. It's crash tested?

But, but you don't advertise a crash tested plane bag.

It's crash tested for the, for the car.

Oh, okay. Okay. I'm like, good God, how do you market that?

Did you want to like test out putting crash tested pet products? Okay.

All right.

It's so great.

Do they have the little mannequins that they run into the wall?

Wait, how do you—

In slow motion. It's for small dogs. Like, like car commercials.

Dude, of course you went there. I'm like, I'm envisioning like, how do you crash test a plane?

It is. No, it's great. It's a great product. Let me hook you up with that one, please.

Please.

Okay. But, but so the, and this is, this is what's so beautiful about, about luggage, but about Away specifically. Firmly, that's the moment where you're preparing for a trip and that's the moment where you're remembering, ugh, my luggage broke last time. The wheel is wonky. The zipper doesn't close. By the way, that's why we have retail stores as well, because the majority of people who come to buy a suitcase in retail have a trip in the next 3 days. They don't have time to order on the website. They don't even have time to order Prime on Amazon, right? They need an actual physical location because they just pulled their suitcases out. They realize it's broken. They need to buy a new one. They're upgrading to Away. But my bigger point is that the luggage is the first step, but it's opening all of the excitement you have ahead of a fun trip, of all of the itinerary that you have planned, the restaurants you're going to go to, the time spent with your family and friends that you're going to go and have great memories against, right? And, and I love that the luggage becomes that sort of first physical representation of what's awaiting of that week of vacation that you have planned. And then the, the opposite is true too, of if you've had a great luggage experience, the luggage actually disappears, right? You don't think about after a trip, oh, my luggage, my luggage was so amazing. What you think about is my luggage broke down, the wheels were wonky in the streets of Barcelona. The trolley broke when I was climbing to the 6th floor walk-up of my Airbnb. That's what sticks. It's the friction points. We try to remove that. Very clearly, that's part of the DNA from day one. It's that engineering, that performance piece. But I find that interesting to sell a product today that when it's so good, it disappears.

It's invisible.

It's invisible.

It's brilliant. However, the last 2 luggage I bought, Follow that pattern, but I bought them mid-trip because it was wonky at the airport. I flew into LaGuardia last night.

Yeah.

And I'm just watching this luggage come out, and I'm like, I need luggage because mine suck, and Mariana's is even worse.

You probably need luggage because you forget it places too.

I do that too. But I looked at them all coming down the thing, and I'm like, if I wanted to pick one out, which one would I pick out? I'm like, it's all luggage. It all looks the same, right? Except every time I buy one, It sucks. It breaks the handle. I pick it up, 50 pounds by the handle, and that thing breaks the wheels off of that thing. You open it up, and it's just like everything's terrible in there. So when this was created, what said, wow, we're going to be different? What was it that they said, this is a way, this is why we're better?

The origin story is very similar to what you're talking about. Our founder, Jen Rubio, her luggage broke mid-trip. And it was at the airport. And she thought, there must be like a better way to do this. You know, that entrepreneurial thought that everyone has at some point. And so, the idea originally, which we still carry to this day, is you need to package non-negotiable performance. And that quality and that craftsmanship, it starts with that. No one cares about a beautiful suitcase if it's gonna break on the first trip. That's not the order of things in the suitcase world, right? You have to start with the best wheels on the market, the best zipper on the market, the best polycarbonate shell, which is the type of plastic that we use for our hardshell luggage, because not all plastic is made equal either.

Mm-hmm.

And then, you have to test that and test it again and again and again. Our luggages, they go through over 80+ tests. We put them on treadmills to walk 50,000 steps before they've taken the first smile with any customer. We test them for hours in in sometimes absurd conditions. We will freeze a suitcase, load it way past an airline capacity, and then drop it from multiple floors high. And we are gonna do that again and again and again, and it cannot crack. It cannot have a hole in the shell. Otherwise, we don't bring it to market, right?

How do you freeze a luggage bag? Can I ask you?

We have giant fridges, giant freezers. Yes. Just—

You're preparing for Canada. I mean, or Sweden.

But, but yes, because it's in all conditions and in the, in the, what is it called? Like the belly of the plane. I'm forgetting the word. It's really, really cold.

It's cold down there.

In those places, right? So, it starts like that and then you understand that luggage is personal and emotional and so, you wrap it around an identity that like reflects who you are and your self-expression, right? And so, that's how it started. And for me, when I joined, What was so important was to understand very fast what was core to Away and how to keep, protect, and preserve that. And also, at the same time, how to modernize the next decade of it.

I'm sorry, Matt. I just have to— you're amazing, and everything you say is amazing because most entrepreneurs that I know, they're like, we're gonna make luggage, we're gonna get into luggage. They're gonna go to 5 to 8 manufacturers, they're gonna give 'em a sample, and they're gonna say, this one's $4 less than this one. And they're gonna say, Looks the same, we'll buy that one, right?

Yeah, that's not how we work.

Not only that, like 10 years of that, and every time you're saying, test it first, that's the baseline, our product has to be great.

It has to be great. It's a non-negotiable. If it's not great, we're not bringing to market.

It's a common thing between all great brands right now though, is everybody's obsessed with product. Like, do you, I mean, like how many people do we know, like the best operators are just product obsessed. You kind of have to be, I think. I think the bar is is now like the bar for building a good brand is like product has to be great.

The product has to be great.

That's your price of admission. And then above that is like, okay, how do I build brand? How do I build community movement? All that stuff.

The 10 years of e-com is, it's kind of this Amazonization in the opposite way. It means I wanna make some money, so I need to buy something, put it on Amazon, and I'll sell it. How do I get the most money? And it's like, It's like the whole game is return customers. That's the whole game. Everyone's always like, how do you become successful?

The whole game is moat. I'm sorry, is brand. Brand is the only moat in consumer.

Get them to come back again and again and again so you're not spending that money on the new customer acquisition. So you don't think of that. You have to kind of luck into some of that. You guys thought about that. I lucked into it. And so everyone's like, hey, how do you make so much money on DTC? It's like, I lucked out. It's a really good product. That was by chance.

Great product at a great price.

Thank you. I appreciate that. Also, what I wanna talk about is, is what you just said, which is you have to get them to come back and back and back again. How many luggages do you have?

I was gonna say, this is inherently difficult in your business, right? Because like when you get at, when you do buy a good bag, mm-hmm, they last a while.

And on purpose, by design. By design, I make products that I don't want you to come back for the same product for years. Right? By design. Yep.

Which makes it a bad business model.

It's a horrible business model.

Like, be honest.

When you're thinking about it, right?

It's terrible.

People, when I talk about lifetime value, I get prompted this question all the time. Well, what's the natural like repurchasing cycle for a piece of luggage?

Can we pick another word?

It's 7 to 10 years, right? I would love for it to be shorter than that. I would love for that to happen. But, but so that's one of the biggest constraints of making a non-consumable great product.

Sure.

And you have the same issue and amazing thing going with your product. When I have an amazing handbag, I expect it to last 10 years. An amazing backpack, I want it to last for forever.

The difference is people will have 30 handbags and 2 pieces of luggage.

That's very true. And that's why the TAM for, for bags is more than twice the size of the TAM for luggage in the US. Obviously.

[Sponsor Content] Shoplift is a CRO platform built for e-commerce operators and the only one that's Shopify Plus certified. We're using them for the new brand the operators ourselves are launching. They've built a free CRO resource hub at shoplift.ai/operators— real conversion benchmarks by category, the seasonal patterns most tools hide, and practical CRO for how you actually run your store. 2 ways in, get your free benchmarks or start a free trial at Shoplift. Go to shoplift.ai/operators. So when Matt and I were talking before, we're like, so let's talk to them about their product line expansion.

Yeah.

She's gotta be thinking about it. What is that?

So, so how I think about that second purchase overall, people come usually the vast majority of the time, they buy a luggage from us. That's what we're the most known for. During the pandemic, talk about playing in a space where travel was shaky, right? During the pandemic, instead of trying to continue pushing for luggage, the brand diversified its product assortments and we launched bags, accessories that work in design systems together. So, our packing cubes are optimized for our luggages, our handbags and everywhere bags are meant to be on top of our luggage as well. And so, we started growing those assortments. Those product categories are growing really, really fast since because they have a much higher repurchasing cycle as well. When it comes to forward-looking, we're continuing to take that approach and the approach that we've taken with Away bags of saying it's everything you need and nothing that you don't. It's the single best personal item that we can build and design for you. We are continuing to put that design principle into our forward-looking assortment. And we're relaunching a lot of our bags in the next 6 months. We're bringing new innovation to the market. I'm excited about that. But that's interesting. So, the journey is I come into the brand, I buy luggage, then, huh, they also have bags? I didn't know they had bags. Away makes that? And so, they buy a bag, they buy a backpack. And then the system works really well. And so that customer comes back and buys for someone else in their family, their spouse, their kids. They'll tell people about the brand to a lot of other people because when you find a great luggage, you want to actually tell people. And what I have found is that it's a lot more profitable and productive to sell a product like a luggage that's going to have a slower repurchasing window, but that one customer is going to bring you 10 other customers, then that single original customer buying a cheaper product in supplements or beauty, for example, that's going to come back maybe 5 times during the same year. And we've run the math on that. And for us, at our price points, at the basket values that we operate under, it works. The math works in that way.

Yeah.

Obviously, we're still focused into tightening the repurchasing cycle as much as possible. And we've done really good progress, I think, on that. But it's interesting in that way and how we're thinking about it in slightly different way than other businesses maybe.

It's, yeah, I mean, our main show, there's 4 guys right on the show. HexClad sells like indestructible cookware. That's literally their promise. Ridge, lifetime guarantee on a wallet and rings and whatever else. Mike sells insulated steel drinkware. It's like you can throw it out of a plane and it'll probably survive. And then I sold phone cases, which had the lifetime, like, repurchase rate was basically, well, when do you get a new phone? Our business survived entirely off of what you're saying, which is like, I get one, they bring 5 of their friends, they bring 10 of their friends, and they brag about it.

Exactly.

Because it was like very much story-driven brand. So what you're saying totally resonates. Did you get this from your time in the luxury industry? Because like you did a tour of duty at LVMH, or a couple. I think Richemont?

Yes, correct.

Yeah. What from that world did you bring into Away?

Even Richemont and LVMH operate very, very different models because Richemont, it's all about high-end watchmaking. And you're going to have that one amazing watch, not only for the rest of your own life, but you're going to give it to your kids and grandkids. And so, and so the lifetime of the product is in generations, not just years or even decades.

And the brand storytelling is literally that, right?

I mean, I've worked for some brands. are older than the United States, right? At Trichement. It's amazing to understand the longevity of it, which those brands never take for granted either. In fashion, including luxury fashion, you do have seasons.

Mm-hmm.

A Louis Vuitton, a Chanel, or Dior, I mean, they're issuing at least 4 collections every single year, which I find amazing even in terms of logistics and inventory and replenishment and how you're managing that piece of it. So, within luxury, I think you still have some of those nuances, but the idea that it starts with the product and the craftsmanship and honoring the quality of it has been true for virtually all of the products I've sold in my career. And I'm super proud of that. I think those companies are pioneers in their respective areas, and they're pioneers because they've stood up to the brand promise that they've set with their customers from day one.

What, uh, so then bring Amazon into this picture, 'cause you've also spent time at Amazon.

Correct. So, I did Richemont for 7 years.

Yeah.

And my role there was building e-com and building digital marketing in the early days of those luxury brands.

Which would've been hard 'cause they didn't wanna do it.

They, that totally was hard.

I'm old enough to remember, I'm old enough to remember those days.

Those were the years.

Yes, exactly.

And I often tell this story that the day that we launched a very high-end jewelry brand online, within 30 minutes, we had the first order coming through, and it was a mobile order from somewhere in the Midwest for over $200,000. And I could see like minds being blown from the execs around the room because they had never thought that that was possible, that you had a customer outside of Madison Avenue here.

Yeah.

And that's one of the things where you launch one and then the others see it. And so, you launch a second one and a third website and a fourth one, and then suddenly everyone has it. But when I joined that group, you had to actually call a concierge to place the order and you couldn't check out online in those early days. And so, how far we've come already, right? And so, as much as those brands were very much getting transformed in their digital journey, I knew that what Amazon was doing on their side was a different level of thinking about e-commerce and how do you build at scale with customer obsession behind. And that's why I wanted to go in the inside and learn from there then. And so, I moved to Seattle and I joined Amazon in the beauty category, which you go to an ASP that for Amazon is really high, but compared to luxury, you're talking about maybe like $40, $50 for a great brand.

Mm-hmm.

And beauty at Amazon sits in consumables because people are coming back twice a week to purchase it again and again and again. And you learn the consumable lifetime and that journey and how that's different. And so, the product was great because frankly, I was working with great brands selling their inventory into Amazon. But what was great and that quality piece that we're talking about, is the mechanics of the e-commerce model that they were building. That's the product at Amazon. And the non-compromise that they have on the product is this one. And when they talk about the customer obsession, they're as obsessed with their customers as a luxury brand is obsessed with their customers.

Do you think those 2 worlds clash a little bit? Because what you're hitting on is so important. It's like at a brand like an LVMH, like at any one of the LVMH brands, the product is a very— it's like what they hold sacred, the physical thing. Whereas at Amazon, the product is Amazon. Which is like the system itself is the product. That's what they build. That's what they obsess over. They both share this, like, we care a lot about the customer, but they both come at it from different worlds. And there's clear, as brand people, like, there's a lot of conflict with brands working with Amazon. Like, that is, I don't think there's anybody who's like a brand who wouldn't say there's conflict.

[Sponsor Content] From a customer perspective, the luxury of Amazon is the strength of their supply chain. There is luxury in getting anything you might want free in one day. That's— convenience is luxury when you think about it in that way. And so, I discard the idea that I've heard a lot during those days that Amazon is purely mass. It's targeting mass-only consumers. That's not true. The services it offers are luxury services in the form of a digital product experience, which is supported by the fact that they are best in class in logistics and supply chain and infrastructure, generally speaking. The brand tension to Amazon is real, but is it vastly different than the terms you're signing away when you're selling in department stores or in boutiques? Why is Amazon held to potentially a different standard there? At Caden Lane, ShipHero is the WMS platform we trust to run our warehouse AI routes the pick location with the fastest path possible. It easily increased pick efficiency by 10%, and their pick-to-light takes the thinking out of picking. Now you can take anyone off the street and train them on picking within 10 minutes with almost zero error rate. It increased our newest pickers' efficiency by 30%. It integrates with all major commerce platforms, including Shopify and even our TikTok shop. Switching to ShipHero is easy. Most brands are live within a few weeks and new staff can be live before lunch. Learn more about ShipHero at shiphero.com/titans. Amazon, from a retailer perspective, is my second most profitable channel at Away. It's much more profitable than some of our department stores, which I adore for different reasons of the physical experience that they provide, the corners, the really experiential—

The soft touch, the low-tech, high-touch.

But Amazon is a powerful accelerator for us overall, I think.

I think it's powerful that you're saying Amazon is luxury because I didn't know I lived a luxury lifestyle ever before now, and now I feel a little bit better about myself.

No, if you think about it, like, yeah, I mean, you're hitting on 2 important points. It absolutely is. Like, I've never actually, you're right, I've not heard that frame before. I think it's actually a really cool frame. But Amazon, Amazon is, the idea that Amazon is just a certain kind of customer, that I think I think we're moving past that point now. Like, I think, because you see an Amazon truck or a box in every neighborhood in the country. I don't care how rich the zip code is, like, there's Amazon boxes in that neighborhood.

I don't care if you cut this, but you think about it, you fly into the airport and you don't have to wait. You go right to a car who drives you right to the hotel. You're already checked in. Time is luxury.

Oh yeah. Amazon is absolutely—

Amazon has become luxury. That is like, did you read that someplace or did you just say that?

No, no, but she was in the beast, she was in the belly of the beast.

She said it, right?

Like, think about 50 years ago, ago and describe to someone 50 years ago the Amazon experience. You, you can go to a place from your living room. You can buy anything in the world coming from anywhere in the world, and it'll be delivered to your house the next day.

For free.

For free. Isn't that luxury? Isn't that access, which is luxury, time, which is luxury, convenience, which is like, to me it is.

Yeah, I mean, until you get in such abundance that it becomes commodity and that becomes like baseline expectation, right?

I absolutely agree, but now you're talking about consumerism and how much is too much, and I challenge my team sometimes of, we ship so fast, out of the way, it's incredible, and I challenge them sometimes into saying, are we shipping too fast?

I actually think this is a thing.

Yeah.

I think that's a great question.

Because more than once we've had customers either changing their mind or they want another color or another size and they call us and you're like, I'm so sorry, your order shipped already.

I actually think this thing, I think too many brands do ship too fast because it's not the thing that their customer is coming to you for. They go to Amazon for like, oh my God, I need it the same day. I need it right now. Whereas they go to your brand for something else. They're going for discovery or entertainment or, or like a specific colorway or a style. Like you have the whole private community thing. I think that's what people go to brands for. And I do wonder if that's, if we're just going to Again, the whole AI and algorithmic and Amazon infrastructure, if we're just pushing more and more to like, that's the function that like your owned channels are gonna serve. Like you're opening physical retail stores, right? And that to me is, that's the function that those stores serve.

So you took a company that was already in for 9 years, you have all this experience, and they said, we want you to come in and be the CEO, take the ship and move it to the next level. What is that like before you accept the job? You plan the night before you go to work with your lunchbox, and then how is your first 3 months?

It was such an honor to even get the call at that moment, truly, because I grew up with Away truly as that brand that is such a good representation of entrepreneurship and e-commerce and championing something new. And so, So, there was a lot of care in considering the role and going through the process. And you add to that the transition with a founder, which is also a very big moment in the life of a company when everything so far has been founder-led, founder-grown, and that was very real at Away as well. And so, when I met Jen Rubio for the first time, it was from a stance of just awe for this visionary entrepreneur that she is truly. And before firming up and accepting the role, there was a lot of time that Jen and I spent to align on what we're protecting and where we see white spaces ahead. And that is before the job starts.

Hmm.

Because you have to have a degree of clarity in a role like this one at that moment in time of what is the mandate, what is the scope, what does the role entail exactly, and are you aligned fundamentally with where the founder, where the board want to take this? So, even earlier talking about some of those battles for Amazon, we didn't have those truly because there was so much time spent before my day one going into those conversations, identifying those opportunities, and aligning We are ready for expanding distribution. It's going to look like this. We're going to do it with a level of aggressivity and urgency that we think the brand can handle. And it's going to be amazing. And then I joined on Cyber Monday, which was—

That's a weird day to start.

So great.

Why would you? Who chose that?

I joined on Cyber Monday because in December, we spend the time to finalize and shape up the budget for the next year. And I wanted to be a part of that, which makes sense. Also, I never discount joining at a moment where you are seeing people at their best. You feel the—

Or worst.

Or worst.

Let's be honest, like Cyber Monday can be real bad.

And so, and so you had the, the ticker on the wall of the Cyber Monday sale. I mean, if you're retail at heart, we're all sellers at heart.

Yeah.

It is so exciting to start on a day like that. And so, that was the before, that was day 1, which is we have to hit those sales, those tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars. And then, then you go into the strategy, which for me, I fundamentally believe the first 6 months, it's about listening, understanding the business, asking the questions, I traveled a lot to meet our retailers. I traveled a lot to visit our factories, all of our retail stores, and understanding and listening before you actually shape, I think, the vision and the strategy that then you share back with your teams.

Can you expand on this then? So, Away obviously has a board.

Yeah.

You come in.

Yeah.

There's, and I'm assuming the founders are still, is somebody still on the board?

The founder, Jen, is now chair of the board.

Chair of the board.

Is vision, direction, strategy, is that set at a board? Do you bring that stuff to the board?

We bring it to the board. They go to the board, they challenge it back and forth, and then we align together into, this is gonna be the deliverable for this year, that's the budget, and that's the 3-year plan ahead of that.

Got it.

Okay.

Yeah.

The, just the substance of saying, what do we protect and where's the white space?

Yeah.

It's so great because people think business is about more, more, more, more, more.

Yeah.

It's not. In order to get more, you have to cut part of what you've done in the past out. I always say you have to kill 90% of who you were in order to grow. So, what 10% do you protect and how do you get rid of that? You have to get rid of things that you've loved, that you've succeeded on, that mean a lot to you. They're like, that made our business. Yes, but it will crush the future if we don't get rid of it.

And this is where my job is easier than yours because when you're coming in as an executive in a company, you're less emotionally attached to those things that you've built.

Yeah, they're not your kids.

I have so much admiration for founders and people who take it from 0 to 1 because that's the hardest first step. And everything that you're building on top of that are the trade-offs of letting go that you need to make on things that you have built yourself. I am in year 2 of my mandate and year 1, I always find it to be kind of easy in a way where you can always say, ugh, who did that? Like, terrible idea. Year 2, I'm like, ugh, who did that? It was me last year. Like, it's a lot harder.

Yeah, at some point, the president can't blame the past president, you know?

And so, year 2 is cementing some of the early strategic signals that you've tried to implement, and year 3 is proving that it's actually the right direction. So, year 2, I think, is actually much harder than the first year in a business. And that question of what are we letting go, to be super honest with you, we're still to some extent struggling with some of that because it's touching everything in the business. It's touching product, distribution, ways of working, teams, and how we're organized. All of those things, we have to ask again the question. I've been back to this sentence so many times this year with my team. We are competing with day one companies that are born today that are out to get you, to get me, and they're operating with an operating system that I didn't even think was a thing 10 years ago. And that operating system is— Oh my gosh, there's companies being built right now with no employees. No em— exactly.

This is like where you're— this is such a good place to go. Like, you're— we are all up against, uh, like a 20-year-old.

Yes.

In a basement or a garage, uh, with all the same tools that we all have now. Like, we used to, even at our size, right? Like, even when you're in the hundreds of millions in revenue, You still have software that, like, that used to be a competitive advantage. You had data that used this stuff. Now I'm like, that's all gone. And now you got a 20-year-old who doesn't sleep, right? Like no family, no kids. Like it's him or her and their buddies just sitting in a basement and they can do things that we can't. They can move, they can say things that we can't.

That's right.

Right? So like—

Although we can hear, absolutely.

Yeah, no, but they can go, they can make claims.

They don't care.

Like, the game is so hard. So, how do you guys think about this, like, this day one mentality? Like, how do we compete in a world that is vastly different than it was even 12 months ago?

I fundamentally think that if that does not excite you as a challenge, this is not the right place for you anymore. You have to take that and say, bring it on. I'm up for it because as much as it's forcing us, to unlearn 10 years of technical architecture decisions, 10 years of shaping an organization and designing it for specific business, 10 years sometimes of bad habits who were very much the right ones at some point.

Yeah.

On the other side, I have 10 years of intellectual property and patents, 10 years of billions of customer data points, 10 years of millions of miles traveled with millions of people who've bought Away suitcases, and that is equity and capital that you cannot have when you're starting on day one in a garage.

Mm-hmm.

So, there are hard things to do, and the untangling is harder than the building from a clean plate, I think, and we're untangling right now at Away. We are untangling a lot of the different things that we've done in the past that were, again, the right things to do, And at the same time, we are also asking ourselves the questions, what are all of the things that make us special that are the competitive edge and advantage that no one else has? And this is when we talk a lot about the power that we have in our communities and the equity of an Away luggage at the airport where you immediately know what it is. And so, we're trying to do those 2 things at the same time. It's hard, but I'm expecting every single person in the organization to be super pumped about this, to be super excited about it all.

When you came into Away, was there, was there something that was obvious that did need to go away?

We had a lot of assortments that the long tail was long.

Okay.

And so, we, we keep trimming the long tail and, but I've done that in every single company, um, where you have to take a really hard look at your product assortment. And at the actual performance per product, and I love looking at a metric that we we call like TPPU trading profit per unit, which is essentially the PNL of a single product, and that is the PNL fully loaded. So how much advertising you put against that product, how much people cost you put against that product, and having truly an understanding of what is the TPPU of your of your business per per SKU, and then you have to you have to cut you have to cut everything that. a drag on the P&L, everything that's not productive, everything that's not serving a secondary purpose. So, we're continuing to do that, but that editing process is part of continuing to grow the business as we were talking when you just need to continue growing and knowing what to let go and what to keep preserving.

What would be a secondary process? And I want to go to you. So, like, sorry, secondary purpose. So, like, I think about this a lot because like sometimes you have products that are maybe bad performers on a profit basis, but they're great advertisers.

Exactly. That's a secondary purpose.

Okay.

Yeah. So, I'm thinking—

Like a leopard print piece of luggage is probably not going to sell that well, but like might get a lot of attention.

We do a small buy of a high-profile partnership or collaborations. We know that it's meant to have a beginning and an end. We're still putting advertising and media dollars behind it. For example, last year we released a limited edition white Lotus collection when the new season came out. And that was a great product and it sold out, but by design, it's meant to be a smaller buy. It's an in and out. Another example, which I've been loving recently to learn more about it from my team, our— we've opened TikTok last December, a TikTok Shop.

Oh, that's fun.

And it's— fun is one word for it.

That's what I was getting at. We've all been there.

And what's trending on TikTok Shop for us is our hard case sunglasses. glasses case, which before that, you don't think of Away as selling sunglass cases. We were selling a few hundred a month of that product, which is low for us, and it started going viral.

Of course.

And now we're selling thousands and thousands and thousands of this product every month. I think that actually every single product of that SKU we're selling is now on TikTok Shop, basically. Here's where it gets interesting. The product itself, it has, has okay margins, okay profitability. It's a much lower price point, which makes sense for TikTok than luggage. 82% of customers who are buying this product are new to Away on TikTok Shop, and 14% of them come back within 2 months to buy another Away product.

On your site though?

On our site.

Yeah. So that for you, that's a trade worth making.

Of course.

What is you? Have you guys seen something different on TikTok shops? I know the answer to this question, Chris. This is why I'm asking because I talked to McCoy. Yeah, TikTok shop.

We have different views on TikTok shop.

Okay.

Yeah. McCoy is our CMO, and he's like, "I gotta measure this. I gotta figure this out." I don't think these are new customers. These are return customers.

Oh yeah.

We're stealing from our own nerd. And I'm like, "Okay." He's like, "We had a terrible month on TikTok." talk in June. It was not as cost-effective. I think we lost money. I'm like, it was the most profitable month we've ever had in our company. So big picture is, it works.

Yeah.

Keep jamming this thing. You can't always take the numbers and add up and say, that's how it works. But when you are running the whole thing, you see all the pictures, like, put more gas on that fire. Let's pour it on, even if it's to get ahead. Because everyone else, if you wait till you figure this shit out, other people are going to have it figured out. You got to be ahead of them.

I agree.

I always say, if you put 2 stores next to each other, if you're worse than somebody else, they might do 10 times more sales. If you're better at them online, you can do 10,000 times more sales than them, right? So, your home runs are a lot bigger out there. So, TikTok is like, boom, let's learn, let's do it. We spend that we don't know is gonna be returned. But guess what? When you do the math at the end, you're like, well, best month we've ever had. Another great month. Uh-oh, we've blown our numbers out of the door, right? So TikTok is this beautiful thing. He talks to my CMO who, oh, he will drag on about stories about, you don't understand the math on this.

Yeah, dude, he wrote the longest text message I have ever seen. I'm like, we have like a group of a bunch of brands in this one text group. It was like, a, who's the big investor here in tech? Bill Ackman. You ever seen like his, his Twitter threads? McCoy just drops in this text message. You know how iMessage has an expand button? I did. I realized that there was an expand button at that moment. I'm like, I speak in one sentence texts. It annoys people because I'm like a ding, ding, ding, ding. Aaron's here. He knows this. McCoy. No, no. Here's 14 chapters of a book on TikTok shops.

That's what makes what—

I want to read that. Please send me that.

Oh, you don't.

He's going to make you feel awful about TikTok Shops.

Like, he'll make you feel awful, but it's the greatest thing we've done.

We all questioned our lives.

Just because you're so mad independent, right? So, you as the CEO who has to report to the board, has to report to these people on the equity, you have to do all of these things. You've gotta see what other people cannot in their little silos and say, yeah, I get it. We're doing it anyhow, right?

Yeah.

Do you do that on a day-to-day basis?

Yes, I do. Because on TikTok Shop, you're right. All of those things are right. All of those things we're seeing at the same You have to parse out what's the TLDR at the end of the day. At the end of the day, we're getting new customers at a highly effective rate. At the end of the day, every time something is trending on TikTok, my Amazon sales are going through the roof.

Yeah, it's impressions.

And then my return customers are coming to my website. So, those secondary order effects are working in the greater good of the business. If I look at the TikTok P&L in silo, it's not It's, it's not a good-looking P&L. If I look at all of the other things that are happening outside of it because of it, it's a much better different story.

It turns out products can be good advertising.

Yeah.

That's basically what TikTok Shops is.

Exactly.

But you have to go to a board and you're gonna say, well, there's this halo effect. The most overused word in TikTok of all time is the halo effect. And they're like, can you measure it? We need to run performance out for the next year, the next 2, the next 3 years. like, no.

Sort of. Maybe.

Trust me, bro.

You own your own supply chain. You probably don't, right? Uh, it actually makes it really hard to run traditional, like, you know, supply chains because TikTok is moving so fast. It's difficult to know what's gonna pop off.

Yeah.

So it's not like you're going out and being like, I'm pretty sure this is gonna be viral on TikTok. So like, I'm gonna go to my factories in China and say like, give me you know, 50,000 of this thing.

Totally.

But I don't mean to jump in because this is about you, but it's the same thing when we manufacture and we're only, you know, 2 days away from shipping that stuff that sells so fast. We made these 2,000 mystery boxes and we thought, oh, we'll just give them to our top creators, right? Sold out in an hour.

Wow.

Like, now what do we do?

Oh, I love this.

Well, they don't want to wait 6 more weeks. for that refill. They're like, hey, I just made a bunch of money. I'm somebody who's doing your live sales.

Yeah, it's all affiliate sales.

What do I get tomorrow? What do I get the next day? How do you fill this pipeline? And it's all the confusion that all entrepreneurs and CEOs love.

I love this. We launched a product in the spring called a Topside, which is a top loader carry-on suitcase. It's a great product. We knew it was going to be great. It's been tested. We loved it from the beginning. We had that strong feeling the market was going to react positively to it. We beat plan by 300% at launch, and therefore we went out of stock so fast. That product we manufacture with longtime factory partners in Southeast Asia. It's not a 6-week timeframe to bring it back.

No, it's months.

It's months to bring it back. And so, what do you do? How do you keep the energy and the excitement up? How do you justify having spent quite a bit of money in those advertising dollars, which for us, we want to pulse in our marketing calendar. That's the assets, that's the calendar, that's the copy we're going to have for 6 months. And now, the product is out of stock on the website. And it's weird. It's a weird thing because I love the those reactions of the market. But at the same time, I tell my team, I don't necessarily want us to go beyond plan. I just want us to plan better. Because when we beat plan and beat forecast, it has all of those other effects that are happening of we're out of stock and the promo calendar gets messed up and the inventory turns don't work anymore. And what are we going to sell to those customers?

But can you not play the luxury thing here and actually build brand on this?

You can build scarcity.

Yeah.

Sustaining it for a long time, time for a product that is also a need is complicated.

Yes.

Because we launched it in May ahead of summer travel. People need a luggage to actually travel, right? So, you can play that game for sure. And frankly, we've done that before in out-of-stock moments. The suitcase with 50,000 5-star reviews, finally back. That type of messaging, which works really well, but you also have to be hyper-conscious of the timing and when you're pulsing those So now with your TikTok experience that you're having and what he's saying, are you going to make product just for TikTok? We're not making product just for TikTok, at least not yet.

Okay.

But we are putting more of our existing DTC inventory on the shop to see potentially what takes off. And again, thinking of TikTok as an extension of the DTC experience.

Yeah, because there's been a lot of companies that have now proven that TikTok Shops is not just a low AOV.

So, in February of this year, we put a product on TikTok Shop first before putting it on our own website. And we launched a color called Island Pink, a bright fuchsia pink, and that was luggage.

Yeah.

And there was some skepticism internally around, you're gonna sell a full price $400 luggage on TikTok Shop, and it's nowhere in the world where people can actually see it in person. And yes, indeed, that's what happened. And we did. And so, we sold it on TikTok Shop first. And so, we're not building for TikTok Shop, but that type of timing actually worked in our favor as well. We were able to build momentum around only available on TikTok Shop, and then we brought it to our DTC and our retail stores, and it sold out as well. And it's a color that actually resonated really well. with the TikTok viewers.

Got it. How, this is like the whole TikTok thing, it's just so bloody loud. Like, I don't know, I just find TikTok Shops loud. And yet you've made this comment of like, we sell a product that is like inherently, if it's great, it's invisible. That's another one of these like things, like how do you do that? How do you reconcile like we're gonna be just this wildly loud brand on TikTok Shops while selling something that we hope you never actually have to think about?

It's, it's a brilliant question because a lot of what makes an Away product an Away product is the invisible industrial design that's hidden in the luggage itself. And we've talked earlier around if the wheels are not rolling or the trolley gets sticky or the zippers don't close, that's what you're gonna remember. So a lot of what makes an Away luggage so special It's the invisible engineering behind it. It's the best rolling wheels on the market. It's the trolley that's gonna be at any height, an amazing trolley experience. It's gonna glide so smoothly in the airport or on cobblestone streets. It's the zippers all around that are not gonna glitch at all, right? That's what makes a product invisible and yet exceptional. And at the same time, the wrapper, the story of that is our iconic ridges. It's the placement of our logo. It's the colors that, you know, are the Away colors, and that's why you still see so many Away luggages at the airport and you know it's an Away luggage. Something when I joined that made my job so real, that moment that we all have when we take a new job and you're like, oh, wow, like, this is actually real. When I took the role, I was still living in Chicago. I was commuting every week to New York. And so, I was taking that plane, that like a commuter shuttle plane, and I started counting the number of Away luggages in my planes on Thursday nights when I was flying home. And I was counting 5, 10, 15, 20. I got to 27 Away luggages in one of the planes that I was taking. And I texted my team so honored and proud of saying, you guys have built this. It is incredible, and it's a testament to everything that the brand stands for. So, you're building invisibility in the engineering and the performance, and at the same time, you're building community that trusts the brand promise so much that they're opting into a product that is iconically recognizable. And if you ask an American customer, to draw away luggage, they will. They will understand how it's designed and the outer wrapper of it.

How much time do you spend on product? Like you in your seat, and then how much time do you spend in other parts of the business?

Okay, I spend quite a bit of time on product and more time than I ever spent before on product, but I also know that my strengths are on running the business in other What I mean by that is I have an amazing designer, head designer, and design team. I have an amazing SVP of brand and brand and creative team, and I feel full trust and confidence in them to make the right product decision. My biggest weakness in business, having worked in fashion and in product, is you frankly show me 2 shades of blue, for me, they're blue, and they will know exactly this blue is gonna sell out and this blue, which is totally like 1% different, is not gonna sell out. And I'm like, really? This is incredible. And so, I'm letting them run and do their jobs as much as possible on this because they're so freaking good at it.

You know, we did a— this is years ago, this is maybe 6, 7 years ago, but Pela did a product line with Apple, right? So, we were like, Apple wants to bring us in. And I remember the design process with Apple, and we would sit down with my design team and their design team, and they would toil, the Apple team would toil over a wall of blues. And they would sit there and it was maybe 50 or 60 of them. And I'm looking at them all. I'm like, guys, there's 3 colors on the wall. Like there's 3, there's no fricking way there's 50 colors on this wall. 3. And then they got down to a decision. So, ultimately their head of design was like, this is the one that's going to sell the most. And holy hell, she was right.

That's incredible.

Yeah. Of everything that we released, she's like, that's going to sell the most by a mile. We still sell that product. Still a great product. Still bangs. I get it. I respect design people so much more now as a result of that experience. So, I hear what you're saying. What are the areas then? Where are you most— you say your genius is in other areas of the business. So, where do you feel most comfortable? Where do you have highest leverage?

I get you to do your best job again and again and again by asking so many questions. I exhaust my team in the questions that I ask all the time.

That's great leadership, man.

Because I want to understand the process, like walk me through it. I want to understand what goes into making this happen, testing this product, signing this contract. I want to understand all of it and asking the questions forces Having clarity of the answers, which practicing clarity of mind is an overlooked leadership skill that I think we all need to be better at.

Hmm.

It's extremely hard to do. It's extremely hard to do again and again and again. And yet, it's probably the single biggest thing you can do for your teams. It's to be clear in your mind and your vision and able to communicate that and articulate it the right way.

Okay, so speaking of contracts and then vision, you guys now have this, uh, you have a WNBA player.

Yes.

That you're just, I'm like—

Sabrina Ionescu. Yeah.

Oh, I'm the biggest Sabrina fan in the world.

Really? Did you see what we launched yesterday?

I had to figure out who this was this morning.

So good.

You know Sab?

Sabi's amazing. Of course she is. She's an icon. She's an athlete. She's, she's everything. She's a leader on the court, off the court. She inspires everyone, me first.

Portland Leather Goods, Oregon. Kelly Graves.

Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Sabrina Leno.

So, we signed a contract with the New York Liberty last year.

Yes.

And we're, we are the official luggage brand of this WNBA team, which is an amazing team and, and, and so aligned with New York as well.

Of course.

And we are a New York brand. It's, it's amazing. And we've, we've done some amazing events with Ellie, their mascot, all year. And as a spinoff of this partnership, we've signed Sabrina directly to design and bring to market with us her own luggage collection, which we launched early September. And it's been amazing to see the response because there is such a convergence of fandom and travelers. People travel for sports.

Yeah.

More than before, people go to games. follow athletes. And so, you have this community which brings amazing energy into everything that the team and the star players are doing. And so, it's been incredibly exciting to bring this product to the world.

Is this a— like, this reminds me again, your history in the luxury world is like, they do this so well, right? They always have like the perfect face of whatever the brand is supposed to be at that time. Is that where you got this from? Like, I just wanna know why, like, It actually—I did not have your reaction. I saw the NBA, this like WNBA player. I'm like, I'm like, okay, number one, who is that? Number two, well, I don't watch sports.

No, no, but it's not sports; it's the Liberty.

Yeah, yeah, but I don't. I'm on the other coast, guys. No, no, no, no, no. This is you nailed it. So I just—I had to look it up, but I'm like, oh, interesting—an athlete. The sports thing for the travel—I get that. But like, why not? Why not another larger celebrity? Like there's levels of celebrity, right? Like there's huge ones out there. Why not go there?

Correct. I know that's offensive to you. I'm sorry. There are so many levels of celebrities, but that's not how we think about it. We don't think about levels of celebrity and like, let's find an A-lister or an actor.

It's like cultural relevance to you guys.

It is. It is cultural relevance in the most authentic way that we can. So it's New York. It's performance. It's travel in a very organic way. And so, when we met Sabrina, there was an immediate connection in how she likes to travel, how she's thinking about performance in her travel, in her gear, and in her partnerships that she signs. That's top of mind as well. And so, a lot went into the collection to define the type of product, the color of product, the organization inside of it. Can it fit a basketball? Do we have shoe cubes? All of those things are part of it and it's those little details that I think make a great partnership feel super organic versus an ambassador for the brand or a face of the brand, which might be different.

Yeah, this is why I asked because like we actually do get this question quite a bit from our audience, right? It's like, how do I do celebrity deals? How do I bring in influencers? And I don't think people realize how much nuance goes into the partnership, and when it's done well, it's actually at a product level.

Yeah. And again, we did the WNBA, the New York Liberty, and Sabrina. So, it's not also one shot. We're going to have one season with an athlete and another season with an actor and another season with a dancer, right? We are going deep into how we think about partnerships, and we bring them to life in different ways. And that allows us to tell stories that build on each other instead of having to start again from ground zero, which from a marketer's perspective is also good. You want to build, you want to compound instead of starting from zero baseline again.

Is this going deeper in the customer that has always been an Away customer or is this an expansion?

Ooh, it's going deeper into the existing Away customer by tapping into an Away customer who's also going to expand the brand into other people, into the fandom and the community, which goes beyond New York. I mean, at this point, the New York Liberty have that have fans all over the US and international as well.

Yeah, okay, so that's where I wanna go with this. I see Away as a New York brand, right? Just being from the Northeast, Away is a New York brand. How are you thinking of taking the brand internationally now?

Away is a New York brand, and we are super proud of that New York heritage and those New York roots. Our office is in SoHo, a few blocks from this studio. It has this New York energy. in everything that we do. When I say everything that we do, it's a New York energy around the performance expectations of like, get going, around the no BS that you don't want to have in anything that we're doing. And it's not performative the way that we are, and New Yorkers are not performative either. We're taking this in our international expansion in the next 3 years, Right now, we have a flagship store in Toronto. We have a flagship store in London as well. And we will be expanding into other locations next year and the next couple years after that because it, it's a true white space for us. Inherently, this is a luggage you see already all around the world.

Yep.

I take it to Hong Kong or I take it to the Middle East and I see a in terminals and we're not there. So, those customers have come to the US, have been to London to our store to buy the product. We want to find the best ways to serve them then. Right now, we're going through the sequencing of what opening those markets looks like, the business model of opening those markets with different business models depending on the geographies as well.

Yep.

And frankly, the complexity for Away is that opening cross-border for us, it's hard to maintain price parity because of how bulky the product itself is. You're not shipping a small parcel internationally. You're shipping something that's much larger.

It's a box of air.

It's a box of air.

It's really expensive.

It's a great box of air. Yes, correct. And so, it's very expensive. And on top of that, because we stand with our products so much, the reverse logistics piece of it, we also need to hack and to understand better. If you need to repair your luggage, if you need a new set of wheels, how can we do that when you leave, you know, on the other side of the world?

How do you see travel in general changing? Because everything feels like it's changing right now. Is travel one of these things like, no, this is never gonna change?

Travel has changed a lot since COVID and it's changed, it's changed in very nuanced ways where you have some macro changes that we've seen specifically in the US. People are traveling way more for festivals, events, sports. They're following pop stars all around on their concert journeys.

Yeah, we're all groupies now.

Exactly, we are, right? So, those are different travel motives that did not necessarily exist, or at least to that scale 10 years ago. Travel is also getting much more multi-generational. You have, especially our original consumers, 10 years in, they have kids, they have families, and they're traveling in different ways. And so, we've launched kids' lines, diaper bags, and so on and so forth. But also, travel is getting more and more expensive for, in some ways, airlines, airline costs, tickets. This is very, very, very expensive. So, what we're seeing on the other side is a return back to train travel, to road trips. And for us, it's really good prompts to our design and development teams around how do we bring solutions to those new kinds of travel? travels when the medium is also changing.

It was so interesting. Didn't Louis Vuitton start as like a, like a travel bag for like the train or something like the trunk?

Trunks, mallettes, absolutely.

So, there's a whole heritage piece to this.

There is.

Like we're going back in time.

And it's going back to slow travel in a way, slower travel in a way, which we've signed a partnership with Amtrak this year. And it's been, it's been great actually because we're seeing more and more people doing that slow travel discovery on long journeys in trains. And in a train, you don't have a ton of space. You cannot really open your luggage. So, that topside product I was mentioning earlier, instead of opening like a carousel and taking a lot of space, opens up. So, you have the same capacity in a much smaller footprint. You go deeper in the suitcase. So, those are the type of insights that we're taking that allow us truly to design for truly new ways that people are traveling.

Has there been something that has surprised you in this business? So like you're in your second year. Yeah. You said this is like, this is a hard year. Uh, well, it's like harder than the first, right? Um, but with all of the, I'm sure like we all do this, right? We all have expectations when we come into something. Yeah. What has been the most surprising thing about being at Away for you?

2 things. The first one is the realization that the macro right now in retail is tough.

Yeah.

The macro is tough. Every year you're getting hit by something else. Is it tariffs? Is it Middle Eastern geopolitics that are impacting your freight routes? Is it something else? The new normal is change, and I feel like every year I need to buffer my business by $10 to $50 million of unknown stuff that's gonna happen.

Yeah, yeah.

And so, that's forcing like new forecasting, that's forcing resilience in your team and your culture of like, get on with the program because that's gonna happen year on year again.

Yeah, they're not, they're no longer black swan events if they're happening every year.

Oh, 100%. The second thing that has surprised me on the other side of the spectrum is how much of a love brand Away is. And I tell people I work at Away and I swear the first thing I hear again and again and again is, I I love my suitcase.

Yeah, yeah.

I love my suitcase. You don't say that about any suitcase. You say that about your Away and, and respecting and honoring the equity of the love brand. It's a huge responsibility, but it's a starting point that you can only dream of when you have that, right? And it, it hasn't been surprising in that I was a consumer and I loved it as well, but the scale at which I, I hear that again and again, is surprising. The impact that you've made on people who've had an Away luggage for 10 years is very special, and that's a really good surprise.

How do you get all of your employees to see that? They kind of know it, but what I found is, like, I'll go to store openings where there's 3-block lines of people who've lined up since 11:00 the night before, right? And you're just like— and everyone comes up to you and says, I own 82 of your bags. I love it so much. It means the entire world to me. And you're like, Oh, shit, I'm sitting in a design room with people who are like, this blue or this blue? You know, like they don't know the love.

Completely.

And when you spread that out in the world and you created, you are the CEO of a company like that, are you able to get your employees to events and to understand what that is? Because D2C, sometimes you miss that. A 5-star review is a 5-star review.

When you have someone who has 82 luggage who's waiting in line what they love is not just the 82 luggages, but it's the trips they've taken with those luggages.

Yeah.

And it's the stories of those travels that they bring back to you. The last line of every single job description that we push in the world is, you must love to travel, but that's a given. And our employees feel that in their core because at the core, we're hiring people who are the consumer. And how we bring that to life very pragmatically, every employee has stipends for free products when they join that we refresh every couple years. We practice full summer flexibility where in the summer you can work from anywhere in the world and you get to travel and you have those experiences and you dial in from July 4th to Labor Day. During your 10-pull anniversaries, you get days off and dollars to travel and explore the world. Our Slack channel travel recommendations should be published in a book. It's so good because people are sending all of those recommendations.

Well, why don't you? That's great marketing. Oh my God.

You know what I did?

Marketer in me would eat that up.

I absolutely, we had 10 years of travel recommendations and I built a little Claude thing to build a website that now has the map of all of those pins. And so now we have that internally.

This should actually be a public thing on a Waze site.

And actually, we now are using some of that and we've just published our Tokyo guide that's fully employee curated.

Oh, that's awesome.

When the team just went to shoot our spring campaign in Tokyo, and now we have blog posts around the places that they love going to. So, it comes to life in real ways, and the product, I think, is so good because it's designed by travelers for travelers, and we wear test all the things employee first. And so, there's just so much of that love and real life experience that goes into the product day in and day out.

Okay. We like to finish every one of these episodes with what we call the Titan 10. These are standard questions we ask everybody.

Oh, okay.

I'm so curious about yours.

Okay.

Given the background that you have and how you're running the company. So, I'm just going to hit you with them.

Hit me with it.

As fast as you can.

Let's do it.

Okay. So, you get to a desert island. I'm only going to give you 3 numbers that you get to take with you. I'm going to give them to you on a piece of paper every week. Tells you how your company is doing. What are those 3 numbers?

Trading profit per unit, trading profit per channel, and how are we doing on the number of Diet Coke in the fridge? That will tell me if I have a good week or no.

That's awesome. Okay, so then you also get to bring a book, resource, anything. It just can't be about business. What are you reading? What are you watching?

The book that I go back to again and again that's not business, and I have 2 kids, 6-year-old and 3-and-a-half-year-old, is Oh, the Places You'll Go by Dr. Seuss. Because Because it is such a good life lesson book. And if I have only one that can teach me everything about life, it's this one.

Okay. Do you have a belief about business then that would be considered contrarian and other people think that you might be a little crazy for?

I do not stress. I like to sleep 8 hours a night and I am very much not an exec who is always on, on my emails and Slack.

I kind of love that. I love that. What is the single most important word in leadership?

We. Winning is a collective sport.

What is the single most important word in business?

Integrity. It's everything.

Okay. Best meal of the day and why?

On Sundays, it's the coffee that I take to the playground as my kids play. It's not the coffee, it's a feeling. During the week, it's getting home in time to make dinner with my family.

Very cool. Are you a ritual person then?

Is that— I like moments that bring people together.

Okay. What do you think the most overrated growth tactic is right now?

The shiny object syndrome. You're always looking for the next viral trend, jumping in the comments. I think that's overrated and people are seeing through that more and more.

Okay, and then what's the most underrated?

Retention and cultivating people who've already told you how much they love your brand.

I kind of expected you to say that Hell yes. Damn, that was good. All right, I think that's the pod.

That's awesome. Thank you so much.

Crushed that.

Absolutely killed it.

This was so great, guys.