Away Luggage: The Catalog Model Without the Catalog
A Suitcase Breaks Apart in a Swiss Airport
Jen Rubio's suitcase splits open on an airport floor in Switzerland, spilling clothes and toiletries across the tile, and she patches it back together with borrowed straps and tape just to make her connection. That mishap, recounted in The Business of Business's history of the company, is the founding anecdote behind Away, the luggage brand Rubio launched with Steph Korey in 2015. The two had met in 2011 while working together at Warby Parker, where Rubio ran social media and Korey oversaw supply chain — colleagues, not strangers, when Rubio called Korey looking for a suitcase that wouldn't fail her again.
What they built from that call was a company established November 9, 2015, funded first with $150,000 raised from family and friends. Rubio and Korey took a blueprint for a durable, hard-shell suitcase to a factory in southeastern China, visiting it eight times that year to get the design right. Christmas 2015 was closing in faster than the product could ship, so the founders leaned on a pre-order campaign backed by social media advertising rather than wait for inventory — the first Carry-Ons didn't reach customers until early 2016. Vogue had already previewed the bag that November, calling it "The Perfect Carry-On," a line that stuck to the product's marketing for years afterward. The company made $12 million in its first year and was profitable by the end of 2017.
Funding a Retail Footprint Instead of a Catalog
Away sells as a direct-to-consumer brand, meaning it sells to shoppers itself rather than through department-store wholesalers or third-party distributors — a structural choice, not a marketing slogan, since it determines who controls pricing, product presentation, and the customer relationship end to end. A catalog-era retailer built the same kind of control through print runs and a mailing list; Away built it through venture capital. The company raised a $2.5 million seed round by November 2015 from Accel Partners and Forerunner Ventures, an $8.5 million Series A in September 2016 for international expansion, a $20 million Series B in May 2017, and a $100 million round in May 2019 that pushed its valuation to $1.4 billion. Capitalism.com's case study on the company puts the aggregate seed-stage and growth investment north of $181 million across more than twenty backers, a roster that includes Accel Partners, Global Founders Capital, Battery Ventures, Comcast Ventures, Wellington Management, Baillie Gifford, and Forerunner Ventures.
That 2019 capital was earmarked specifically for two things: building physical stores and expanding the travel-gear line beyond suitcases. It is a genuinely different reinvestment logic than the one a mail-order catalog followed. A catalog house poured its margin back into bigger print runs, more pages, and a longer mailing list — the store, if it had one, came later and mattered less. Away inverted that order: the online store came first, and the venture money bought a physical retail footprint on top of it. Away's own site currently lists 16 stores spanning the U.S., the U.K., and Canada, alongside the online catalog of luggage the brand still sells as its core product.
A Magazine Instead of a Catalog
Away's answer to the seasonal print catalog wasn't a catalog at all — it was a podcast and a magazine. The company launched a podcast called Airplane Mode in May 2017, followed two months later by Here, a print and digital travel publication built around city guides, travel essays, and photo journals rather than product listings. It's the clearest evidence that Away understood what a catalog actually did for a direct-marketing brand: not just move product, but build a recognizable point of view a customer would return to on its own terms. Trade coverage rewarded the approach — Adweek named Away a "Breakthrough Brand with Ingenious Marketing," and Fast Company placed it among its "2018 Top 10 Most Innovative Companies." By August 2017, celebrity adoption had turned into shorthand: The Business of Business notes that People magazine dubbed the Carry-On "the little black dress of luggage."
None of that content marketing replaced the product itself. It ran alongside a genuinely fast expansion: three additional sizes launched within the Carry-On's first year, and the line's Bigger Carry-On went on to earn an honoree spot in Fast Company's 2017 Innovation by Design Awards. The magazine and the podcast did the identity work; the product line did the selling.
When the Brand's Internal Culture Became the External Story
The direct-to-consumer model's biggest exposure showed up in December 2019, when a report from The Verge described a toxic workplace at Away — a culture of intimidation in which executives used the company's internal Slack channel to publicly criticize employees, according to The Business of Business's account of the reporting. Staff described being expected to work long hours with limited paid time off and to answer messages late at night. Korey, then CEO, apologized publicly and resigned on December 9, replaced by Stuart Haselden, a former Lululemon executive brought in to reset the culture.
The resignation didn't hold. Korey rescinded it on January 13, 2020, returning as co-CEO alongside Haselden — a reversal that cost the company its HR chief, who resigned the same day in protest. By July 2020, after Korey made social-media comments attacking digital-only media companies during a period of heightened public attention to workplace equity, Rubio and Haselden announced she would step down within the year. Rubio became sole CEO. It's a sequence that shows the flip side of a direct-to-consumer brand's biggest asset: when there's no wholesaler or department-store buffer between founders and customers, the founders' public conduct becomes inseparable from the brand's promise in a way a catalog-era manufacturer, several layers removed from the shopper, rarely had to answer for as directly.
The Catalog Job, Done Without a Catalog
Strip away the podcast, the magazine, and the funding rounds, and Away's playbook is doing exactly what a mail-order catalog did for a century: build a direct line to the customer, control every touchpoint along the way, and use the brand's own voice — not a retailer's shelf placement — to make the sale. What changed is the toolkit. A catalog earned trust through a printed guarantee and a return address; Away earned it through a specific, testable product claim (a suitcase built to survive real travel) backed by venture capital instead of a wholesaler's credit line. The travel magazine did the job a seasonal catalog cover once did — establishing a lifestyle the reader wanted to be part of before ever pricing a product.
The 2019 workplace reporting is the part of the story a catalog-era retailer, insulated by more corporate layers, would have been less exposed to. But the brand's survival of it is instructive on its own terms: five years later, Away is still selling the same core proposition — a direct-to-consumer hardside suitcase, now priced from $275 for the Carry-On and $295 for the Bigger Carry-On on Away's own site — through the same channel structure it started with. The catalog model didn't need the catalog. It needed the underlying discipline: a direct relationship, a specific promise, and a willingness to be held to it in public.