Away

“By the way, this essay was written before the DTC boom, but this is the story of so many direct-to-consumer companies, whether it's Away Luggage, Casper, Warby, et cetera. Ton of money was given to these brands early on to spend a ton on paid marketing. The ea…”

“The one consistent Thing that we found in those companies that was different than our peer set of, you know, the aways and the Warby's of the world is that they didn't grow by raising hundreds of millions of dollars of capital and trying to skyrocket the highe…”

“No, we did not raise tens of millions of dollars. We bootstrapped the business. We made a decision early on that as much as we admired and appreciated what a way had done with their business is that we were going to grow At a reasonable pace. We did not want t…”

“All the same things that we saw with eyewear, we were seeing with luggage. Like, crazy markups in the industry. Like, no brands that people really loved. Like, a really awful shopping experience.”

“She found, like, some trademark lawyers and asked them if we could trademark it, and they basically laughed in our face. And she was like, she, like, insisted that they looked into it, and then a week later they called us and they said, you have been given a g…”

“So over the course of a few months, we talked to, like, maybe 800 people, and we would just talk to them about travel, and we would ask them things like, not even about luggage, but about their biggest pain points when they travel, and we discovered things lik…”

“Or we could launch with a pre-order, which I think is just like the most boring thing you can do when you're launching a brand. Like no one wants to put their credit card down for something that they like may or may not get.”

“And by the end of a couple of weeks, we had sold out of all of the books, and each book represented one suitcase that we ordered. So we had sold out of our first order.”

“Every celebrity collaboration we've ever done has been because that celeb has been a customer.”

“Laura Jean Witherspoon ordered a bag. And Steph said it out loud. And I was like, that's Reese Witherspoon. That's her real name. She's like, that's so weird that you know that. But yeah, like, she had heard about it from, like, one of these articles or one of…”

“So we've sold over one million suitcases.”

“I think if you think established is getting to fifty million dollars of revenue, I would say Away is going to do it in 22 months.”