Here's a fun fact about the 2010s: somewhere along the way, a hard-shell suitcase became a flex. Not a Birkin, not a sneaker drop, a piece of luggage. You can blame, or thank, Jen Rubio for that, because she looked at the single most boring object in travel and decided it deserved a fan club.
A Broken Bag and a Big Idea
The origin story is almost too tidy: Rubio's suitcase shattered mid-trip, she asked friends to recommend a nice replacement, and realized nobody had a good answer. The luggage aisle was a wasteland of overpriced legacy brands and sad airport-kiosk options. There was no cool suitcase. There was a gap the size of an overhead bin.
Rubio, who'd sharpened her instincts in branding and digital roles before this, teamed up with co-founder Steph Korey and launched Away in 2015. The pitch wasn't really about wheels and zippers. It was about selling travel itself, the anticipation, the someday-I'll-go feeling, and bundling a great product inside that fantasy. Before they shipped a single bag, the pair even put out a coffee-table book about travel, a flex that signaled the plan from day one: build the lifestyle first, sell the suitcase second.
The Brand That Out-Designed Everyone
Away got the product right: a sleek polycarbonate shell, a built-in (later removable) charger, an interior compression system, and that famously satisfying click. But the real genius was the world they built around it. The candy-toned color palette. The minimalist, sun-washed photography. A glossy travel magazine called Here that talked about going places more than it talked about bags.
The website felt less like e-commerce and more like a mood board you could check out from. The DTC model meant no department-store markup and a direct line to customers who became evangelists. Away made you feel like buying the suitcase was the first step of a trip you hadn't even booked yet.
They weren't selling luggage. They were selling the version of you that has somewhere to be.
From Carry-On to Cult Status
The thing took off. Away raised serious venture money, reportedly hit a valuation north of a billion dollars, and turned a humble carry-on into a bona fide status object you'd spot rolling through every fashionable airport on Earth. The orange-and-blush bags became shorthand for a certain kind of design-literate millennial traveler.
Away wasn't immune to growing pains, scaling a hyped brand is brutal, and the company navigated its share of public turbulence around culture and leadership. Rubio stepped into the CEO seat herself for a stretch, steering the brand through choppier post-pandemic skies for travel overall.
But the legacy is locked in. Away proved that any category, no matter how dull, can be reinvented if you treat design and storytelling as the actual product. The brand spawned a thousand imitators, all chasing that same clean-lined, color-popping, lifestyle-forward formula, which is the surest sign you've created something rather than copied it. A suitcase is a suitcase. A suitcase with a point of view is a movement.
The takeaway: the most boring shelf in any store is just an opportunity nobody's bothered to make beautiful yet.
