Away is making a major category expansion to target the travel market as a whole.
The eight-year-old travel company debuted on Wednesday its Softside luggage collection, a pivotal category expansion for Away after establishing its roots in hard-shell luggage. According to Away’s chief executive officer, Jen Rubio, the category expansion is meant to target the roughly 50 percent of travelers who prefer soft-side luggage versus a hard-shell style.
“What we hear time and time again and what we know to be true is half of the luggage market is still soft-side luggage,” Rubio said. “There are some people who were willing to switch from soft to hard. There are some people who just didn’t care, but there’s also a big subset of people who we just weren’t serving — they wanted a soft-side bag. Maybe they love the brand, but they’re just not switching, so it took a lot of product development and we wanted to get it perfect because to us, launching this soft-side bag should feel as special and magical as it did when we launched our classic luggage.”
Away’s Softside collection offers four styles: The Softside Large, The Softside Medium, The Softside Bigger Carry-on and The Softside Carry-on, which is based on Away’s bestselling and original style. The luggage is offered in four colorways — jet black, coast blue, cloud gray and clay pink — and ranges in price from $225 to $325. The collection will be available at Away stores and website starting July 9.
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Rubio explained the Softside luggage collection has been in the works for several years now. She stated Away previously developed a soft-side collection that was close to being put on the market, but the brand ultimately decided it needed to be tweaked to meet the standards the company put forward with its hard-shell offerings.
“We’ve learned so much in terms of design features, aesthetics, quality and durability, and we really just wanted to get it perfect,” she said. “What customers will see now is many, many iterations later over development and over the course of a few years with the learnings from the last nine years.”
The collection leverages many of the components of Away’s hard-shell luggage, including the wheels, handles and patented compression pad, and introduces new features that correspond better with soft-side luggage. Rubio explained the brand has seen that customers who prefer soft-side luggage pack differently than those who use hard-shell styles, so Away designed the Softside collection accordingly.
Features include a main interior compression system, a top flap pouch and two no-show exterior pockets for additional storage. The exterior is crafted in a “high-strength nylon,” which is designed to resemble the appearance of Away’s hard-shell luggage.
To celebrate the launch, Away tapped an eclectic group of creatives — all of whom prefer soft-side luggage — to appear in the campaign for the collection. The campaign includes the likes of “Succession” actor Alan Ruck, “Hacks” actress Megan Stalter, comedian Ben Marshall, poet Cleo Wade, New York Magazine art critic Jerry Saltz, skateboarder Tyshawn Jones and many others.
The category expansion comes after several challenging years for the company. In 2019, Away faced allegations of a toxic workplace with claims targeted at cofounder and former chief executive officer Steph Korey, who later stepped down from the position in 2020. Rubio, also a cofounder of Away, assumed the role in 2021.
The COVID-19 pandemic further impacted Away as traveling came to a halt, causing an initial 90 percent decline in sales according to a statement from the company in April 2020.
“The pandemic challenged a lot of industries, especially retail and travel and we sit at the intersection of those two,” Rubio said. “But, we knew that if we could make it through the pandemic that we would bounce back in a big way. Travel is very durable economically. I think we had a lot of optimism that there was going to be another side to this. Travel is such an important experience and the travel market always bounces back, so once we did see that bounce back and travel kind of went crazy post-pandemic, everyone really wanted to get back out there after being stuck in their houses for so long. We came at it with really a growth mindset.”
Rubio stated the pandemic taught the company “the way [Away] had been growing was probably not sustainable for [the company] in the long term to keep up with that demand and the spend that comes with it.”
The growth mindset is leading the brand’s current restructuring plan, which continues Away’s mission of bouncing back from its prior challenges and sustaining profitability. In February, the brand reduced its staff by 25 percent across internal teams.
Despite the staff reductions and slower approach to growth, Rubio stated the brand “doubled the pace of our product innovation” this year and launched “twice as many truly net new silhouettes and products” in comparison to 2023.
Rubio said Away doesn’t have any additional launches slated for its Softside collection beyond the debut collection, but hopes that the collection will ultimately make up 50 percent of Away’s business to mirror the breakdown of the luggage market.
