Jen Rubio's luggage cracked open in a Swiss airport in 2015. Four years later, the company she built with Steph Korey was worth $1.4 billion, sold suitcases at $225 against a comparable Tumi bag at $525, and had a waitlist culture that most consumer founders would trade a kidney for.
Then, on December 5, 2019, The Verge published screenshots of Slack messages from inside the company. Fourteen former employees described surveillance, restricted time off, and public dressing-downs. Within four days the CEO had resigned. Five weeks later, she had un-resigned.
Let’s talk about the detail that most retellings skip, because that’s where the tea is at.
The boycott never arrived
Away's holiday sales actually grew after the story broke, with US spending up 20% in December 2019 versus the prior year and customer counts up 23%, according to card transaction data from Second Measure. The story ran during peak gifting season. Shoppers kept buying.
This kills the comfortable version of this case study, where consumers punish bad employers. Purchase intent lives in a different part of the brain than moral outrage, and a suitcase bought as a Christmas gift clears checkout in ninety seconds.
So if the customer never left, where did the damage go?
The CX queue is the product in DTC
Most of the complaints in the reporting came from the customer experience team.
For a direct-to-consumer brand, CX is not a support function. It is the showroom, the returns desk, the warranty department, and the sales floor compressed into one Zendesk inbox. Someone buying a $225 hard-shell online, sight unseen, is really buying a promise that a human will fix it when the wheel snaps in Lisbon.
Burn out that team, and the product degrades on a lag. Response times slip, resolution quality drops, and reviews turn sour six months after the spreadsheet said everything was fine. Cohort damage never shows up in this quarter's revenue line, which is precisely why founders miss it.
Amazon's playbook, half copied
Korey framed her critiques in the language of company values, borrowing heavily from Amazon's leadership principles: customer obsession, high standards, ownership. Amazon's list also contains a principle called "earn trust," which asks leaders to listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat people respectfully.
The intensity got imported, but the counterweight did not.
Culture playbooks are systems where the harsh parts and the protective parts hold each other in tension. Pull out the protective principles, and you keep the pressure while removing the valve. Any founder cloning Amazon, Netflix, or Bridgewater should copy the full list or none of it.
The valuation assumed margins the category never had
Away raised $181 million in venture capital across five rounds and passed $1 billion on the way to a $1.4 billion valuation in May 2019, roughly doubling from $700 million a year earlier.
Look at what that multiple demanded. Luggage is a hardgoods business: real COGS, ocean freight, tariffs, returns, and a replacement cycle measured in years. A customer buys a carry-on once, maybe twice a decade. For context, Samsonite booked around $2.9 billion in revenue in 2022, while Away did roughly $232 million.
When repeat purchase is that thin, customer acquisition cost gets amortized over close to a single transaction, and the only way to defend a software-style multiple is to squeeze operating expenses. The team closest to the customer absorbs that squeeze first. The culture story and the cap table story were essentially the same story, just presented in different ways.
What the receipts showed later
Korey stepped down, returned as co-CEO in January 2020, then left permanently by mid-2020. Rubio took the CEO seat in 2021 and moved to executive chairman in 2025 when Jessica Schinazi was appointed. COVID took sales down 90% and forced furloughs for roughly half the team plus a 10% layoff. In February 2024 the company cut a quarter of its internal staff during a reorg. A reported sale process in 2023 went nowhere.
Five CEO configurations in six years is a governance and continuity problem, and it costs compounding time.
Brand fragility shows up somewhere other than checkout
Consumers forgave Away in about ninety seconds. However, the talent market, the board, and eventually the acquirer pool weren't that merciful, though.
This is the shape of brand fragility in a DTC business. Revenue holds while your recruiting funnel narrows, your senior operators start taking calls, your best CX leads leave with the institutional knowledge, and your exit multiple quietly compresses because buyers underwrite the operating machine, not the Instagram grid.
Founder takeaways
If you are a founder or planning to start a startup yourself, here are some lessons to take along the way:
- Stress-test the gap between promise and payroll. Write down what your brand promises customers, then check whether the team delivering that promise is staffed and paid to deliver it. Any gap gets paid for in churn, first by employees, then by customers.
- Copy culture systems whole. If you are importing another company's operating principles, list every principle, including the ones about trust and candour. Ship the whole thing or build your own.
- Watch your CX metrics as product metrics. Track first-response time, resolution rate, and agent attrition on the same dashboard as CAC and repeat rate. Attrition in support is a six-month leading indicator of review scores.
- Underwrite your own multiple. Work out what gross margin and repeat purchase rate your valuation implies, then ask whether your category can physically produce them. Raising a number the business model cannot service creates operating pressure that lands on people.
- Give people a private channel. Away's all-public Slack policy made humiliation a spectator sport. Bullying spreads faster when witnesses are structural, so keep a way for teams to talk without an audience.
