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NEW YORK — When Jessica Schinazi took over as chief executive of Away in 2025, the luggage company was entering a new phase of its life. The direct to consumer brand that built its name on minimalist design, founder led storytelling and the romance of movement was now operating in a market that had accelerated beyond the simplicity of one website and one retail model.
Travel is no longer rebounding, it is baseline. According to American Express Travel’s 2025 Global Travel Trends Report, 74% of global respondents plan to take one to three domestic trips this year, while 59% plan to take one to three international trips, evidence that demand remains strong alongside more intentional, multi-trip planning.
Consumers are more analytical and less linear in how they buy. Away’s next step is building repeatable go-to-market coverage across the decision journey, not relying on a single breakout launch.
Speaking from New York, she is direct. It reflects the day-to-day work of keeping the brand coherent in a fragmented market.
Suitcase decisions sit at the intersection of function and self-image: the realities of how people travel and the identity they want to project in transit.
The category stretches from business grade workhorses to design led minimalism, from legacy houses to the late night, last minute grab from a certain Japanese mega store.
Most of us fall somewhere between intention and aspiration. Designing luggage for that spectrum is not simply an exercise in aesthetics. It is a question of how people want to move through the world.
Away’s founders established an emotional brand position, modern, confident, and unfussy. Schinazi is responsible for protecting that centre of gravity while broadening the brand’s relevance.
Under co-founder Jen Rubio, Away built a distinctive identity: a lifestyle brand with a strong point of view on travel, community and the emotional charge of going somewhere. Rubio remains involved as Executive Chair, and her instinct for culture and product still shapes Away’s direction.
“Our founder, Jen Rubio, is an iconic visionary,” Schinazi says. “I am so impressed by her immediate understanding of what is pulsing in culture and what will make an amazing product that truly resonates with customers.”
The two speak often. “We both look in the same direction,” she says. The company now positions this partnership as a continuity mechanism. Rubio anchors the cultural and product instinct. Schinazi, who has spent her career inside complex global systems, anchors execution.
Born in Brazil and now a Brazil born French US citizen, Schinazi studied Economics and Hispanic Studies at Columbia University before building a career across Richemont, Amazon, LVMH and Dyson. These experiences shaped her management style.
“At Amazon, it is that immense customer obsession,” she says. “It is the leadership principles and the focus that is so intentional in everything you do.”
“At Dyson, the principle is to solve problems others ignore, and to do it first. At Away, very similarly, we solve travel problems. We do it in a way that is not over engineered. It is everything you need and nothing you do not.”
Luxury added a longer horizon. “Luxury brands understand timelessness, craftsmanship and how to build something that lasts for generations. That long term view is something we are focused on building at Away now.”
Schinazi distils the modern CEO role into two responsibilities.
“Running a strong business while also fostering the team and company culture. You cannot have one without the other,” she says. “The numbers only tell part of the story. The energy, the trust, the shared purpose inside the company are what sustain growth over time.”
Her job, as she frames it, is to create clarity. “Clarity of purpose, priorities and culture. The world moves fast, and people need to feel grounded in why we exist and where we are headed.”
If her team were to sum up her leadership in one sentence, she hopes they would say she brings “focus, optimism and belief in what is possible, even when things get hard”.
Away is competing in a market where the definition of luxury is shifting. In 2025, the global luxury travel market is estimated at about 1.77 trillion dollars, with growth driven by personalised, tech driven and sustainable experiences rather than purely ostentatious spend, according to a recent industry report. At the same time, analysts note that “quiet luxury” and more discreet forms of status continue to gain momentum, with customers prioritising craftsmanship, subtlety and experience over loud logos.
Schinazi sees the next decade less as an age of extravagance and more as an age of ease.“True luxury in travel is not about extravagance. It is about ease,” she says. “Functionality that feels elevated. Materials that improve with time. Service that anticipates your needs before you even ask.”
She sees the future of luxury as detail-led rather than logo-led. In her view, personalisation will define the next era. Away already offers monogramming on core products and will soon add in-store handle and wheel customisation.
“It turns a functional detail into a look that is unmistakably theirs,” she says.
She also believes the human touch will matter more, not less. “In the era of AI, human connection will remain essential. Human experiences, augmented by technology, will continue to delight travellers.”
The global luggage market is forecast to grow from around 23 billion dollars in 2024 to more than 40 billion by 2032 The United States was estimated at 9.7 billion dollars in 2022 (source: finance.yahoo.com). Online channels continue to expand. Amazon generated 14.2 billion dollars in sales during Prime Day 2024, with luggage and travel gear making up a notable share (source: edesk.com). Away entered this world as a DTC brand with its own strong gravity. But as consumer journeys decentralised, the company began taking a more expansive view.
“We are, in many ways, an iconic DTC company,” she says. “But after ten years of talking directly to customers and understanding how to serve them, it now feels right to enter wholesale.”
The move into Amazon was driven by customer behaviour. “There had been hundreds of thousands of searches for Away terms on Amazon before we were present there,” she says. “When the customer is already there, searching for the brand, we want to have something for them.”
Nordstrom, meanwhile, serves markets where Away does not operate stores. The company is now in around 60 Nordstrom locations. “We view Nordstrom as an elevated premium experience,” she says. “It allows customers to test luggage, see size differences and explore options.”
Away presents its strategy as a controlled broadening. The company is betting that tailoring assortments to each channel will maintain brand integrity while increasing access. “It is not about serving everything to everyone in every channel,” she says. “It is about understanding the value differentiation between our own site, Nordstrom, Amazon and others.”
In her view, retail channels have fragmented beyond the traditional online or store distinction.
“It is not so much about bringing customers only to your website,” she says. “It is about decentralising the commerce experience into many more channels than ever before.” SMS, social shopping, AI enabled shopping and native checkouts sit alongside wholesale, marketplaces and concessions. Internally, this changes how companies organise.
“We used to have wholesale teams and retail teams,” she says. “Now what do you have. SMS teams. Social teams. You need to think very differently about organisation design.”
Away is building technology and AI as the connective tissue across this ecosystem.
“Our AI strategy at Away has three main pillars,” she says. Governance and privacy first. An AI council second. Training third.
“I fundamentally believe that the biggest power of AI for us will be in enabling the workplace and our workflows.”
Every employee in Away’s corporate offices has been trained on AI tools. “I do not want anyone to feel left on the sidelines,” she says. The goal is not to build headline features, but to increase operational capacity.
Away is experimenting with AI enabled shopping, including native checkouts, but positions AI as internal scaffolding.
“Retail can be a brand superpower when executed correctly,” Schinazi says.
Away’s stores host events, act as testing grounds and facilitate long form customer conversations. A recent launch included a store takeover with Ax Coffee and a retail exclusive colour for the Aluminium Edge range.
In Dallas, a customer returned two weeks after a purchase simply to talk about a trip to South Africa.
“She was telling us how her journey was linked to her Away luggage, how the Red Tango Trunk let her bring back souvenirs, how easy it was in the airport,” Schinazi says. “Those moments are very special.”
Away is betting that retail’s human texture will become more important as digital touchpoints multiply.
“Warranty is part of the customer promise we make,” she says. “I think our warranty is best in class.”
Testing remains rigorous. “We have done a no go on some products right before launch because we were not satisfied with the testing,” she says. “We will keep going until we feel very good about the product we are bringing to market.”
She sees travel as a form of self care. “You do not want to think about your suitcase when you travel,” she says. “If something happens, we will try to repair it. If we need to replace it, we will replace it.”
Running a global brand rarely stops at six in the evening. Her reset is straightforward.
“I make a point of leaving the office to have dinner with my family,” she says. “I get to hear about my kids’ days. It is a reset for me, but also a reminder to tackle work with perspective.”
Her travel uniform is practical and familiar. Her original 2016 Bigger Carry On remains in rotation. “It is still going strong,” she says. She pairs it with the Featherlight Cargo Backpack, which she uses for both travel and commuting. Inside are adapters, cords and a book she may or may not read.
On long haul flights she travels in leggings or sweatpants, an Everlane cashmere sweater and Veja sneakers. Her in-flight essentials include Caudalie Beauty Elixir, Violette Boum Boum Milk and a pocket Mason Pearson brush. For reasons she cannot quite explain, an old French arrowword puzzle book always comes along.
Places matter to her. Seattle’s Discovery Park. Chicago’s lakefront bike paths. Parisian cafés where she can sit with a strong espresso and watch the world move. In New York, inspiration comes late at night on skyline lit walks. Near Away’s office in Soho, she gravitates to Sant Ambroeus.
Asked what has remained constant through a career that runs from vacuum cleaners to lipsticks to suitcases, Schinazi keeps coming back to the same point.
“Regardless of the category, there has always been that intent around customer obsession,” she says. “That is what I want to focus on and what I see at Away.”
The company now frames its next chapter around a balance of continuity and change. Keep the heart of the brand intact. Make the business accessible in more places. Build systems that match the complexity of modern retail. Use technology to improve the organisation, not overwhelm it. Keep the product reliable. Preserve the human texture of travel.
What happens next depends on whether Away can hold both sides of that equation. The brand that once represented a new way of moving through the world is learning how to operate in a landscape where customers shift between channels without thinking and where competition is broader and faster.
“We are still in an early phase,” she says. “There are many learnings ahead. What we do know is that we are here to play, here to learn and we are doing it.”
For travellers standing in front of that same wall of luggage, reconciling who they are with who they hope to be as they wheel a case through an airport, the test will be simple: Does Away still feel like the brand that understands both sides of that decision.
If it does, and if the infrastructure Schinazi is building holds, the company’s second decade may end up being less about disruption and more about something harder to pull off: staying relevant as the way we travel, and the way we shop for travel, changes around it.
Schinazi’s tenure suggests that the CEO’s most enduring work happens after the disruption phase ends, when the task becomes translating cultural insight into systems that scale without hollowing out meaning.
Away’s early success came from emotional resonance; its next phase depends on operational and technological scaffolding. Schinazi’s leadership recognises that emotional equity decays without systems to support it.
Schinazi expands into wholesale, marketplaces, AI-enabled commerce, and retail while insisting on a coherent brand centre. This is a strategic distinction: distribution can fragment; identity cannot.
Her emphasis on AI as internal enablement, governance over spectacle, and training over exclusion reflects a leadership choice: capability-building rather than command-and-control.
