Away’s former CEO is returning as its co-chief

Looks like it’s more of a PR duck your head for a while until things cool down vs. external pressure and internal acceptance of bad behavior that led to them stepping down.

There's nothing about this that indicates the board asserted itself at all. The plan to step down was presented to the board by the CEO who wanted to move to become Chairwoman of the board.

they do almost zero advertising and their stores only exists in the New York, SF, LA, and Boston metro areas, plus one shop in Portland. The majority of Americans have never heard of Muji.

Curious, how are the wheels on the Muji luggage? The wheels on the Away cases are the best of any luggage I've owned.

> The one attractive thing about the away cases is the lifetime warranty

lifetime warranty is worthless if the company goes out of business, too

>I can’t figure out why people would choose them over muji.

Most Americans don't know what the hell Muji is. They only exist in a few coastal cities.

I mean I love my Muji stationery and pens (0.7), and I always describe it as Japanese Ikea to people, and they get it. But they don't advertise.

Looks interesting but super expensive

I couldn't find any information on the unloaded weight of this thing - do you know what it is?

I've looked at lots of options for carry-on luggage, and most are heavy enough to significantly eat into the 7kg or 8kg allowed. Honestly, I can't imagine moving away from the simple backpack I used; it's light, and I can carry 8kg easily for any distance (covering laptop, Mac Air, and misc other items). By carrying everything, I can go anywhere I can walk, and don't have to worry about pushing / pulling some box on wheels around.

These kind of mega-expensive luggage 'solutions' mostly seem to be for people who like showing they can afford such things.

>the large back-wheel and push mechanism felt super innovative and provide a very tangible improvement to quality of life for steering the case around in streets compared to existing designs

I knew I'd seen it before - it's basically a laundry cart. Obviously different build quality but the innovative 60 degree handle and large back wheels? Laundry cart.

> "Social media" make it seems like some separate entity, it's still public sentiment.

If your target market is American teenage boys and some Qatari old men really, really hate you their feelings are public sentiment too but you shouldn’t care in the slightest. Likewise what journalists think should be irrelevant compared to what customers think.

> it's still public sentiment.

I think the point is that it isn't a 'public sentiment'. Public sentiment would imply some sort of representative sample. Twitter people engaging in Twitter mob behaviour is not representative. It's like calling the Campus students freakouts when some conservative speaker visit, as 'public sentiment'.

>You have also bought into the framing the company has used to make itself seem like the victim by referring to "mobs" having power,

That's exactly what it was. It wasn't a balanced view on this CEO or company culture. It wasn't even that bad. I remember reading the Verge article, and thinking "Meh". There was one circumstance when the team was asked to work New Years Day in return for getting a month off. Everyone would make that choice. But OK, Korey clear set high expectations and created a culture where working a high number of hours was encouraged - is that bad? "Meh". It's an interesting case study but a investigative report from the The Verge is overkill.

And this is another aspect to this story, this mob behaviour was triggered by 'The Verge', itself a billion-dollar conglomerate owned in part by NBCUniversal, another global media conglomorate. 'Public Sentiment' indeed.

It's often not "public sentiment", it's often a handful of nobodies on Twitter that the media deliberately seeks out to push a narrative. The worst part is that the narrative-pushing often isn't insidious, they just want page views.

>existing power structures

Like who?

Twitter is mob rule. Regardless of whether or not Twitter disrupts the Illuminati, it's not a great alternative.

For being supposedly fake, there's a lot of real people burning up an awful lot of their real time agitating on Twitter.

Russia, FB and POTUS?

You're right on that. I'm more reacting to this story where the complaining is not try to change things, but an attempted take down of the company. I disagree with the anger and sense of having been wronged that's portrayed in the original article. You're not a victim if you can leave, that's totally ok to do. I would definitely agree a company is a long series of people affecting changes that hopefully make the whole better.

I think I disagree with that. The labor pool isn't unlimited and there's laws in place to protect workers. Reading this article as someone that's worked in banking it seems unfair to treat this company a different way that all others. We all still go to banks despite the horrible ways they treat their workers.

Ruling by mob means the treatment is unfair across companies. I think people should argue for laws that are broadly applicable when the market fail. And in this case I think the market (even like glassdoor, reviews, etc) would tank the company's ability to hire it it was not a place people wanted to work.

oh I don't know. lots of people on flyertalk stating they cannot support a company with such toxic management.

these people are influencers

Very well put. Governments are in a race to inflate their currencies, and the dollar being the global reserve makes it uniquely positioned to decrease the wealth of the entire world every time another dollar is printed. My only recommendation is to buy assets, but who knows which assets are in a bubble! Maybe it’s all of them.

I do agree that valuations are inflated.

Also, I think that the total addressable market for luggage vs. a Black Hawk are very different.

Not sure how the valuation of a company that makes helicopters and sells them to governments is related to a company that makes luggage?

It's very easy to get a valuation, as this evergreen piece from Basecamp always elegantly shows [0]

[0] https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1941-press-release-37signals-...

But not every company can easily bootstrap. And of those that can, much of the time it's a lot faster if you take some money upfront.

Nothing wrong with either approach imo, but the ridiculous valuations are a separate and, yes, exhausting problem. I'm not sure why people even seek insane valuations - maybe VC push them into it or something? I don't know.

Hmm, the list is a little strange, as it includes a few entrants that are shadows of their former selves. I can speak to one that I'm personally familiar with: A Small Orange is a hosting company that sold to a conglomerate and the entire staff was cycled out after the sale. Now it's merely a shell corporation with a website with some branding, the same as every other Endurance International Group brand. The infrastructure and whatnot is all EIG, and the staff is intermingled with the staff from dozens of other small-name web hosts, and not to mention that that whole industry has been bleeding money since the advent of AWS. I guess it was started as a small business, but it's not one that prevailed. The owner made some money when he sold it -- in 2010 or 2011. Now? It's barely a company at all.

37signals is a broken clock that is right twice a day. It's blog is very effective content marketing for it's SMB basecamp product.

One of my favorite examples: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2585-facebook-is-not-worth-33...

I think the real answer is the VC model works well for some cases, and bootstrapping is OK too! Both have their downside! Many VCs will tell you this directly. No need to get religious about it.

I feel like it's a bad form to infer a markup based on the price of a lower quality dupe.

Like would you compare a Canada Goose jacket with it's dupe at Hollister and say they're "comparable"?

https://www.canadagoose.com/ca/en/victoria-parka-3037L.html?...

https://www.hollisterco.com/shop/us/p/cozy-lined-thermore-pa...

What do you think about people who leave reviews on websites like yelp, tripadvisor, capterra, etc?

Do you think they're also review writing addicts who shouldn't be taken seriously or do you think one should take what they write seriously while making a purchase decision?

PS - Not trying to compare deciding who to keep CEO vs. making a purchase. Genuinely want your opinion.

Edit: well, this is gathering downvotes. I really wonder what people are disagreeing with. Just like Twitter rage culture, you've condemned me/this message as "what a fucking idiot", sadly not even explaining your reasoning.

Original comment:

Reading the article it does seem she's remorseful about her behavior.

> Ms. Korey, at one point nearly breaking down in tears, said that the month since the article was published had been a tough lesson about management — and herself.

Hopefully she does learn from this and can change her behavior.

But the Twittersphere is fucking bullshit, any small deviation from their standards of perfection and you're the scum of the earth (e.g. Chris Rock's tweets from years ago) that has to be banished from society.

Then again, it seems they're selling luggage for the Instagram generation, where the USP is the lifestyle (it's fucking luggage, how sexy can you make it?). In that market the court of online public opinion sadly does matter.

I had never heard of Away until I saw the Twitter thread. I assume that this is because it is a niche "luxury" brand that appeals mainly to a relatively small set of well-off younger buyers, which it targets via Internet channels like Twitter and other websites (such as the news organizations who wrote extensively about Away's woes.) Unfortunately for the Away company, the recent bad PR is also disproportionately going to transmitted to its potential customers via those same channels.

TL;DR maybe if this was ExxonMobil, some controversy on Twitter would be easy to shrug off. When you're a small Internet-focused company that's trying to sell a niche audience on your aspirational products, being savaged on Twitter and half the trendy Internet seems like terribly bad news.

>Just try and read the CEO's Slack screed about "teaching accountability" without sounding like a DreamWorks villain...

I did. Let's not overstate it.

>The Away management team comes across as manipulative and maximally exploitative at the expense of their employees' well-beings, topped off with a CEO intent on forcing her abysmal work-life balance and sleep schedule on the rest of her staff.

This comes across the same way the Verge article does. Namely, it feels like you're just looking for things to be offended by. The specifics are minor and trivial and interesting enough as a case study but certainly not interesting enough as a national story about some great wrong-doing.

Here's a random excerpt:

"Employees say she swore during interviews, cackled at people’s jokes, and took new hires to lunch, telling stories about her own mistakes. Once, during an interview, a woman remarked that she was drawn to Away because she was a millennial and it was a millennial-friendly product. “I’m a millennial, too,” Korey said. Later, that same employee was told by her manager that Korey had referred to the team as a bunch of “millennial twats.”"

I'm not sure what relevance 'cackling' at jokes is (though it evokes sexist tropes) but outside of that, COME ON. That's just pilling on hoping something sticks because it's all a big pile of nothing.

There is also an anecdote about Korey shutting down a private slack channel because of toxic and racist messages and reprimanded the employees in question. The story backs this up by referencing messages that called out 'cis white men', but the article then spins it as: "“It just became really obvious that this happened because someone white and powerful got offended,” says the customer experience manager, Lindsey." ... yeah. I think I'm with Korey on this. She made the right move.

Is there a non-paywalled version of [1] ?