Luggage Industry Disruptor Away Plans to Triple Revenues Next Year
Luggage company Away has high hopes for next year, expecting sales to triple in 2018.
One thing driving that growth could be the new product line CEO Stephanie Korey told Cheddar is in the pipeline, though she didn’t specify exactly what’s to come. The founder also credits the company’s business-to-consumer model with propelling growth, as well as its ability to manage inventory, something that is often a hurdle for start-ups.
“I’m probably one of the few CEOs out there whose entire background before becoming a CEO was in supply chain,” Korey told Cheddar. “We have created a very responsive, fast supply chain.”
Founded in 2015, Away has already sold more than 250,000 suitcases and grown from 4 to 100 employees. The company has raised $31 million dollars in funding, and Korey says she’s not looking to raise more capital in the near future.
Away’s decked out luggage features laundry bags, interior compartments, and a built-in USB charger. The tech features are something that have come into focus recently, after major airlines banned the use of smart luggage with non-removable lithium-ion batteries.
The new rules don’t affect Away, though, because its batteries are removable.
“We anticipated the potential for regulations to change around batteries,” Korey said. “From the start we built the battery removable, so there’s no impact to us with the new regulations.”
The policies from Delta, Alaska, and American Airlines go into effect on January 15, 2018.
For full interview [click here] (https://cheddar.com/videos/aways-big-year-and-plans-for-expansion).
An independent watchdog within the IRS reports that while taxpayer services have vastly improved, the agency is still too slow to resolve identity theft cases. And National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins says those delays are “unconscionable.” Erin M. Collins said in the report released Wednesday that overall the 2024 filing season went smoothly, though IRS delays in resolving identity theft victim assistance cases are worsening. It took nearly 19 months to resolve self-reported identity theft cases as of January, and Wednesday's report states that now it takes 22 months to resolve these cases.
Amazon.com Inc. surpassed $2 trillion in market value for the first time in afternoon trading on Wednesday. The push higher for Amazon’s stock market valuation comes a little more than a week after Nvidia hit $3 trillion and briefly became the most valuable company on Wall Street. Nvidia’s chips are used to power many AI application and its valuation has soared as a result. Amazon has also been making big investments in AI as global interest has grown in the technology. Most of the company’s focus has been on business-focused products.
Climate change doesn’t just mean more extreme weather – it also leads to billions of dollars in lost productivity, tourism, and stresses infrastructure.
It’s an annual tradition: the Fed’s banking ‘stress test.’ A year after the regional banking crisis, there are good reasons to make sure they’re prepped.
Summer is upon us, which means weddings, trips overseas, and trips to see Taylor Swift. Avoid a “Cruel Summer” with these budget-friendly tips and tricks.
While Nvidia's meteoric rise led it to briefly dethrone Microsoft as the world's biggest public company, there's a lot more going on in this market than A.I.
