Away barely advertised its suitcases — it advertised where they'd been

the problem

A new luggage brand entering a mature market had no functional advantage dramatic enough to win on specs alone

background

what everyone would do

Compete on functional product improvements, better materials, more durable construction, additional features, and market the brand primarily through comparative claims about build quality and warranty terms against established luggage competitors.

what they saw

Nobody remembers their suitcase — they remember the trip. Away stopped advertising the object and started advertising the destination, letting customers' own travel photos become the entire marketing feed.

the move

Of Away's Instagram content, the large majority, roughly 600 of 676 posts in one documented analysis, were user-generated photos submitted by customers showing Away luggage incidentally present in exotic or aspirational travel destinations, with the destination and experience as the visual focus rather than the suitcase itself, an approach that reached an estimated 15 million people organically. This let Away's marketing communicate an emotional association, travel, adventure, the excitement of a trip, rather than making a functional claim about the product a skeptical customer would need to independently verify, while simultaneously generating a continuous stream of authentic content at a fraction of the cost of a traditional produced advertising campaign. The company also published a print travel magazine, Here, further reinforcing the brand's self-positioning as a travel lifestyle company that happened to sell suitcases rather than a suitcase company doing travel-themed marketing. The strategy proved commercially decisive: Away scaled to a reported $1.4 billion valuation, with its founders and independent analysts crediting the storytelling-first, user-generated content approach as the primary driver of the brand's rapid growth in a category most customers had previously found unexciting.

why it works

Repositioning around travel experience rather than product function sidestepped a direct comparison against established luggage brands' durability and warranty claims, competing instead on an emotional association no functional feature could easily replicate. User-generated travel photography carried inherent authenticity a produced advertising campaign couldn't match, since viewers could recognize the content as genuine customer experience rather than a brand's own marketing claim, which is part of why the organic reach scaled so far beyond what the same budget spent on traditional advertising would likely have achieved.

the payoff

Founded in 2015, Away's user-generated Instagram strategy reached 15 million people organically, helping it reach a $1.4B valuation.

where it breaks

This positioning depends on having a genuine base of customers actively traveling and willing to generate authentic content; a product without an inherently aspirational use context has less natural material to build the same strategy around. It also risks under-communicating genuine functional differences that matter to customers who do care about durability and practical features, and the emotional positioning provides less defense if a competitor later demonstrates a real, verifiable quality or durability advantage the lifestyle marketing hadn't addressed.

what came after

Became a widely cited case study in direct-to-consumer marketing for how a commodity product category can be repositioned around an aspirational lifestyle association rather than functional differentiation, and for using genuine user-generated content rather than staged branded photography to build organic reach.

references

1. [1]Next Billion-Dollar Startups: How Two Young Entrepreneurs Used Relentless Online Marketing To Build Away Into A $700M Luggage BrandForbes, 2018forbes.com
2. [2]Inside Away's Instagram strategyDigiday, 2018digiday.com

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