Up, Up, Up and Away
The following is sourced from The Verge’s recent investigation of luxury luggage brand Away’s company culture, and is yet another Brand Beware parable that’s eye opening at the least.
In 2011 Steph Korey and Jen Rubio met while working at the trendy direct-to-consumer eyewear company Warby Parker.
There, Korey implemented the lessons she’d learned at Bloomingdale’s years before. “The things I learned there about retail markups, markdowns, wholesaling, licensing, and the department store supply chain all later became the very things we would avoid at Warby Parker,” she said in an interview in Fortune.
The pair established Away, a startup that sold luxury self branded luggage at a coach price” by cutting out the middleman and marketing directly to consumers. It was a model perfected by brands like Dollar Shave Club, Glossier, and Everlane: direct-to-consumer powerhouses that, through some alchemy of Facebook ads, freckled models, and bold sans serif fonts, had elevated themselves out of their business category to achieve tech company success.
Following this blueprint, Korey and Rubio positioned Away as a travel company, not a luggage brand. “We’re working to create the perfect version of everything people need to travel more seamlessly,” Rubio said in a 2018 interview. “Luggage is only the beginning.”
To make their brand even more aspirational, Away partnered with models and it-girls like Karlie Kloss, Julia Restoin Roitfeld, and Rashida Jones to promote the bags on social media. This was Rubio’s wheelhouse: she’d managed social strategy at Warby Parker and knew how to make Away hyper-relevant. Korey, for her part, didn’t have to work hard to project an aspirational lifestyle.
The CEO grew up in Ohio in a 55,000-square-foot historic mansion with an indoor swimming pool and three dining rooms. She’d gone to boarding school, then landed in Bloomingdale’s executive development program while at Brown University.
But for all of her privilege, no one denied the executive’s fanatical work ethic. Where Rubio’s job seemed to involve glamorous travel and speaking events, and many employees say they never interacted with her.
Korey was always in the office. She managed all of the company’s operations and was regularly online past 1AM. The CEO often vacillated between being funny and relatable to hyper-critical and even cruel. 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.
However, while the pair sold a vision of travel and inclusion, but former employees say it masked a toxic work environment. All was not well.
A recent investigation by The Verge magazine has uncovered supposed workplace bullying, ranting, shaming and helicopter management resulting bruised employee morale, according to leaked Slack logs and interviews The Verge conducted with 14 former workers.
In one scenario recounted by staff, when customer emails were piling up due to an inability to meet the demand, Korey began randomly calling the customer experience line to see whether someone picked up, often berating the managers and screaming, “What is this shit!” at her desk if her call went unanswered.
In another, when she demanded staff not take their Christmas holidays, and noticed two managers still had time off on the calendar, she was livid. “If you all choose to utilize your empowerment to leave our customers hanging...you will have convinced me that this group does not embody Away’s core values,” she said. (Again, emphasis Korey’s.)
The investigation does not bode well for the ‘dream brand’ yet it’s not an isolated incident in today’s workplace.
What stood out in the report was how, as The Verge reported, ‘Korey often framed her critiques in terms of Away’s core company values: thoughtful, customer-obsessed, iterative, empowered, accessible, in it together. Empowered employees didn’t schedule time off when things were busy, regardless of how much they’d been working. Customer-obsessed employees did whatever it took to make consumers happy, even if it came at the cost of their own well-being.’
Which makes one wonder, why bother with brand values when you can’t even value the people articulating them on your behalf?
It’s yet another Brand Beware moment, where brand leaders drink too much of their own KoolAid and completely forget that their behaviour, words, reputation and integrity is highly visible and subject to intense scrutiny.
Which is why you must endeavour to treat people, especially employees, with the utmost respect regardless of the business or brand pressure you may be under.
Note: According to CNN Business, Away confirmed on December 11 that co-founder Steph Korey would be stepping down from her role as CEO following a scathing report into the company's culture. https://edition.cnn.com/2019/12/09/tech/away-luggage-ceo-steph-korey/index.html.
Source: For the full investigation writeup from The Verge, please visit https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/5/20995453/away-luggage-ceo-steph-korey-toxic-work-environment-travel-inclusion
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