Hi, this is Women Who Travel, a podcast from Condé Nas Traveler.

And while you're listening to this, I am actually in Colombia. And Meredith is in. Where are you, Meredith? I am a week and a half into a trip to New Zealand. And we can't quite figure out if we're speaking to you from the future or the past. But either way, we wanted to rerun one of our favorite episodes of women who travel, which is when we sat down

with Jen Rubio, one of the co-founders of Away Luggage, to talk about how she created this

absolutely fantastic brand that you see all over every airport, all over this.

We hope you enjoy the episode, and if you want to come listen to us live, you can find us on

March 11th in Austin. We will be

recording an episode with the incredible Liz Lambert at Holy Roller. You can find all of the

information in the Facebook group, and we hope to see you there.

Hi, this is Women Who Travel, a podcast from Condé Nas Traveler that digs deep into the realities of traveling as a woman today and celebrates while we'll never stay home.

I'm Lale Arikogu, and with me, as always, is my co-host, Meredith Carey.

Hello, everyone.

And joining us today is Jen Rubio, co-founder of away luggage, which I will very biasedly say is

a traveller favourite. Founded in 2015, the brand has become the face of, I would say,

millennial travel. There are celebrity collaborations, pop-up stores, hundreds of thousands of

suitcases have been sold, and $50 million were raised in the latest round of funding for the company. It goes without saying that Jen is one of the women shaping the travel landscape today and we are so thrilled to have her here. Hello Jen. Hi, it's so good to be here. You know, every time someone does one of those intros, it's like the only time I take a step back and think about it. I'm like, oh yeah, we did all of that.

We did this thing.

It's so crazy.

This was all me.

And so you co-founded a way with Steph Corey.

And I mean, I'd love to hear like a little bit of the origin story before we kind of get into everything else.

How did the idea come

to you to? Did you see like a gap in the market that made you like, were you frustrated with something and you were like, we want to fix this? Yeah, yeah, that's exactly it. I think a lot of people see what we've, we've been able to do with the help of our team and think, you know, they must have always wanted to be founders or like we must have had this passionate dream to be in the

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