YouSaid · the spoken record

Jen Rubio

lines on the record: 89
first: 2019-03-18
most recent: 2019-03-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think It's probably 50 50. I mean, I think for me personally, luck and timing had so much to do with everything I've done at every single step, just in terms of like the way we time things or the people that we met or even just the fact that it was really lucky that I called Steph when I did and that we didn't take the jobs that we were supposed to. But I think we worked our tails off, especially in that first year just obsessing over everything. I mean, I don't know. I think it's like every time I saw something that excited me, I would find a way to do it. Like I never thought, oh, I need to get a degree to do that or I need to have certain work experience to do that. I would just find a way to do it. And I think I'm just a very curious person. That's something I learned from my dad, actually. And I just followed all of my curiosities.”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sorry. I was kidding. I was like, am I 32? I mean, so I think for us It's funny because the future away really goes back to what we were saying. And I think we talked about it a lot, but we didn't really know what it meant. We knew we were going to be a travel brand and we were going to start by selling luggage. But we became so obsessed with just every part of the travel experience. So I think, you know, in the short term, like our goal right now is the way you would go to Nike if you're playing sports and you kind of get everything from like one sportswear brand and they make all the different things like we want to do that with travel like when someone's going on a trip we want to make everything they need to go on that trip seamlessly but I think in the long term like what we've done or what we're trying to do is really set this foundation for how do we create a brand that people love and trust enough so that we can solve every single part of the travel experience.”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, you are at the time of this recording, you're only 32, you've got, oh my God, your entire career ahead of you. Where do you see this company going? I mean, what do you imagine a way becoming beyond a company that sells suitcases?”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And to us, that was so daunting. Like, how do you create a billion dollar company? And now the kinds of investors that we meet with or that we're getting to know for this next phase of the business will say things like, yeah, we really just evaluating to see if this can be like a $5 or $10 billion company, which is mind-blowing.”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I mean, I don't know. I think it's like I never set out to do this. I never set out to run a company with hundreds of people. And I think what's asked of you when you have a couple dozen employees and maybe like a couple million in revenue is so different than what is being asked for us now. So for us, like. While externally, it definitely has been successful and really exciting and something we're really proud of. We're just like, we're constantly behind the sky and trying to fix things or trying to keep up with things. Yeah. Those first investor meetings, they'll sit there and look at you to see if you have what it takes or if you have the idea that can turn into a $1 billion company.”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think that just things have been moving so quickly that I don't think we stop enough to think about what happened and what we've done. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that we're so different and basically like any strength that Steph has is like my weakness and vice versa. So that meant like from the beginning we had all bases covered So I feel like Even if this wasn't a runaway success, we would have done things like twice as quickly or twice as good as anyone else because we really like from the beginning operated as like one brain”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it's pretty amazing how quickly that's happened, but at the same time, you really, both you and staff came to this with. Lot of experience, an experience that really kind of set you up to succeed in this venture. Sort of took the time to kind of learn the ropes. In some ways, it's not surprising that it succeeded so quickly. I don't know. Does it surprise you?”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wow. I mean, it is pretty unbelievable. On the one hand, it is unbelievable, right? You start this company in 2015. Today, three and a half years later, you're doing... I don't know. The last I've seen is 50 million in revenue, probably higher today.”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I remember being like, oh, I know that person from college, like, they must have seen on Facebook or I used to work with that person. And it'd be like names of people we knew. And then maybe Names of people we didn't know, but then once in a while, like, you know, we were watching orders come in one day, and Laura Jean Witherspoon ordered a bag and step said it out loud. And I was like, that's Reese Witherspoon. That's her real name. She's like, that's so weird that you know that. But yeah, like she had heard about it from one of these articles or one of these influencers, and she ordered a book. So she actually has one of our original books and the bag.”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think what happened was we'd gifted to a couple celebrities, and I can't remember who, but you know, celebrities get their photo taken by paparazzi when they leave the airport. So the bag would start showing up like in all of these magazines as celebrities were leaving airports. So I think that did a lot for growing our customer base and also other celebrities seeing it. But I think what's been amazing is that like celebrities were so drawn to the brand that every celebrity collaboration we've ever done has been because that celeb has been a customer. And it was crazy. I don't know how it happened. When we first launched the book and we were looking at the orders come in, we would see the names of every single person who ordered.”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That anytime you would open Instagram and someone was like getting ready for a trip, they would be posting a photo with their waysuitcase.”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think what we saw pretty quickly is that our timing was perfect. Like we were in this time in social media where travel is a status symbol. Everyone wanted to post about not just their trips and like not just about the beach that they're on or like the mountain that they're skiing on, but how they got there and people are taking photos at airports or even when they were packing. Steph and I realized that like we had to be a part of this and we had to be the bag in all those photos that people were posting as they were packing or as they were at the airport. So we basically found, I mean, in the beginning, in the beginning was a lot of press and then it was a lot of basically anyone we knew on social media that had a lot of followers like asking them to post about the bag during that kind of like pre-trip process. And we made it so”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But yeah, so that was January. They put him on a boat and they made their way over and we sold our first physical suitcase in February of 2016.”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was a dream come true because we'd basically spent an entire year just imagining it and designing it and putting in the work. And I had never been a part of that process before of like coming up with and designing something from scratch and then seeing the end result. So there were a lot of tears. It was like a very emotional time. But we were like, I was like on the factory floor crying, like hugging the suitcase.”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so it's actually great because the holidays happened. We sold the books. Our minds were blown. And we were like, look at the appetite for... For this brand, like all the stuff we told VCs is real. And we actually weren't sure if it would be. Get the luggage over here. So right after Christmas, we flew to our factory and we actually spent days like in the factory on the production line doing like quality control, checking every suitcase. Like Steph and I were like we're standing there with all the factory workers. Like we inspected every bag off of the line. They got packaged in their boxes.”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On the first day. So Vogue wrote about it, a bunch of other outlets picked it up. Of the people in the book were like really excited about it. We had like a big dinner, everyone was posting about it. And then the next day, like hundreds more sold. And then more the next day. And by the end of a couple of weeks, we had sold out of all of the books and each book represented one suitcase that we ordered. So we had sold out of our first order.”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you so basically you had to buy the book for $225, which was the price of the first suitcase, and we sold hundreds on the first day.”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's like these thousands of books showed up. So November rolls around. We had lined up a bunch of press. We invested a ton of time in meeting with editors, like getting them to fall in love with us and the idea and the product that would eventually launch. And on November 9th, 2015, we woke up and there's a big feature on vogue.com, all about this new travel brand. And that was our launch. And we had the book on the website. And we basically spent the whole day like refreshing Google Analytics, refreshing our little dashboard for the platform that we were selling on. And people just started buying the book.”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I guess like a different way of looking at it would be like you would, it was basically a preorder for the suitcase, but you would get the book. And the reason we did that was because we wanted people to be able to give people things for the holidays, like something tangible. So yeah, so if you went on the away website in November of 2015, you would buy the coffee table book and the book would come with a gift card for the suitcase, but you would have to go back on the website in February to redeem the gift card. And it was like the craziest, like least efficient idea on paper and even now as I'm telling you. But Steph was like, you know what? I think this could really work. And we made 2,000 of these books. And I remember like the books got delivered and they came these huge boxes. And I think Steph and I looked at each other and we were like, this is either a great idea or we're going to have these books in this office like fraternity.”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that was like the book was the thing that we were going to sell. So we had set up this whole website to sell luggage that wasn't going to be ready. So then we changed the website to sell the book.”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The other feedback was like, you know, we would show them a picture of the luggage, like a rendering of the luggage, and they'd be like, I don't get it. It's just luggage. Like what's different about it? We're like, well, here's all the great things about the product, but also, and then I would go on and on about this brand that we were building. And I would like ramble about the brand. And I was like, we make luggage, but we're a travel brand. It's really going to connect with people. And that's the whole idea for a way is that people didn't emotionally connect with Samsonite or Toomey or any of these other brands. And basically the VCs that we ended up going with were the ones who got that brand was this tangible thing that we could make uniquely ours and that's what would set us apart. So every time and even now, like every time we come up with like some crazy idea like this, they're like, okay, it must be for the brand. So no one questioned what we did.”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What are you guys doing? Well, it's actually funny because when we were trying to choose our investors, a lot of the feedback that we got were like, oh, you're creating the Werby Parker for luggage, great, we'll invest. And those are super easy conversations.”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And she would write the little blurbs, and then we realized that we would need photos in the book or it'd be really boring. So she would also ask them for their vacation photos. And we came up with this list of people that she would interview. And the whole plan was to write this book and to, you know, we had two, it was just us and two designers at the time. And we got them to agree to design the book. So we were like, we're going to make a coffee table book. And then inside the coffee table book, we're going to put a gift card that people can redeem for the luggage.”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, so basically I was like, we're sitting in this week. We're like, okay, we have to show people that we're an exciting new travel brand and that they're going to love us. So the book was, we were going to find 40 tastemakers, like not celebrities, but people who had really strong communities, like people who we wanted to vouch for us, essentially. And my friend who was like a freelancer for T magazine and Vogue and Into the Gloss, she was going to interview these people about like their favorite place to travel to.”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm just like, I was just like this freak with all these crazy ideas and stuff would be like, okay, okay, we can make this work. Like we were just total enablers.”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which I think is just like the most boring thing you can do when you're launching a brand. Like, no one wants to put their credit card down for something that they may or may not get. So we came up with this idea. And the idea was that we would come up with something before Christmas that people would want to buy that would show them that we were like this amazing new travel brand that they'd never heard of.”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were sending them like 3D renderings And we're mostly just like selling them on this idea that before us, amazing affordable luggage did not exist. And beyond that, that there was like this whole brand that was obsessed with travel the way that they were and that we were creating it. So people were just excited about that. And when we found out the bags weren't going to be ready, we were like, okay, what are we going to launch? Like, we can't launch suitcases. So basically our options were like, don't launch or push it back, which wasn't on the table for us for whatever reason. Or we could launch with a pre-order.”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's so weird that this whole world did not adhere to our timeline. And it was as if someone had said we had to stop doing the company, even though it was a self-imposed deadline. At this point, we actually started, like, we didn't even have a suitcase yet, and we'd already started. Editors and to like potential PR agencies about what we were doing, and we had gotten some really good feedback.”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we didn't know that at the time. We were like, I got months. But yeah, our whole thing was launch before Christmas, get a lot of press, sell a lot of suitcases We found out when we placed our order in August that because of the way we designed the bags and we use like all these like top-of-the-line components and we had looked at like every single supplier and wanted all the best things from all the suppliers, that there was no way that our bag would be ready before Christmas. Which I don't know why it was so surprising to us. We were like, what do you mean? Like, we have this timeline and the spreadsheet, and it says the spreadsheet that we made up.”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the plan was to launch before Christmas, and we had known from previous experience that this was like a very lucrative time to launch something. All the media does gift guides. There's also like a lot of demand for human interest stories and things like that. So we had all these angles that we wanted to hit. But basically the plan was to launch the suitcases and get a lot of press because we knew from Warby Parker that the press was a big part of driving sales.”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where, like, this would be like a great way to launch, like, get a ton of press. So we had this like self imposed deadline looming above our heads, but like once we wrote the timeline down, we stuck to it. And that meant being super methodical in everything we were doing, whether it was designing the product or fundraising or just like literally anything that we were doing. But yeah, so we raised the seed round in the summer and we talked to a lot of investors and Yuri Kim at Forerunner ended up co-leading our seed round and she actually brought in the other co-lead, which was Brian O'Malley from Excel at the time.”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think I think part of it was that deadline to launch in 2015 came from nobody but us. We really wanted to do it. I don't even know where that timeline came from.”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I met with Yuri and I kind of like Was basically just like a meeting of me being excited about what we were doing. In my head, it wasn't like me pitching her. But because of that, like because of that early meeting and because of her wanting to stay in touch and being excited about the idea and seeing how excited we were about the idea, like we stayed in touch, which meant that when we actually went out to raise our seat around in the summer, we already had like a like a foot in the door with one of the firms that we wanted to partner with. And we pitched a lot of VCs. It was like a crazy process. We were like super diligent. We had this crazy spreadsheet of every single venture capital firm who'd ever invested in a director-to-consumer brand, who the partner was at each firm that did it. If we had any mutual connections on LinkedIn, like how we would get to them, we had this crazy master plan for fundraising.”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so in March of 2015, like when this was barely an idea, like we still didn't have a ton of direction what we were doing, a friend of mine in San Francisco introduced me to Yuri Kim, who's a partner at Forerunner. And Forerunner is the VC firm that invested in Warvie Parker and Everlane and Dollar Shave Club and Jet.com. And they just had like this amazing portfolio and these amazing wins. And we had heard about them obviously when we worked at Werby but didn't really interact with them. And my friend was like, I'll introduce you to one of the partners. And me, like, I just had like the audacity to schedule a meeting with her, even though we literally had nothing. At this point, we still thought a way was a placeholder name. It was just like an idea to create this thing and we were basically just like in the throes of doing research. But I was in San Francisco and I”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so basically, you know, Steph and I had this list, and then I knew what I wanted it to look like. And, you know, we were basically up like 20 hours a day because our industrial designers were in San Francisco. We had factories that we were talking to in China. Basically, the second one of them wrote us an email. Like we would make sure to write back or pass it on so there would be no delays. Because also in all of this And I to this day don't know where it came from, but this was like January. This was like February of 2015 and we had it in our heads that we wanted to launch by Christmas. So in less than a year, we wanted to have like product out into the world. And luckily, like, we really didn't have anything else to do. So we just immerse ourselves fully in this. And we're just obsessed with every single detail.”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People and we would just talk to them about travel and we would ask them things like not even about luggage but about their biggest pain points when they travel and we discovered things like people would get to hotel rooms and they would like steal laundry bags from the hotels because like they didn't have their own or that you know everybody like wanted a bag that they could fit a ton of stuff in but also have it be flexible but also really durable and like really lightweight and then something we heard a ton was my biggest pain point like one of my biggest pain points when i travel is like my phone always dies when i'm at the airport so we were basically armed with with not a list of features but but stories that kept coming up and that's how we figured out all of the things we needed to make like our one perfect suitcase”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Good at what they do and like varying degrees of working conditions and the end product and all of that that we couldn't really make a decision until we had decided what to make. And I think the first few weeks were just like really intense, like our intense version of like market research, which basically meant we went shopping. Like every single day, we went to every department store. We went to every luggage store and like compared all of the experiences and all the prices and kept very meticulous notes on what was out there mainly because we couldn't afford to like pay for the industry reports. So we're like, well, just figure this out ourselves. So we start shopping for luggage and we're like getting a better sense of like what was being offered. It still wasn't super clear to us. So we decided that to really create the perfect luggage, we need to actually figure out what people wanted. So over the course of a few months, we talked to like maybe 800 people.”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so at Warby Parker, you know, Steph basically learned how to make things. And obviously the industries are different, but she had a bunch of contacts in China, who she asked for intros to like in the luggage space. We cast this wide net. We realized that there are lots of different factories, like a varying degrees of”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah, I didn't think about that. I was like I was like, I can sell anything I was like, we have to brand it. He's like, What are you branding? I'm like, the company, don't worry about it. But she kind of went with it. So that's where my head was at. And Steph was like, okay, well, we have to come up with a product to sell.”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so kind of like our first steps made sense to us because we are who we are. I had this branding background. She had the supply chain background. And I was like, okay, we need to get a branding agency. Like we need someone to do this. And it was still like, we didn't even have a product. We didn't even know how to make it. But I was like, I'm going to start working on the branding.”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then Steph and I actually spent a lot of time like brainstorming new names, but we just never came up with anything as good. And she found like some trademark lawyers and asked them if we could trademark it. And they basically laughed in our face. And she was like, she like insisted that they looked into it. And then a week later, they called us and they said, you have been given a gift from the marketing gods because this trademark is available in your category in a lot of different countries.”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I feel like everyone's always looking for some wild story about how I came up with it. But as I was doing my research, I was like trying to stay organized and I made like a folder on my computer. It was like TBD luggage brand. And one day I like open my computer And I just typed in away as a placeholder, like it just came to me. And I always had it in my head like there's no way we can use like a way as a brand name. It's like such a simple four-letter word. It's like extremely common.”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I really didn't want to take it because I had been so excited about this idea for a luggage brand that I actually wrote stuff in email about how I never wanted to be an entrepreneur before, but was really passionate about this idea. And I thought that we were the two perfect people to do it. And it made a whole list of everything I wanted to co-founder and then explain how she embodied all of those things. Like I wanted someone who had like a complimentary skill set and like had other lucrative opportunities that they were turning down to do this, which was like a weird qualifier, but it was really important to me. And it wasn't until I wrote that email, like asking her to be my co-founder and asking her to do this with me, that that was a point I kind of realized I wanted to be an entrepreneur.”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I was still living in London and I was in pretty late stages to be VP of marketing at this fashion company. Steph was in business school and talking to a few startups about being like their VP of supply chain. And I was actually being flown into New York for like one of my final interviews. And I realized as I was doing the interview that I was like, I don't want to do this. I want to do the luggage thing. So I do the interview. I don't even remember how it went. But I got the job offer.”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we basically got off the phone and she realized all the same things that we saw with eyewear we were seeing with luggage, like crazy markups in the industry, like no brands that people really loved, like a really awful shopping experience. So she was coming at it from this whole like supply chain disruption angle. And she's, I guess she was sitting there in business school, like looking for her category and I basically called her with my little baby idea to start a luggage brand and she was like, this is it. Like this is what we have to do.”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, she left Worby Parker to go to business school at Columbia. And she'd just always been my sounding board. So I called her to catch up. And I was mostly complaining. I was like, this luggage brand doesn't exist. I have a bunch of ideas. I think I could make a cool one. But also how annoying I have to go interview for this other job. We're just catching up, and this was supposed to be a 10 minute call, and like three hours later, we were still on the phone. And basically, she was in business school and she had been looking to start something. And she was the one who was like what we did at Warby Parker, we can do with luggage.”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She ran supply chain there. So she was in charge of how the glasses were made, like the factories that we got them from, like how they got to the States to be shipped to customers, just like stuff that I actually technically went to school for, but really didn't know much about. But we kind of went through this crazy growth of where we parker together, and we stayed friends and we'd loosely kept in touch. We'd check in every few months. So just as this little baby idea of making luggage that my friends would love was brewing in my head, I reached out to Steph and like I sent her a Facebook message and I said, hey, there's something I've been thinking about would love to catch up with you. And she was in business school at the time.”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That I could start something. Like at this point, like I was interviewing for jobs and in my head, I was like, I can start a little luggage business on the side and like make it like some cool brand and maybe sell it at Liberty or on Netaporte or like these cool places that I like to shop. And that's when I caught up with Steph. When I was at Warby Parker, I met Steph Corey and we had started on the same day and we became fast friends and we were friends all throughout my time at Warby Parker.”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I was like, I wanted to go shopping. I wanted to buy the right thing so that this wouldn't happen again. And I was crowdsourcing for answers and I didn't get an answer. These are people who I have like amassed a network of friends over time whose taste I really trust whose advice I take. And no one had any advice for me. Everyone was like, good luck. So I started to think, why doesn't this luggage brand exist? Like how come buying luggage is so awful? Like, how come you have to go into the basement of a department store in New York? There's all these crazy luggage stores in Midtown that are massive and you go in and there's a $500 bag next to a $50 bag and they look exactly the same. Like the luggage salesman is like whispering in your ear like I can give you 30% off if you buy it right now. I was like, why is this so horrible? So that's when I maybe thought.”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I know. Me neither. So what I thought to myself was I have to find this brand. Like there has to be a great luggage brand out there. Like, I didn't think I'm going to start wine. I was just like”
2019-03-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Away: Jen Rubio · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT