AWAY Travel Monogram Project, a case study.
A limited edition marketing project became an iconic monogram program lasting years, including its own department with multiple employees and thousands of hand painted suitcases. This right-place-right-time client relationship blossomed with the company’s success, simultaneously opening up an entirely new branch of my freelance career and empowering me to seriously pursue a passion for hand painted customization.
In 2015 the co-founder of AWAY Travel, Jen Rubio, reached out to me when multiple mutual friends had recommended we meet. At the time AWAY was a small startup with about 6 employees and Jen was searching for artists to collaborate on what was intended to be a limited edition project - hand painted custom monograms made to order by local artists with unique styles. At the time I had been painting friends’ motorcycles and helmets and random signs for fun while I built my career designing lettering primarily for ad agencies. I hadn’t considered that there might be an opportunity to apply my skills in hand painting to a “real” client - one with a “real” budget and “real” office.
When I first went into that real office on Mulberry Street in Little Italy, I met the two other artists who I would be featured alongside - Scott Biersack and Alaina Sullivan. We were kicking off the project by showing each other the monogram styles we had come up with, trading tips on working with the enamel paints, and also getting the first taste of how legit this suitcase brand was about to be - a photographer Nate Poekert was there to document the collaboration for an upcoming New York Times article. And once that article dropped, the work began. We would come into the office on alternating days to paint in our signature styles, trading off completing the monogram orders that flooded in at an unexpected rate. What was supposed to be maybe 30 monograms became 50, then 100 - from a one month project to two and then three. Other artists opted out for their own reasons but I was hooked on the repetitive work, the challenge of keeping up with demand, and of course those gasoline-scented paint fumes.
The energy of the office was contagious. I worked standing, back-to-back with other creatives like designer Sho Shibuya who created print materials and swag at a level of refinement that seemed rare for startups at the time. Photoshoots for new product happened in the meeting room, the Operations manager also did customer service, the founders joked about maybe being able to buy the apartment we were working out of one day (a hilariously humble dream for how things turned out). I was freelance, and came and left as I pleased - exactly as involved as I wanted to be.
Thousands of suitcases, all hand-painted
Collaborating with multiple teams within the company for special projects and gaining insight into celebrity gifting
AWAY struck a magic chord of having a great product, gathering some much-talked-about funding, and hitting a steady output of press all at the exact right time which sent the company on a swift upward trajectory. The popularity of my hand painted monograms swung with it, and I needed to hire some help. The FIT Job Board connected me to illustrator majors Mary Bova and Anna Niklova; and my dear friend Karen Dooley joined me mostly just to learn the technique, not knowing she would be totally roped into this whole thing and imminently hired full time. Karen managed our small team of artists and grew it into a wild group of full-time painters, industry freelancers, aspirational art students, and fulfillment dudes with impeccable music taste and crucially good senses of humor. At its peak, the AWAY Monogram Team employed over 20 artists and 5 fulfillment and repairs specialists. I designed the alphabets and trained the painters, who then trained other painters, and on and on.
Our monogram studio setup went from the cramped basement stockroom of the first AWAY store on Crosby, to a room at Industry City stocked floor-to-ceiling, to taking over the entire square footage of the second AWAY office (another luxury SoHo apartment!) on Greene Street, to a full floor of the massive AWAY corporate office on Broadway, and then back to Industry City again. At one point I was even given my very own “studio” in the entire basement at 93 Mercer Street, where I painted over 1,200 cases for a special project with YouTube over the course of a month.
As a roving freelancer I was able to collaborate with multiple teams within Away on projects such as VIP/influencer gifting, corporate gifting, special in-store monogramming events at AWAY and Nordstrom locations, in-office murals, product designs, and employee thank-you gifts.
Between 2015-2020 we painted thousands and thousands of suitcases together. The co-founders, especially Steph Korey, were constant advocates for hand painting even when their growth had a couple eager employees salivating at the chance to optimize! and try to offer worse quality for higher turnover - something our team refused. We consistently put out luxurious, hand painted little gems that customers adored - and that would last even the most egregious bag handler’s worst day. Maybe you’ve seen them out and about in the airports or on the train - I have! And I can still tell who painted which by the tiny differences in style - Anna’s slender downstrokes, Karen’s lefthanded flair, Kurt’s skilled C curves, Mary’s being the most opaque, and mine are notable for being the fattest with little stylistic twists at the ends of crossbars on E’s and F’s and T’s, etc.
I will randomly get emails from previous customers who want to talk or have questions about those special little monograms!
And in 2020, well, you can maybe guess what might have happened to a barely profitable creative team dedicated to hand painted art at a now-corporate startup in the travel industry during an unprecedented time when travel was halted.
I hear they have a robot that prints their monograms now! Which I’m sure is far more efficient and makes more sense for a brand of their size (but I think we can all agree is way, way less cool, right?).