Great Product, Horrible Culture. Sad (but unsurprising) how management has buried all of the accurate, negative reviews. - Anonymous employee Away Employee Review

1.0
11 Sept 2018
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

-The company's core product, the polycarbonate luggage, is truly great. It's definitely the best quality you can get for the price. -If you work on certain teams (PR/Comms/Brand/Experiential), I do think that Away is a great place to work. These teams get to travel a ton and spend a lot of money on things that have yet to be proven to be worth anything to the business.

Cons

-Everything you've read about the mean girl culture is true. Totally unsurprising given the demeanors/personalities of the founders and the fact that very few real adults work here. -Promotions and terminations are NOT AT ALL based on competence (and no, I was not fired). They are based on random personal preferences of VPs and Execs. History shows that if you are a very mean and/or pretty girl, you will probably succeed here. Management makes a lot of promotion/termination decisions based on personal vendettas/emotional whims. Also, there are a ton of politics at play. If you get in the way of the wrong exec that the founders love, you will be removed, regardless of how good you are at your job. -No one has any idea what they're doing. There are a ton of super inexperienced millennials with inflated titles since they just happened to "get in early" and management has no idea how to reshuffle after the absurd growth the company has seen. -The company will do anything for a headline, regardless of whether it is ethical or honest, hence the PR/Comms/Brand/Experiential jobs being better than most.

avatar
Away Response
7y
Hi- Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I believe open and honest feedback is how we all learn and grow, and am always grateful to hear it. I understand that all of the feedback here is your perception of what you’ve observed, and I’d love to take a minute to respond to a few of the points in a way that might give you, and anyone else reading this, additional context on the topics you raise: -Our Brand and PR teams have no interest in spending money on things that have yet to be proven to be worth anything to the business. They are professionals who take pride in driving business impact, just like all of our other departments, and to imply that they spend their time on things that don’t impact the business unfairly diminishes the great work they do. -You note that you believe that no “real adults” work here, but our ten person leadership team has, on average, 15 years of work experience. A lot of this experience took place at more established companies. I deeply value the experience and leadership they bring to Away. -Promotions and terminations are always based on work performance, and on our core values. Out of privacy and respect for our employees, individual performance records and details around terminations are not shared with others, so I can understand how some decisions might feel “random” to you, but we believe that it’s OK that not everyone will be the right ultimate fit for their role and the evolving needs of the business. -We’ve strived to create a workplace that encourages a growth mindset, where we acknowledge that people can always be learning to evolve their skills as the business grows, so it’s true that everyone on the team is consistently learning new skills. But to suggest that “no one knows what they’re doing” is both inaccurate and incredibly unfair to the many people who have been working hard to build one of the most successful direct-to-consumer businesses. -As a company, we have high standards of ethics and honesty, but if you’re aware of behavior that contradicts that, please raise it for our People Operations team so that we can investigate. Thanks for taking the time to leave this feedback. It’s a good reminder that we can be better at communicating the company’s philosophies and frameworks on these topics so that all of our employees have greater visibility to avoid misinterpreting some of our decisions due to a lack of context. Thanks again, and wishing you all the best. -Steph

Explore other reviews about Away

5.0
10 Feb 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Excellent team-spirited colleagues who would not hesitate to help one another whenever they can

Cons

None to think other than having room for growth.

3.0
13 Apr 2026
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Free luggage - Working with fun coworkers in store - Away generally has good values as a company

Cons

- They don't give annual raises for COL, the only way to get a raise is to move up. There are only so many keyholder or management positions available... - Depending on your position you are either going to be doing hard physical labor or spending hours a day doing nothing - The company doesn't seem to have a lot of revenue. I think they let a lot of upper management go, they're reducing the lifetime warranty on products to five years, and are seemingly looking for ways to cut costs all around - Rules seem to be applied unevenly at store level - The rollout of new technology and new policy is chaotic at best. Things are rolled out before they're fully baked, ie the new warranty policy has a lot of unanswered questions and during a manager all-hands meeting the answers were "we haven't worked that out just yet." Their Shopify rollout is still half-baked and there aren't fixes for things like doing exchanges. Why would you put your employees in the position to have to explain that there is not a way to do an even exchange, you're going to have to return the product - which takes up to five days to go back to your bank account, and then repurchase the new item? Customers don't care that you the retail employee has no control over that, and they'll tell you off for having essentially double the amount of their purchase out of their account for up to five days.

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