Away's Influencer Playbook
I talked to Alice Chen, Director of Social and Community at Away, about the brand's influencer marketing strategy.
One of my favorite sponsored posts ever? When Away partnered with Jake Shane to do one of his viral “nyming” videos with their monogrammed luggage. It was timely, specific, and just super clever.
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You may have also seen Away’s most recent campaign: a mix of celebrities and influencers revealing their “Softside”.
They just get it.
Today I am excited to dig into Away’s influencer marketing playbook with Alice Chen, Director of Social and Community. We talk about:
How they’ve built a social strategy that allows them to move quickly
“Our biggest wins have been a result of our bias to action, paired with an ownable approach.”
Why they write custom briefs for every influencer they work with
What metrics they look at to determine if a sponsored post was a success
How to get out of your own FYP when it comes to casting
“Just because you’re not seeing something doesn’t mean it’s not relevant. Trust your team to make decisions on social, influencer, and creative—it will vastly grow your networks and humanize your brand.”
And lots more!
Let’s dive in!
✨ Bonus AMA With Alice for Paid Subscribers ✨
Big news! Alice will be in the Link in Bio Discord today, answering any questions you may have about Away’s social media and influencer strategy. Join the Discord by becoming a paid subscriber and ask your questions in the #newsletter-discussion channel.
Rachel Karten: First, can you tell me about your current role and any past social (or not!) roles you've had?
Alice Chen: I joined Away almost a year ago as the Director of Social and Community, where our team oversees all things organic social and influencer.
I started my career in print editorial more than 10 years ago, but pivoted quickly to digital and social (a sign of the times). Before Away, I led the Global Social Media team at La Mer; spent about four years at Apple, where I launched social for Apple News and News+; and managed social and digital content for all the channels within the Hello Sunshine umbrella (Reese, Hello Sunshine, Reese’s Book Club, and Fair Play).
RK: How would you describe Away's social media strategy?
AC: Cultural relevance is our North Star, and we prioritize adaptability to get there. The way consumers experience content on social media today in such a nonlinear way gives us a lot of freedom to make social our creative playground. The flip side of that coin means platforms want new, new, new. So we’ve built an internal infrastructure that empowers us to move quickly, react to the cultural climate, and create with intention without taking ourselves too seriously.
That said, social as a creative playground doesn’t mean we throw spaghetti at the wall and hope something sticks. During our exploration, we are constantly asking ourselves: Is this ownable to Away? Our biggest wins have been a result of our bias to action, paired with an ownable approach. Ownability is key—moving quickly only gets you part of the way.
During the Met Gala, for example, we saw a lot of brands playing into the cultural moment by photoshopping their product into red carpet photos or dressing their product up in the most-talked-about looks. And that content is fun! (The legal of it all is another discussion.) But we try not to join the conversation for the sake of being a part of it; rather, we look for ways to push a step further. We tied our concept back to travel and created content around the theoretical trip home from the event—allowing us to put our product front and center without taking away from the moment. This year’s looks lended themselves especially well to the concept—I mean, a suitcase full of sand? So simple, but so feed-stopping…thanks, Tyla!
As a team of two (myself and our Associate Manager of Social, Cameron Sackett) we have to make quick calls all the time on what we do or don’t play into. Organic social is a never-ending treadmill of things we *could* have done, but there is no value—to the brand or to your team’s well-being—in trying to do it all.
RK: And how would you describe Away's influencer strategy?
AC: We are working to reimagine the ways brands and influencers can work together, and widen the aperture on what it means to be an influencer. It starts with respecting influencers, creators, and tastemakers as true brand and creative partners—not as mouthpieces with a script.
Currently, we’re taking a very hands-on, collaborative, and bespoke approach to our influencer relationships, down to custom briefs per influencer to best cater to the types of content they create.
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Similar to our overall social approach, we are super considerate in who we work with, when we work with them, and what we partner with them on. Does the influencer reflect the diversity of our community? Is the content they create authentic to the campaign we are tasking them with? Do they have ownable content franchises that their audiences know and love them for—and can Away fit into that content in an equally ownable and organic way?
RK: How has your influencer strategy evolved over time?
AC: We are in the process of building more structure and more scalability in how we work with influencers. (We’re actually hiring a Senior Manager of Influencer and Advocacy to lead this charge!)
Like we operate on social, we want to leave plenty of room for adaptability, exploration, and quick reactions to culture—no process should get in the way of that. For us, that means leaving room in our workflows and budget to move quickly when we’ve identified rising talent that we absolutely can’t wait to work with.
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RK: How do you measure success when it comes to a sponsored post?
AC: It depends! Reach, views, engagement are a baseline; we set targets for those metrics based on our overall social goals for a given campaign. If it’s part of a paid campaign, we also look at things like link clicks, conversion, and CTR.
While those are the hard numbers that ladder up into goals across the wider marketing team, our team is super invested in community-building, sentiment, and cultural relevance. Some of that is more easily measured: How many people shared this content? How many comments did it generate? And some is less simple to quantify: Did this partnership get people talking, online and/or offline? Was this content entertaining enough to stick in our audience’s minds?
The content we partner with influencers on should feel truly organic. It should feel worth your time to watch, entertaining enough to share with your friends, and never, ever read as paid placement.
RK: What makes someone a good influencer for Away?
AC: It goes without saying that anyone who works with us has to be passionate about travel. But the creators who really stand out to us are those with a strong point of view, who have a story to tell, and who are steadfast in their identity and values. Bonus points if you can make us laugh, too!
RK: I'd love to hear about a few influencer collabs or posts that you’re proud of.
AC: On the social front, I’m so proud of our team’s work on our Pride campaign with New York-based designer Willie Norris. It’s a collaboration our Senior Manager of Partnerships, Josh Sacks, first brought to the brand last year, before expanding on it this year in an even more robust and meaningful way that brought in more of the community.
Willie spoke about the relationship in Vogue Business recently: “With Away I had a wonderful partner. There is a bigger point to make here about how brands are shells without people in them. The reason that this partnership was so successful is because there was a passionate human, gay power coming from both sides here. I also had someone to carry it with me this year, which is West Dakota [the NYC drag artist], which shows how important it is to expand this ecosystem and bring more people in.”
Cameron on the social team owned the content development from start to finish, partnering with Josh, Willie, and West to roll out a series of collaborative posts that got Willie’s, West’s, and our community really excited—the comments across the posts in this series say it all.
On the influencer front, we launched a limited edition Island Pink collection earlier this year with a fully integrated social and influencer tease phase: internal BTS content, a hyper-targeted early-seeding approach that drove a swell of pre-launch UGC, and a series of influencer videos that leveraged what each influencer is best known for.
This collection was all about color, so we kicked off with the color-match expert @fritzdoesart. We then tapped the likes of @sylvaniandrama, @viennaayla, and @anouskaanastasia, giving them the creative freedom to do what they do best — bringing together the ownable content and storytelling they’ve built on their channels, with organic ties to our collection. Product showed up in a way that was additive to the narrative rather than distracting from the storytelling.
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RK: How do influencers show up on your owned channels? Do you collab post, repost, etc?
AC: We recently started experimenting with more collab posts; it’s something we used to be more precious about, but influencer content especially is such a partnership between brand and creator that it feels right to show up as a collab.
How influencers show up on our owned channels varies. Sometimes the content is created for Away channels only, sometimes it’s designed to show up on influencers’ channels exclusively, and other times we do a blend of both. It comes down to what the campaign needs and goals are.
RK: What are three tips you'd give other brands on how they should approach working with influencers and creators?
AC:
Treat influencers and creators as your creative partners.
Be willing to take risks. Influencers diversify your audience and broaden your reach, and if you don’t expand your community of influencers, you won’t grow your brand community.
Trust your team! If we all open TikTok right now, each of our FYPs will look vastly different. Just because you’re not seeing something doesn’t mean it’s not relevant. Trust your team to make decisions on social, influencer, and creative—it will vastly grow your networks and humanize your brand.
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See you again on Tuesday!
these three tips are perfect and i wish it was printed in school books where future managers are working and on all the onboarding documents of marketing staff.
Away has been nailing it lately. Love this interview and look at their social strategy.