How Indre Rockefeller, Cofounder of Paravel, Creating $20 Billion-Plus in Global Luggage Market

 Indre Rockefeller, cofounder, and co-chief executive of Paravel, an eco-friendly luggage bag, and organizer brand, have made an exceptional gap by making $20 Billion-Plus in global luggage market. Set in motion in 2016, Paravel provides luxury, stylish travel bags at accessible prices that consumers connect with.

“I was traveling all the time,” Rockefeller says. “I was working for an international fashion brand. I was on the road visiting our stores, going to our headquarters, and flying to various cities for Fashion Week; living out of luggage basically. I was constantly going to go pack up and found myself thinking, ‘why isn't there one brand that I am drawn to, to solve all my packing needs?’ I'm going to six-to-seven different brand companies to solve my travel needs.”

“It felt like there was no brand that was addressing travel holistically as a system that also resonated with me,” she continues. “There were two extremes in travel. It was the luxury brands that were treating a lot of their travel goods as an afterthought addition to their offering, not as a core tenet to their value proposition. Then there were commoditized travel brands that felt that they were really speaking almost to this hangover of the male corporate traveler.”

While launching the product, Rockefeller and her cofounder Andy Krantz, targeted international consumer. Choosing material which is resilient and time-tested was a hectic job. They have re-engineered cotton canvas and nylon into stylish, functional silhouettes destined for modern life. 

Rockefeller’s interest in the fashion industry has emerged after she ended her career as a professional dancer due to back injury. She started working as  Anna Wintour's first assistant at Vogue. “Leaving it [dance] for a very all-encompassing job, the way it was at Vogue and in Anna's office, made it an easier transition,” she explains. “I went from one all-encompassing role and world into another one. In the beginning, I didn't have time to think about it; I just threw myself into a new job and into a whole new space. Working for Anna directly was an opportunity to learn everything about the industry It was just sort of such a wonderful, foundational introduction to the industry at large.”

After completing her MBA from Stanford, she continued to work in the industry at Moda Operandi, a multi-brand luxury e-tailer, where she worked as a general merchandising manager and creative director of trunk shows. After that, she switched to Delpozo, a luxury Spanish fashion brand. Delpozo adds Indre Rockefeller as president of Delpozo USA. 

“I am honored to welcome Indre Rockefeller as Delpozo’s first US president, whose strong industry relationships and brand business experience will help us to further expand our business in the US, Canada, and the Caribbean”, said Pedro Trolez, Global President and Owner of Perfumes y Diseño, to which the Delpozo brand belongs.

In her role as president of the Americas, she not only opened its U.S. Office but also oversaw sales, communications, and strategy. Now, they are improving experience of traveling customers. 

“Learning to delegate is something that is critical and is a hard lesson to learn as an entrepreneur when it's your own company,” Rockefeller shares. “Especially in the early days, everything is personal, everything is coming from inside you. My co-founder and I, everything that we have built, started from some instincts from the two of us. And from there, adding people to the team is an absolutely wonderful thing…Risk taking is something that is instinctive in entrepreneurship, but a lot of times that's your own risk that you can calculate. You have to embrace and encourage other people's risk and make sure that they know it's okay to fail because some of the best moments or results come from either lessons from failure or an attempt at one thing and a result in another.”

Her Pivots are: 

Research as much as you can. That includes talking with people in industry, finding mentorships and volunteering events that you want to pivot into to understand how it practically works. 

Talk with people from the industry you want to move with. Sometimes there's surprising moment when you found that what you're looking for can be replicated. Find out your own way of doing it. 

Figure out where innovation could benefit the industry you want to pivot into. Creating a new product or service will make stand you out from crowd. It makes you pioneer in the field.  

“Especially in this sort of female entrepreneurial community,” Rockefeller concludes, “it's growing faster. There are amazing female entrepreneurs out there with wonderful strides being made and conversations being had. Some of the best companies founded by women were founded in a setting where women identified something that they were interested in or passionate about that wasn't necessarily understood by the broader community until they became a larger company. In retrospect, people understood it but not at the time they did it. Perhaps it's just about trusting your own instincts.”