The embattled cofounder of Away has a next act: Building products for kids that adults will love

The cofounder of Away, Steph Korey Goodwin, is officially launching a new venture—her first since founding the DTC luggage company nine years ago. 

The company, Charmspring, is a children’s brand that will release products related to learning and development. Its first product, Springboard, is a design-forward scheduling board that uses magnetic tiles with illustrations of different activities to help kids plan their day.

Charmspring is cofounded by Jennie Monness, who also founded the play space Union Square Play. As a brand, Goodwin and Monness see an opportunity to fill a gap between the parenting advice flooding social feeds and the practicalities of actually parenting, by releasing products that align with the cultural conversations on parenting.

GOOGLE CALendar FOR KIDS

The launch of Charmspring follows some major changes in Goodwin’s life. In 2019, she briefly resigned from her role as CEO of Away following reporting by the Verge on the company’s alleged toxic work environment. The luggage startup had achieved a $1.4 billion valuation earlier that year before the fallout, securing “unicorn” status in startup parlance.

Goodwin initially apologized for her conduct, but shortly after contested the reporting, hired law firm Clare Locke LLP, which specializes in media defamation cases, to bring action against the Verge. Goodwin returned as co-CEO, before ultimately resigning from the company in 2020. (The Away litigation is not currently listed among Clare Locke’s cases on its website.)

As the Away chapter closed for Goodwin, a new personal chapter began: Goodwin became a mom. She had her first child in late 2020, followed by her second child in 2021. Her experience as a new mother led Goodwin to found Charmspring.

“My older daughter . . . was always asking, ‘Where am I going? What am I doing? What’s next?’ recalls Goodwin. “She couldn’t really distinguish between if she was waking up for the day in the morning, or if she was waking up from a nap. It all sort of was a confused, jumbled blur.”

Goodwin recalls drawing DIY stick figure graphics on construction paper, and searching online without success for pictograms to use for at-home routines. That’s when she realized there was a market opportunity for Springboard.

The company’s launch follows two years of research and consultation with experts like Lisa Spiegel, cofounder of psychology center Soho Parenting, and the developmental psychologist Melissa Kloss. “Reining in [kids] with a sense of order and structure really allows them to thrive and adapt, especially when there’s big changes,” Monness says of the motivation behind visual calendars like Springboard. Goodwin compares it to how adults use Google Calendar to structure their day and know what’s coming next. 

Of course, visual schedules exist in plenty. Teachers use them all the time. Goodwin acknowledges that she isn’t the first to come up with the idea. But Springboard’s high design differentiates it from what you can find on Amazon, for instance. The board is a premium product (with a premium price tag) that’s user-friendly for kids and aesthetically pleasing enough that parents will want it in their home. “It feels like decor,” Goodwin says. “The child feels like it’s for them, but the parent doesn’t feel like it’s something they need to hide or put away for the sake of keeping the aesthetic of the home.”

Goodwin and Monness conceived of Springboard as a customizable product suite. There’s a larger, seven-day Springboard with 68-plus tiles ($295 to $325), and smaller Springboards for $145 that focus on specific times of day. There are also starter packs of tiles tied to a child’s age range.

What makes the product thoughtful from a design perspective is how it marries customizability and polished finish. Customers enter their kids’ name, font, and board color preferences when ordering, so that he board arrives personalized. Each frame is custom made to accommodate slightly asymmetrical, rounded corners. There is also a bespoke family version, for which consumers can choose tiles in a drag and drop interface online. “No matter what, you can customize it,” Goodwin says. 

Design agency Red Antler developed Charmspring’s colorful visual identity, centered around the brand ethos that “structure sets play free,” says Goodwin. “It was about whimsy and fun,” says Goodwin, with a chunky font that looks like building blocks. The brand and design is meant to convey flexibility. The agency also helped with industrial design, web design, and art direction.  

NEW STARTUP, NEW FUNDING STRATEGY

A lot has changed in the startup world since Goodwin founded Away in 2015. “The learning a lot of brands and entrepreneurs have had over the past decade is that in a physical product business, actually you’re probably going to build a better business if you don’t over-raise too much capital,” says Goodwin of the company’s investment strategy. “And that’s definitely the approach we’re taking here.”

According to Goodwin, there are two main reasons for this. First, over-raising capital leads to dilution, because more investors have their hand in the honey pot. “You really want those people who are really putting in the sweat equity to be the owners in the business,” she says. Second, in a physical product business, you can sell your product to almost immediately bring in revenue and cash flow, rather than having to rely so heavily on raising money up front. “If you use your own revenue and cash flow to fund your business’s growth, you’re going to make smarter, more strategic business decisions,” Goodwin says. 

Charmspring has about a dozen “friends and family investors,” Goodwin says. She is the largest investor in that group. Yael Aflalo of venture firm Daughters Capital and Henry McNamara of venture firm Whalebone Ventures have also invested in the company.

“Personally, I found starting a business the second time to be a very different experience,” Goodwin says of her new venture. “Back in 2015 when we were launching Away, being a consumer product brand that sold your products online was still sort of like a novel channel concept,” she says. “When you fast-forward nine years, pretty much every company that sells products sells them online now.” In 2024, you have to make a branded consumer product that’s truly innovative in order to stand out, she adds. (Talk to any digital agency and they’ll remind you that knockout branding and marketing also plays a role.) 

Goodwin acknowledges it also helps to have done it once before. “The first time you start a business, it’s a lot of figuring out what we have to do,” she says. “But when you’re starting a second business, you know what the ‘what’ is. You’re just figuring out how exactly to do each one of those things. So it’s a different set of challenges. A lot of the stuff that we were confused about or found really challenging is actually a lot easier this go-around.”

WORK CULTURE REBOOT 

Goodwin is facing a new startup culture with Charmspring. The “girlboss” era of Away’s founding is a thing of the past. And the pandemic has also permanently changed the way we work, allowing for more flexibility and hybrid schedules.

We asked Goodwin how she’s addressed the problems she faced at Away for her new venture, and how her management style has evolved since. Goodwin didn’t offer specific policies she plans to implement, but did acknowledge there’s been an evolution, using the business term “growth mindset” to describe her personal evolution.

“My personal philosophy, both in work and in life, is the best thing you can do is have a growth mindset,” she says. “So no matter what your experiences are, reflect on them and say, ‘what can I learn from this?’ And ‘how can I improve?’” 

With that framework in mind, Goodwin says she is making considered choices in what she’s carrying forward from Away. “There’s a lot that we did at Away that will carry into what we’re doing at Charmspring, because there’s some things that we did really well, and then there’s plenty of other things we did at Away that we’re saying ‘we’re learning from that, and we’re evolving it, and we’re going to do a little bit differently this time,’” she says. For instance, Charmspring currently has four employees at launch, in addition to freelancers and consultants; a similar size to Away when it launched, Goodwin says.

But one point of evolution, at least for now, seems to be in her approach to work-life balance. “Our team is majority parents with young children who have caregiving responsibilities at home, and we basically just figure out the right balance of, how can we have enough hours during the business day where we can collaborate with each other, and then also the flexibility to also get our work done around our family schedules and our personal schedules,” she says.

Another Away approach that Goodwin is carrying through to Charmspring is positioning the venture as a lifestyle brand; not a company hawking a particular product. “When we went into Away, we weren’t creating a luggage company; we wanted to create a travel brand,” she says. “When it comes to Charmspring, we’re not thinking, ‘we’re a company that makes a children’s routine board.’ We’re a brand that is going to support parents and families in building connection, and in making home life more joyful and fun and goofy and silly and magical through systems that are helpful for parents and great for kids. . . . The Springboard is just our first product in delivering that.”