As price hikes and inflation persists in 2025, harnessing consumer trust is a challenging prospect for brands across the fashion and luxury space.
Spending habits are changing in tandem — consumers are prioritising experiences and travel over products and apparel for their discretionary expenditure. In the third quarter of 2024, the top category that US and European customers splurged on was eating out, followed by travel and buying groceries, according to BoF and McKinsey’s State of Fashion 2025 report.
Poised to capture customer attention amid this behavioural shift is Canadian luggage brand Monos. The direct-to-consumer company, founded in 2018 by Victor Tam, Hubert Chan and Daniel Shin, was developed around the principle of mindful travel, with quality and ease a key pillar behind the brand’s ethos and product offering (the brand’s name comes from the Japanese concept mono no aware — an appreciation for the beauty of fleeting moments).
Building consumer trust across the brand’s value chain is proving critical to their 2025 strategy. At Monos, each product part is carefully considered, with new materials often manufactured in partnership with industry experts — such as its ergonomic aluminium luggage handles and aerospace-grade case exteriors. The brand’s supply chain transparency and accountability recently earned them a B-Corp certification.
Monos is expanding its retail footprint to offer more physical touchpoints, and to better communicate its brand value to customers, with an acute focus on the US. Despite being a digitally native brand, Monos will open five stores in five major cities across the region in 2025, and one listening bar concept, investing in in-person events and activations around these spaces. The US expansion is well-timed, with US consumer spending projected to grow around 4.8 percent year-on-year, according to research by the University of Michigan.
Meanwhile, Monos seeks to solidify its status as a key player in the luggage industry by partnering with the actor Adrien Brody on a campaign launching this month. Brody will be the face of its most premium collection to date, constructed in aluminium. The campaign coincides with the awards buzz surrounding Brody, who recently picked up an Academy Award, a Golden Globe and a BAFTA for his performance in “The Brutalist”.
Now, BoF sits down with CEO and co-founder Victor Tam to learn more about Monos’ expansion journey and how they are elevating touchpoints with consumers to build trust.
What drove the creation of your luggage brand Monos?
I previously founded a furniture company called Rove Concepts and ran it for about 10 years, during which time I got to witness how brands were being built in the 2010-2020 era — through DTC, with a digitally native approach, driving fast growth — and a lot of it didn’t make sense to me. It was all about raising a tonne of capital and growing, going public, selling to larger companies.
I wanted to double-click into the product experience, because it didn’t feel like something that was long-lasting to me. I’m a fan of a lot of brands out there, the ones that have existed for 100 years, say, and understanding — why are they still around?
In 2018, I decided to take a lot of the experience I learned in building that company, building teams and ultimately understanding how to build something great. It really is about building a world-class team on top of what the brand and product stands for, so I sold my part in that company and decided to move on to something new.
Why did you pivot into the travel and luggage space?
Travel, for me and my co-founders, presents a space which is so much about aspiration. For many of us, we work and we live to look forward to travelling.
However, when Monos was founded, the luggage space at the time revolved around legacy brands that had a bunch of kiosks in department stores, or thousands of little stores, and that was the shopping experience. No one was there to educate and help you, and it was always about just the luggage — these kinds of travel brands were never conveying a lifestyle of travelling and what that might mean to the consumer.
It was important for us, on the product side, to educate our consumers. If you go to our site, we show you our manufacturers, we show you the materials that we use, the quality testing that we go through for our products. I had owned other suitcases from several brands before starting this business and understood what type of materials are needed and why certain details matter.
How is Monos shifting its brand positioning?
When we first started, we were lumped into all the cohorts of DTC luggage brands, which was by design — it was a way for growth and to extract market share during the post-COVID period. For consumers, when they can’t touch and feel something, it’s largely going to be about price, because any brand can put the same description and plug value in that way.
Overall, for us, it’s less about selling a product and more about creating an experience that people are going to talk about.
However, now that we can offer a retail experience in-store, once someone experiences that environment, talks to our host, feels the product, understands the product knowledge and what differentiates us, we have felt that people are purchasing our higher-priced collections. With that insight, we are moving up the market, which we believe is the right approach for brands like ours where we are no longer going to be competing with just digital brands on price.
The market has evolved — a lot of the digital brands that don’t really engage consumers in other ways are racing to the bottom in terms of pricing down, offering clearances and sales, and increasing the frequency of those sales. When we think about whether legacy consumer brands can still be built today, you can’t do that without heavily leaning into physical retail.
How is Monos evolving customer experiences through its retail expansion?
Engaging consumers beyond product comes from the physical retail experience — and what we call our phase two of growth, which is about hospitality. A big part of travel is looking forward to dining at that restaurant or staying at that hotel, so to mirror this idea, we are launching our first café and listening bar concept which is located directly next to and interconnected with the new Monos store in Chicago.
We are envisioning a world where, by dialling into hospitality, an entirely new customer can discover Monos. It speaks to an opportunity for travel brands to create immersive, transportive experiences. Overall, for us, it’s less about selling a product and more about creating an experience that people are going to talk about.
We look to create a retail space where it’s not just aesthetically interesting, but it touches all senses — if you listen closely, there is a gentle background sound of birds chirping or leaves rustling, and we think about the architecture of the stores.
Why has Monos identified the US as a key market for retail expansion, and where is the brand looking to next?
Operationally, when we decided to launch our first stores, it made sense to launch them in Vancouver, our home city — from hiring new talent to managing the operation of the stores. We then replicated that in Toronto, to make sure it was a repeatable process in terms of our store experience. But once we accomplished that with Toronto — and the stores are performing well — it made sense to expand into the US.
The US is our largest market when you think about North America, just population-wise, as well as in terms of our revenue split. I think 2025 will be a year where we expand our retail footprint the quickest in the US — we are opening five stores across New York, LA, Washington DC, Boston and Chicago, which more or less covers most of our major markets in the States.
We also have a digital presence in the UK and Australia, and we are looking to launch our next store outside of North America. As a travel brand, the quicker we can be international, the more trust we can build. Both from a brand perception viewpoint but also from a practicality standpoint, with all our stores acting as repair hubs with our lifetime warranty.
What does Monos’ B-Corp certification mean to you and your business?
It means a lot. It took a tonne of work and almost two and a half years to get certified. At the end of the day, to have the largest impact, you have to be a company of a certain size — that’s the reality of things. For us, as a smaller brand, we looked at how we can take a more practical approach and decided to educate ourselves.
It really is about building a world-class team on top of what the brand and product stands for.
We are also in another programme called Climate Neutral Certified, so we are challenging ourselves to go through this certification process with these organisations. We began to home in on checking the safety in the factories that we work with, looking at how we can ensure that the standards and wages are fair, and then on the supply chain side, it’s been about understanding the effects of numerous shipments versus a single shipment in terms of carbon emissions.
As a result, we have now implemented better demand planning, so we don’t have to do last-minute air shipping. It’s for this reason that we have strategically placed warehouses, so we aren’t just shipping goods 5,000 kilometres away, and we have a proper hub set up in the necessary locations. Going through that process has also helped us refine and improve our business model year-over-year.
What inspired the partnership with Adrien Brody?
Adrien has this quiet authenticity and sophistication about him that we really admire. If you follow him on Instagram, you’ll see that he really speaks to his followers directly. When we reached out with the concept, there was a lot of enthusiasm for the creative direction as well as the ethos of Monos, and it all felt very aligned.
At the time, we actually didn’t know about any upcoming movies he was working on, but next thing you know, he was nominated for all these awards and so the timing was serendipitous — which is actually what the campaign is all about. We made a campaign film with him in Morocco about leaning into spontaneity as you travel.
The campaign film is not meant to be overtly about the brand or the luggage, though we really want people to watch it and be reminded of our brand afterwards. Having Adrien create something artful and cultivate emotion with his talent and ability will really resonate with our community and potentially new brand fans, versus asking him to simply pose for more ads.
This is a sponsored feature paid for by Monos as part of a BoF partnership.
