Travel today doesn’t wait for an occasion, it slips into everyday life. It’s in early morning commutes, last-minute work trips, spontaneous weekend plans, and long-awaited holidays. It shows up repeatedly in conversations, decisions, and routines, becoming less of an event and more of a constant. And yet, the category built to support this movement, luggage and travel gear has largely remained stuck in a functional, transactional past.
Escape Plan is attempting to challenge that disconnect. Instead of viewing luggage as a standalone product category, the brand is built around travel as a behaviour, one that cuts across multiple use cases, price points, and consumer mindsets.
The ambition, as highlighted by Abhinav Pathak, Founder and CEO, Escape Plan is not just to differentiate within the category, but to reframe how it is understood and built. “It’s not about luggage. It’s about travel and travel is becoming a very deep part of our lives. Beyond sleep, it’s probably where we spend the most time,” he says.
That quietly shapes the brand’s entire approach setting the tone for how Escape Plan thinks about product design, value, storytelling, and scale.
Designing for how people travel, not what they carry
Escape Plan’s approach starts with a simple but overlooked insight, travel isn’t one activity, it’s many. “We all travel daily. Home to office, short trips, long vacations, domestic, international, there are multiple types of travel.” said Pathak.
Yet, most brands continue to build generic products, focusing on marginal price optimisations rather than solving for real-life contexts. As Pathak put it, “People keep fighting for small optimisations but there are alternate ways of growing, which people have not explored.” This insight drives Escape Plan’s shift from category-led thinking to use-case specificity designing products tailored to how people actually travel
This philosophy extends into how the brand approaches the Indian consumer as well. Contrary to the common perception of India as a price-sensitive market, Pathak argued, “India is not a cheap country. It’s a value-driven country. People will pay a premium, if you justify it.”
Instead of competing on discounts, Escape Plan focuses on delivering stronger value through design, functionality, and a wider, more relevant product offering. In a market flooded with options, the challenge isn’t just affordability, it’s decision-making.
Furthermore, he emphasised, “We might be 10–20% more expensive than incumbents. But we justify it through better design, better functionality, and more relevant use cases.”
Why value, not price, drives the Indian consumer
In a category overwhelmed by choice, the real challenge isn’t availability, it’s clarity. Online marketplaces offer thousands of options, often making decision-making more confusing than convenient.
As Pathak explained “You go online and search for luggage, there are 10,000 options. It’s very hard to select. Our job is not to reduce choice, but to organise it better by use case, by price, by design. That’s where curation comes in.”
Instead of reducing this abundance, Escape Plan chooses to structure it, positioning itself as a curated layer that maps products to specific travel needs, price points, and design sensibilities. But curation here goes beyond organisation; it becomes a way to guide the consumer toward the “right” choice. This is where storytelling comes in not as an abstract brand exercise, but as a function-led narrative.
In a category where products often look and feel similar, Pathak pointed out, “Every luggage has essentially the same features; nobody really focuses on communicating a story around functionality.”
By building and clearly articulating differentiated features, Escape Plan turns utility into narrative anchoring its storytelling in what the product actually does, and in doing so, making the decision easier, sharper, and more meaningful for the consumer.
Turning curation and functionality into real differentiation
For Pathak, the real reason many brands plateau isn’t market conditions, it’s how they choose to grow. Premium brands, in particular, often hit a ceiling after early success because they limit themselves on price points, categories, or channels, eventually exhausting the market available to them.
As he puts it, “ fundamentally In India because every single price point, every single category which is mass, mass premium and premium has a very set defined customer base. So, unless you play across all price points, all channels, you will not be able to scale the business. You will get stuck at a certain volume and kind of then have a ripple effect from there.”
He rejects the traditional split between brand-building and performance, arguing “A lot of founders make brand investments with an eyes-closed approach. They don’t really measure outcomes, they just hope that five years down the line, people will love their brand. That almost never works. You can absolutely invest with a five-year horizon, but you still need to measure what’s happening in the first month. The impact won’t be dramatic, it won’t move by 40%, it might move by 0.4% but you need to see if things are directionally improving.”
“That’s where most people go wrong. They don’t track those early signals. For us, even long-term brand investments are tied to short-term measurement.,” he said while emphasising that even long-term efforts must show short-term signals.
“We don’t care about output metrics; the world operates on input metrics,” he notes. Because ultimately, growth isn’t just about being seen, it’s about being remembered. And that memory is built through experience.
In a landscape where discovery is easy but loyalty is fragile, Pathak believes, “Good service doesn’t cut the bar…you’ll die a slow death. So your experience has to be amazing such that customers go and talk about it even when they’re not supposed to.”
Growth beyond discounts: Distribution, speed, and systems that scale
For years, growth in India’s consumer internet ecosystem has been driven by familiar playbook discounts and paid acquisition. Buy attention, subsidise conversion, and scale volumes. But for Escape Plan, the answer isn’t tactical, it’s structural.
“Speed and curation are two things we focus on relentlessly, they’re always on for us. At the same time, we’re constantly taking feedback from customers and asking a simple question: are we actually getting better? We track our input metrics very closely, day on day, week on week, month on month. It’s not about being the best immediately; that can take years, and that’s fine. What matters is whether we’re improving consistently,” Pathak mentioned.
This inside-out system, however, needs an outside-in engine to scale and that is where most D2C brands fall short. “Distribution is the key. Among D2C brands, the leader keeps changing what remains constant is the incumbent,” he added.
Discovery today is easy, but real dominance comes from availability. “What D2C brands are not able to crack is distribution,” he added, underscoring a simple truth: In India, brands are not built by being seen once, but by being present everywhere that matters.
India vs Bharat: A difference of mindset
A critical layer in this distribution strategy is understanding the difference between India and Bharat. Pathak defined it by saying “For me, ‘India’ is essentially the top metros and a handful of large state capitals. Beyond that is ‘Bharat’. But the difference between the two is not income, it’s mindset. How a metro, urban consumer like you and I think is very different from how a tier-2 consumer in a smaller town operates. In fact, income-wise, I’ve often seen that a tier-2 customer can have more disposable income than a tier-1 customer, simply because their cost of living is lower.”
“The gap is not about money, it’s about positioning, trust, and the promise you make. What works for a metro consumer may not resonate the same way in Bharat. And that’s why you have to build and communicate differently for both.” he added.
The implication is clear, success in India requires not just reach, but contextual understanding.
At its core, the approach is built on a clear system, understanding behaviour over category, solving for use cases over features, tracking inputs over outputs, and prioritising distribution over short-term spikes. Pathak highlighted, “We are trying to be all things travel and nothing beyond that.” It’s a tightly defined ambition, but one that requires consistency across product, experience, and reach. In a category driven by sameness, that discipline executed over time may ultimately be what sets Escape Plan apart, he concluded.
