Sojourn Magazine Spring 2017

SOJOURN//SPRING17
CABINZERO IS THE LAST
BACKPACK YOU'LL EVER NEED
NEIL VARDEN SCHOOLS US ON ITS INCREDIBLE BACKPACK
By Azhar Ahmad
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I’m from the UK and I’m the founder and
CEO of CABINZERO. Having spent a
decade working in I.T, I decided I would
have a complete career change after
experiencing a critical illness 15 years ago.
After this near-death experience, I decided
I.T was not for me and I had to be in
control of my destiny. Since then, I have
been trying to build and shape the brand
CABINZERO whilst living the dream of
travelling. I think I have the perfect job,
being able to work anywhere and build a
business whilst I am on the move. I
empower our team to do the same and
actually if travel is not your passion, and
you prefer to work in an office rather than
at a Beach Restaurant, then you probably
are not suitable to work for CABINZERO.
You had a great story about how you
decided to create CABINZERO. Can you
tell us a little bit about that?
The brand was essentially created after I
started to become disillusioned with
countless luggage and backpack failures
whist travelling the world. I had a eureka
moment where I thought, ‘I can make
better products than these brands and I
will try to do so! It seems to have been a
long time since I first started this journey in
2010, but so far everything is going well.
The backbone of everything we do is
quality and we try to ensure we provid the
highest quality products in class, to ensure
our CABINZERO customers never have
the frustrations I have had with multiple
bags and luggages failing.
What has been the most difficult
challenge you faced so far?
The biggest and continual challenge is
trying to manage workload. We’ve grown
to a team of 11, including our sales
agents. In addition, we have distributors
spread all over the world. All of us are
stretched and working to the limit.
Hopefully we’ll add a couple more people
to the team sooner rather than later and
we can then all have a more manageable
workload. An additional challenge is that
we all work remotely. Whilst we have
offices in the UK and China, they are
empty most of the time. Our team
generally work whilst on the move.
Personally, I am in London now but will
take a flight to Hong Kong later today.
After Hong Kong, I will be in Dubai and
possibly Qatar. We have an important
exhibition in Singapore and all of the team
wants to come to that! This type of
structure does present problems though,
as it’s not always easy collaborating with
each other across multiple time zones. We
plan to have annual CABINZERO
conferences at leading beach resorts once
or twice a year, so all the team can get
together and meet each other in person!
CABINZERO offers one of the best
warranties we’ve ever seen. Was there
any returns made before warranty is
over and how do you feel about that?
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