He Built TUMI Into a Public Company, Then Started Over to Fix What It Couldn’t Do

Charlie Clifford likes to say he started TUMI “with no reservations, no itinerary” — no feasibility study, no business plan, just a few thousand dollars and enough experience importing leather goods from South America to figure it out as he went. He founded the company in 1975 and spent decades building it into one of the most recognized luggage brands in the world, eventually taking it public in 2012.

Most founders would call that the whole career. Charlie treated it as chapter one. In 2017, he started ROAM — built specifically to solve the thing TUMI’s scale made impossible: real, total color customization for every bag, instead of a handful of standard finishes built for mass production.

That’s the more interesting story here, honestly. It’s rare to hear a founder talk candidly about the ceiling of the very company that made them successful — the tradeoffs that come with scale, and what he’d build differently with everything he learned the first time.

If you’ve ever wondered what a founder does with the lessons from a company he already took public, this is the episode.

Charlie breaks down both companies — the one that made him and the one built to outdo it — on Starting Small.

Listen to the full conversation with Charlie Clifford on Apple Podcasts