1. How important are Flight 001’s strategic alliances to their marketing?

We came up with this concept out of need,” says Brad John, co-founder of Flight 001. John and fellow co-founder John Sencion had, until the late 1990s, worked in different aspects of the fashion industry in New York. Sencion was a menswear designer and John worked behind the scenes. Both did an enormous amount of travel between the United States, Europe, and Japan. No matter how many times they set out on a trip, the days and hours before hopping a cab for JFK were spent running from office supply store to bookstore to drugstore to boutique in a mad rush for the latest laptop bag. By the time they got to the airport, they were sweaty, stressed, and miserable—
not exactly the glamorous existence they envisioned when they got into the fashion industry.
On May 5, 1998, somewhere high in the sky between New York and Paris, they came up with an idea for a one-stop travel shop targeted at fashion-forward globetrotters like themselves.
Not everyone got it. “Everyone would say, ‘Well, there’s luggage stores, Brad, what’s the difference? You’re gonna sell luggage,’ ” John recalls. “We were going to sell guidebooks, cosmetics, bags, passport covers. There’s really no place in the world where you can buy all these items in one place.