Function meets finesse: How EUME is carving a premium niche in Indian travel gear

In a country where suitcases once did their job quietly and retreated to lofts until the next summer holiday, luggage has acquired a personality. It now has Instagram handles, airport photo ops and, in some cases, a monogrammed aluminium shell that gleams like a status update.

Into this increasingly stylised category steps EUME, a brand that began with a backpack that kneads your shoulders and now wants to carve out a premium niche in India’s crowded travel market.

Speaking to afaqs!, Naina Parekh, co-founder of EUME, traces the brand’s origins to what she calls a “journey” rather than a launch. The opening gambit was not a suitcase at all, but a patented massage backpack.

“It’s a backpack which has four massagers in it,” Parekh’s explanation goes. “It’s a normal, good-looking backpack which a person can carry with them wherever they are on the go. So it’s called massage on the go. It is operated by a power bank.”

The product, she notes, was one of its kind globally and proudly made in India at the time. A Kickstarter campaign in the United States and a feature on Good Morning America gave the fledgling brand early validation. Then Covid arrived, and the world’s collective luggage went back into storage.

By 2024, with travel rebounding and revenge tourism in full swing, EUME had recalibrated. The range expanded to include hard luggage, new-age backpacks and accessories. Parekh’s articulation of the brand’s current positioning is clear.

“Today, we are a full-grown, very aesthetic, functional, feature-based brand. We are positioning ourselves as a premium brand.” The brand operates at the price point of roughly Rs 4,000 for its backpacks to upwards of Rs 25,000 for its luggage, as per multiple marketplace entries.

'Premium', of course, is a word that gets a vigorous workout in this category. From legacy players to digital-first challengers such as Mokobara and Nasher Miles, nearly every brand claims design prowess and elevated quality. EUME’s bet is that aesthetics must travel with functionality, not sit in the overhead compartment alone.

“We always try to fill in the gap in the market by trying to find out what would make a traveller’s journey easy with aesthetics,” Parekh says. The examples she cites range from aluminium cabin and medium luggage to trunks and what she calls Cabin Pro, which features a soft laptop compartment.

The brand also claims to be among the first to introduce a coffee cup holder in a cabin bag, a small but telling nod to how airports have become extensions of workspaces and cafés.

The 'Make in India' narrative, however, has evolved. “Previously, we were a complete Make in India brand,” Parekh says. “But today, with so many SKUs, with so many designs, we are not completely Make in India.” 

The aspiration remains, she adds, though not within the next three to four years. For a young brand juggling scale, design ambition and cost structures, such trade-offs are pragmatic rather than ideological.

Pricing, unsurprisingly, mirrors the positioning. Parekh is candid that even entry-level products are “a little higher in value” compared to some competitors.

“You can never have a good-looking, good-quality product at a very, very cheap price,” she says. Compartmentalisation, wheel quality and trolley mechanisms all add to cost, and EUME appears unwilling to dilute those components for the sake of aggressive market capture.

If the product narrative hinges on quality and design precision, the marketing narrative leans heavily on community. Parekh speaks at length about aspiration, noting that dual-income households and easy EMI systems have reshaped consumption patterns.

“Today’s consumer is a very aspirational consumer,” she observes. “They wouldn’t want to shift to a little lower quality just for a thousand rupees. They want something which goes with their lifestyle.”

The target cohort, she suggests, spans 25 to 45 years, though she resists rigid segmentation. With increasing attention to wellness and longevity, she argues, even a 45-year-old “thinks like a 35-year-old”. In other words, youth is less a demographic and more a mindset.

On media strategy, EUME follows the now-familiar digital-first playbook, with strong investments in Meta and Google ads. Yet Parekh is clear that offline is back in fashion.

“We have also started taking the conventional way of offline media,” she says, citing standees and retail visibility as trust builders. In a category where touch and feel still matter, brick and mortar is less an anachronism and more a credibility signal.

Retail expansion has gathered pace. In the past two quarters, EUME has opened four stores, with a fifth slated to open in April. The brand is present in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Mumbai, including a store at Mumbai’s T2 airport, a location that functions as both a point of sale and a stage. 

Additional outlets in Hyderabad and Pune, as well as a forthcoming presence at DLF Summit, mark a deliberate pivot from pure D2C to an omnichannel footprint. Quick commerce and marketplaces sit alongside the brand’s own website in its distribution mix.

Brand ambassadors, meanwhile, are deployed with deliberation rather than extravagance. EUME has signed Ishaan Khatter as its ambassador, a choice Parekh frames as a values match.

“Ishaan Khatter and EUME features matched a lot,” she says. “Though he’s from the younger breed, he's very mature."

The comparison is telling. Parekh draws a parallel between Khatter’s curated but not colossal following and EUME’s own community.

“He might not have millions of followers like how other stars have, but whatever followership he has is very concrete. Same way about EUME.” Engagement, not just reach, is the metric she seems to prize.

Content, too, is treated as a craft rather than a checklist. Parekh describes a blend of “quirk, intelligence and sophistication” as core to EUME’s storytelling.

The brand experiments with musicians playing sitar or tabla amid luggage setups, collaborates with sculptors and artists, and last year introduced art on aluminium luggage, claiming to be the first in India to do so. Festival moments such as Holi are embraced, though with what Parekh calls a “very different kind of reel”.

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Underpinning these experiments is a broader shift in how luggage is perceived. “Luggage is not just luggage,” Parekh says. “It’s more of a lifestyle product. It’s not something where you just carry your stuff, but it is somewhere you carry your style statement.”

That sentiment encapsulates the evolution of the category. As air traffic surges and social feeds fill with airport selfies, the suitcase has become an accessory, almost a companion. In such a landscape, EUME’s slow-and-steady ambition to become a legacy brand rather than a fleeting start-up is both cautious and quietly audacious.

Parekh’s mandate is succinct. “We do not compromise on quality. We do not want to be growing in just six months and eight months and just flooding the market.” In a sector where colour drops and flash sales often dominate discourse, restraint might be the boldest strategy of all.