Join us for a compelling conversation with Rashmi Hudson, founder of Alltimate Luggage, who transformed a common travel frustration into a patented innovation. With over 40 years of travel experience, Rashmi identified a critical market gap in professional travel gear and developed a revolutionary three-piece system that's changing how business professionals pack and travel.
On the show, Rashmi reveals the methodical journey from initial concept to market success, demonstrating how deep industry knowledge combined with personal insight can lead to breakthrough product development. Her story showcases the power of solving not just one problem, but anticipating and addressing multiple consumer pain points within a single, comprehensive solution.
Most importantly, she shares how investing in quality materials, thorough testing, and proper patent protection has created a sustainable competitive advantage in the marketplace.
In today’s episode of the Harvest Growth Podcast, we’ll cover:
How identifying and solving genuine consumer pain points can lead to revolutionary product development and market success
How comprehensive testing creates long-term product value and customer loyalty
The importance of protecting your innovation through domestic and international patents
How solving multiple adjacent problems within one solution creates broader market appeal and multiple revenue streams
And so much more!
You can listen to the full interview on your desktop or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Or, click to watch the full video interview here!
Visit www.alltimateluggage.com to learn more about the innovative 3-in-1 design - your complete travel solution engineered for smart travelers. With its compact storage and versatility for both travel and daily use, it's truly the ultimate packing solution. Use code HarvestGrowth for 20% off the 3-in-1 Carry-On Travel Set.
To be a guest on our next podcast, contact us today!
Do you have a brand that you’d like to launch or grow? Do you want help from a partner that has successfully launched hundreds of brands that now total over $2 billion in revenues? Set up a free consultation with us today!
Prefer reading instead of listening? Read the full transcript here!
Jon LaClare [00:00:00]:
Have you ever traveled to a destination only to open up your luggage and all your clothes are completely wrinkled? Today's guest traveled for 40 years on business and personal trips and was fed up with having to iron a bunch of clothes upon arrival every time. So she did something about it. She shares her unique solution and you'll be impressed at how many travel problems are solved with this one piece of luggage.
Speaker B [00:00:23]:
Are you looking for new ways to make your sales grow? You've tried other podcasts, but they don't seem to know. Harvest the growth potential of your product, product or service as we share stories and strategies that'll make your competitors nervous. Now here's the host of the Harvest Growth podcast, John leclair.
Jon LaClare [00:00:43]:
Welcome back to the show. I'm really excited to be speaking with Rashmi Hudson today. She is the inventor and founder of Alltimate Luggage. You can check them out at Alltimateluggage.com it's like Alltimate but A L L at the beginning. And we'll talk more about what this line of luggage is and more about the business as we get going and of course include that in the show notes. But first of all, I want to invite or I want to welcome to the show. Rashmi, thanks for joining us today.
Rashmi Hudson [00:01:08]:
John, thank you so much for having me on Harvest Growth.
Jon LaClare [00:01:11]:
Absolutely. Can you tell our audience a bit about your luggage? So you see a sample behind you? I think you're going to explain it and show it in a minute. But before that, just explain what it is, how you came up with the idea.
Rashmi Hudson [00:01:23]:
Absolutely. It's a three piece travel system. I have traveled for more than 40 years. I traveled corporate and for personal, did everything from planes, trains, automobiles, cruises, you name it, I have done it. And so I know what it takes to travel in all those modes. What started all this was when our son was going to med school and would be going to interviews. And how would he present? Well, because there are so many instances when we want to look our best and we want our clothes to be pristine. And I didn't want him to worry about hotel irons burning or anything else.
Rashmi Hudson [00:01:59]:
And I didn't want the interviewer to see anything but a wonderful young man who could fulfill the role and not worry about, you know, what his clothing looked like. And I looked on them in the market. There were garment bags galore. There were plenty of suitcases, but nothing that would keep your clothes wrinkle free. And so I decided, well, why not invent it? We have utility patents on it, including domestic and international, because the functionality and how it's put together is ours.
Jon LaClare [00:02:35]:
Love it. And I want to talk about kind of the design and how it works. And as I said, you'll go through a sample in a second. But first of all, the need for it. I think all of our listeners, if we, if anybody travels, you know how much of a pain it can be. For me there's always a story, right. So for me, my biggest pain point where I'm like as soon as I started talking to you and first was. Was introduced to your product, like genius.
Jon LaClare [00:02:55]:
I love it. I wish I would have had this for the past many years. One trip I went on we. I used to do presentations on cruise ships. So we would bring clients on and have 20 or 30 people there and we would do kind of all day sessions while we're at sea and then have our fun days on port days or whatever. And, and you know, I dressed nicely, brought my blazer, sport coat and dress shirt and slacks and everything else. And I arrive in my room on the cruise ship, open things up and it's a disaster with wrinkles. And of course on cruise ships there's no irons, right? They don't give you those irons.
Jon LaClare [00:03:25]:
I didn't bring anything. So I punted and found a way to sort of kind of fix it eventually, but forever since then I've been especially conscious of issues. Right. With traveling irons sometimes don't work or there's problems with them or you know, not all clothes can be ironed. And so much easier just to arrive and have your clothes ready to go and wrinkle free. Can you talk about how you. So there's the need you establish of why you need to develop it. How did you figure out the way to do it? So the structure, structure the design of the luggage that would actually work, you know.
Rashmi Hudson [00:03:57]:
So what I knew from traveling was you can take your. I had a garment bag, I had a Hartman. Very nice. It weighs probably six to eight pounds just by itself and would carry three or four suits and you had to carry it flat. Well, airlines no longer have space. Even if you're flying first class, there's not a space for you to hang your garment back like they used to 30 years ago.
Speaker D [00:04:23]:
All right.
Rashmi Hudson [00:04:24]:
All the planes have changed to where they maximize the seats. But what I also knew was if you're packing your soft goods that you roll them. And so what became important to me was how could I combine the two issues? I had the garment bag. So then how do you carry your non hanging items?
Speaker D [00:04:43]:
Right.
Rashmi Hudson [00:04:43]:
A duffel makes complete sense. And because we roll things into a circle, then you have no creases. So for our listening audience, this system is this simple. It is a garment bag that wraps around a duffel and the way it connects, it counts as one piece of carry on luggage. It is super compact. You unpack in less than four seconds, simply unclick, hang up your clothes and.
Speaker D [00:05:08]:
You'Re out the door. That's it.
Rashmi Hudson [00:05:10]:
Less than four seconds and you're out. And so that's how we figured out how to do it. And I grew up sewing, so I took out my sewing machine, sewed some samples and went on a hunt for a manufacturer and a luggage designer who took my ideas and put them into a luggage system.
Jon LaClare [00:05:33]:
So if you want to maybe show the audience on the table behind you how it works, I think it'd be a great time to do that. While you're walking back there, I'll explain. Obviously, for anybody who might be listening and not watching the video, you won't be able to see this. But of course go to YouTube, check out the video that we're going to record or talk about right now. Of course you can always go to the the website Alltimateluggage.com as well to see exactly how this works. But it's such a cool design and I think you got to see it really to fully understand it.
Speaker D [00:06:02]:
So, John, there are three pieces that are the bags and the fourth piece is this luggage strap. I'm going to go ahead and unclick it from here. And this is the most versatile system that you are going to find in the market anywhere. First, we invested heavily into quality. I'm at an age where I'm not interested in providing something that ends up in the trash or in the dumps. So we had a custom made shoulder strap made that is padded leather, non slip, so you can carry it crossbody or down your shoulder just like that. It works so easily. So to show you the garment bag, what I thought would be fun was to unpack.
Speaker D [00:06:45]:
And so this system is fully packed and I'm going to start with the front. We have organization pocket here for tech gear. Right. I'm just going to unpack one at a time so people can see. There's a special pocket for passports. This is an extra thick one, but you can pack two of them in here easily. If you have a Kindle or an iPad that you want to read, you've got some electronics. And most importantly, why not a place for your keys? Because that's the one thing we have actually left.
Speaker D [00:07:12]:
Keys in a hotel safe before. So there's a hook here for your keys. Plus, I always like to carry a bottle opener as well, because, you know, some of your premium drinks that are in your hotel room, you can't open. They don't give you a can opener or a bottle opener to use. Right. And so a bottle opener is kind of nice. So this is the garment bag on the outside. I'm going to turn it to its side so you can see how it wraps around.
Speaker D [00:07:41]:
Okay. There are three clips on the top, and you are unpacked and ready to go out. All right, I'm going to do a demonstration of the garment bag first. You can see from here, this is a three and a half inch gusset. So that means if you want to carry this garment bag flat, you can carry seven, eight items in here. If you want to carry it folded and carry the duffel separately, because you are allowed a carry on and a personal item. Right. So one of these is your carry on, the other is your personal item.
Speaker D [00:08:14]:
But these clips that clicked onto the duffel bag now can click onto each other. And your shoulder strap can go here. So you can carry this under your arm or you can carry it flat. I'm going to unpack here on the very top here. What I want to show you is there is an extension pocket. It's 13 and a half inches long for everything from raincoats to longer dresses for the ladies. There's also an accessory pocket here which is perfect for those events where you need to carry ties, scarves, anything else you simply unzip. One of the things that we built into our system is flat packing, because most garment bags have a zipper down the middle, around the side.
Speaker D [00:09:04]:
And the minute you put your clothes in there, guess what, they're wrinkled already because you're having to stuff them into something. So you basically take it apart and you have your clothes right here. So what I have here is I have two dress shirts and a men's suit, which is enough for really even a four day trip, because you're going to combine it with different accessories and everything. So I'm going to just lay this down here on the side so you can see how much this packs. All right, so there is our garment bag. I'm going to go ahead and just fold it over right now and leave it to the side and I'll explain why I've done that. Secondly, you have the duffel because there's so many things that you want to pack. I wanted to go ahead and have a duffel that could organize all your items.
Speaker D [00:10:02]:
When we did our market research, what we found was that duffels that are soft sided just collapse onto themselves. And when you open it up, like you mentioned before, John, what you get is a bowl of spaghetti, right? That's what all your clothes do. So what you have with our duffel is you have pockets in the front, and the front pockets are just like the ones I showed you in the garment bag with a key fob, a place for passports, everything. Because sometimes you know what, that's all you want, that's all you need. But we also have pockets on both sides which work easy for sliding your phone, your iPad, your, you know, your tickets, whatever travel documents you need. And on the back side, what we did was we put in a very special sleeve for you to use with wheel luggage or a briefcase. And so a trolley sleeve. If you can see my hand through here, it's a zipper that opens on the bottom for our listening audience.
Speaker D [00:10:56]:
And from my experience as a seamstress, I knew exactly which zipper pulls would not give way. How many times, John, have you run down the Runway with your bag on top of your wheel luggage and before you get to, excuse me, 10ft down, it's already falling off each side, right? One side or the other. Has that ever happened to you?
Jon LaClare [00:11:20]:
Oh, too many times. I've kind of learned, like now I carry everything in a big heavy backpack. I don't like doing that, but otherwise it's going to fall off. It's hard to manage. I love the, the trolley strap and.
Speaker D [00:11:30]:
I don't like to carry a, a backpack because it just, it wrinkles everything else that's on me and it's too constrictive and everything. This is so much easier for me to be able to go up and down escalators between me and the escalator. The escalator always wins with wheel luggage. And this just makes it so much easier to maneuver in between flights, you know, in between gates and everything else. Now this feature for the trolley sleep is also on the garment bag. So when you're carrying your garment bag wrapped around the duffel, you've got everything that you need. And if you're carrying a wheeled carry on, this becomes your personal bag. Men have not had a personal bag forever because in the US they just don't carry personal bags.
Speaker D [00:12:11]:
But this is the most useful because then you can have your wheel luggage plus this. What I will tell my listening audience is that this is a soft side luggage and because it's soft sided, it won't get gate checked. Have you flown recently where you, I mean you, if you're not in the first half of the plane that's boarding, you're going to get gate checked and your gate check bag goes to its final destination. Well, if it's going to its final destination or in a waiting area and then you end up with bad weather and then they won't put you on another flight because you don't have your bag with you. And so it's a lot of problems. So it's important to have a. I think the Alltimate is the Alltimate. For this reason it stays with you the whole time.
Speaker D [00:12:51]:
It stays with you on the plane in overhead van so that whenever you get on, get off wherever you have it with you. The minute you leave the airport or get off your get off your plane, you don't have to go to baggage claim, you just change, you know, straight to wherever you're going. Catch your Uber, catch your Lyft and you're good to go. On the inside, there is a huge zippered pocket that lets you open completely. The reason we put hard sides in here not is not just to keep your clothes from being spaghetti. It's also you would have organization and this becomes your drawer away from home. John, let me ask you, I, I'm pretty sure that the audience would agree with you on this, but have you ever left anything in a hotel drawer, Airbnb drawer, verbo drawer?
Jon LaClare [00:13:38]:
Yeah, it's funny, you know, I used to quite often and now I've gotten to the point where I've done it so much where I just don't use the drawers anymore. Right. Because it scares me. I'm going to leave something. So it becomes, without some sort of a solution to help me, it becomes a mess to try to keep track of everything. But no, absolutely, it's, it's a very common thing.
Speaker D [00:13:55]:
Absolutely. So what makes it so easy with this? Because it's wide mouth. You simply put it on. Let's say if you're going on a cruise you can just leave it open on one of the table tops and, and just pull from it as you need it. So this is the third bag and this is a multi purpose day pack. It is fully lined just like all the others with a full length pocket. But it's perfect for shoes, is designed to carry up to like a size 12 shoe. But it's also great for your day activities when you get to someplace.
Speaker D [00:14:29]:
If you're going to a spa, you need something to carry your dirty clothes back.
Jon LaClare [00:14:33]:
Right.
Speaker D [00:14:34]:
Your clean Clothes for coming back. If you're going to Saturday morning market, you need someplace to carry your goods and finds. If you're going on a bike ride, a lady's tote just doesn't work. This is so easy. We have leather glides on here. So all you do is sling it back, you know, behind your shoulders and you can carry it to wherever or just carry it like this. So for your listening audience, you can just use these as a handbag is for, it's unisex, it's for men or women. It's a sleek black system with a, a nice silver stripe.
Speaker D [00:15:06]:
So it works for everybody. So I'm going to unpack and just give the audience an idea what all there are pockets all on the inside. Three of them are mesh pockets so you can see through them because the minute you hit 40, all of a sudden you need, you know, brighter light for everything. Plus there's one zippered lockable pocket so that you can lock your valuables. Little things get lifted and gone, but bigger things do not. The reason, one of the reasons we have this is I was working out at a gym one time, took a quick three minute shower and in that time my sackle wash that my father in law had given me for graduation was lifted.
Rashmi Hudson [00:15:43]:
And that broke my heart and it.
Speaker D [00:15:44]:
Broke his heart and I just don't want other people to have that. It's also good for like if you're going on a Valentine's trip and you're going to surprise your loved one with an engagement ring or a special present, you can lock it up. Especially if he or she is way too nosy, you know, and won't let you surprise. So in here you've got your dopp kit. You also have and I packed this for like a three, four day trip or a cruise. But you can pack. There's plenty of room more to pack. But a bathing suit, I packed four shirts to include a shirt that you can use either with your bathing suit or if you want to go work out at the gym.
Speaker D [00:16:27]:
Right. So you've got another pair of shorts there and there's also a nice pair of shorts in here for you know, client entertainment if you will, like if you're on the golf course, if you're taking this on a golf trip, it is perfect. Especially if you're going to, let's say play at a country club environment or where there's going to be a nice dinner and you need to carry your jacket to wear for evening functions. Undershirt, three pairs of underwear, two Pairs of fun dress socks, athletic socks and your belt. I would venture that this is probably the number one thing. I know it's the number one thing my husband forgets. He has forgotten underwear, he's forgotten everything else. What's nice about this system is that because of the pockets, you quickly get used to, oh, this is where this goes, this is where this goes.
Speaker D [00:17:21]:
And then you'll remember, okay, something goes in this pocket. What am I missing? So that you don't forget anything. And so this gives you a good overview of what all can pack in here. What I'm going to show you is the final benefit of having this system is that it is collapsible. And so if you have a small closet, which I'm not sure that anybody has a large closet anymore, and even in the larger homes there's not a large enough closet. Cruise ships definitely don't have a large closet. But you can take your day pack at home and easily slide this in as well as you can fold in half your garment bag and slide it in here. And this takes up no more space than, let's say a box of tennis shoes.
Speaker D [00:18:17]:
So you can see how slim it is. And for the listening audience, you can tell that this is smaller than a tennis shoe box. Everything is water repellent. We went with Cordura brand thousand denier strength material. My personal system has been used from when we first got the patent on it and just trying it and everything for more than five years and has been on, oh my gosh, probably about 200 trips with me, including I've checked it in just to check it out and everything. And it's still pristine because the thousand denier Cordura is a great scuff resistant material and it's water repellent. And then on the day pack we went with material that also repels sand. So it repels water and it repels sand.
Speaker D [00:19:04]:
So this system will work for everybody, men and women is perfect for when we were talking about the need for graduates. When you think about college graduates, high school graduates going off to college, they're going to have interviews. And for the same reason we got this for our son, you want to set them up for life. As a parent, you know, what you want is for them to be able to succeed in a career of their choice. And this is a way to help them feel confident. Because I really, there's so much psychology behind feeling good about yourself. And how we dress and how we present is one of those. And the first thing that people do is the minute they see you, they size you up, right? They know a little bit about you or a lot about you, depending on how much you've put in in invested into yourself before you showed up for that event.
Speaker D [00:20:00]:
So this is the Alltimate Luggage. Three in one carry on, three pieces for everything that you need. It's versatile, they're individual, you can use them separately, together and the clothes come out wrinkle free. So you can spend your time with your loved ones or your friends, golfing, going out on a cruise, doing whatever you need to do, except for stuck in a hotel room ironing.
Jon LaClare [00:20:24]:
Such a great product that you've come up with. And really, you know, you went through all the features and benefits, really, you couldn't have thought of all that, you know, with a couple of trips, right? But having done 30 years of traveling, you've run into everything, right? You, and you mentioned your husband has had some travel issues as well, right? So we've all had those and everything you said, like, I've had that problem, I've had that problem, I've had that problem. And I love how you've solved it really in one relatively simple solution. And it's all in one, right? I do want to tell our audience, please go to their website so you can check out more of Rashmi's product line@Alltimateluggage.com you can see exactly what it includes in a little bit more detail if you're driving, of course. As always, we'll include this in the show notes. So feel free to please check out the website and learn more about this great product. And also, did you know you can meet with a member of my team absolutely free for a 30 minute strategy consultation? We've launched and grown hundreds of products since 2007 and learned some of our strategies while growing Oxiclean back in the Billy Mays days. We're here to help, so please go to harvestgrowth.com and set up a call if you'd like to discuss further.
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