OOOasis - The Origin Story

By early 2024 I was the proud owner of several domain names. I had somehow gotten it into my head that you couldn’t start a business without a .com, which led to increasingly unhinged iterations of “goodtraveler.com”. Every month I would check for availability of yet another domain until it occurred to me that this may be procrastination disguised as business planning. It had been nearly six years since the idea for a “better” toiletry bag had struck on a whirlwind trip through Europe, and I had watched enough SharkTank to know that an entrepreneur who sits on an idea for too long, is likely no entrepreneur at all.

The summer of 2018 was perhaps the most memorable summer of my unattached adulthood. On a cool August day I found myself in Reykjavik, with nothing but time and solitude. Months earlier I had missed my best friend’s wedding in Lisbon and what was supposed to start as a celebration and reunion of decades of friendship had forcibly turned into a solo trip going from Portugal, to Germany, the Netherlands and ending in Iceland. I was a little scared: this was only my second solo trip, I had only just become a US citizen, I was newly single, and had just started a new job. It didn’t feel like the right time to embark on yet another new experience, but as I walked the unpretentious streets of Lisbon in the heat and Reykjavik in the cold, stopping at churches, castles, and cafes, a sense of calm and curiosity that I hadn’t felt in years overcame me. My New York problems suddenly seemed far away and made space for unencumbered exploration and thinking. Because I had stretched my budget to the max, I opted to stay at the Kex hostel in Reykjavik sharing a room with 4 bunk beds and 7 strangers (talk about new experiences). One morning as I tried to reach my toiletries in the communal bathroom avoiding all surfaces, it struck me that there had to be a better way to contain and access your toiletries. When I searched and couldn’t find what I needed, I couldn’t wait to put pen to paper. On the plane back to New York, I sketched the better toiletry bag on the back of a napkin and thought “Wouldn’t this make for a great founder story?!”

Then life happened: Work got busy, the world plunged into a pandemic, I had a big Ethiopian Nigerian American pandemic wedding, I went back to school for a part-time MBA, and I had a baby. But every idea had an expiration date and in early 2024 I felt that mine was close. Reinvigorated by this looming deadline,  and my urban entrepreneurship class I went back to the drawing board. The toiletry bag of my dreams still didn’t exist, so starting with a toiletry bag, I set out to create beautiful and functional travel accessories that were as versatile as my adventures and my needs. Something that would make not only the destination but the journey feel like an oasis amidst the daily hustle of life. The word oasis resonated and just when I decided to sleep on it, a co-worker’s out-of-office (OOO) email popped up, sealing the deal: my favorite acronym OOO and oasis together made - OOOasis.

If by now you’re assuming I do my best work on a napkin, you’re not wrong. Given that this business’s only asset was a 6-year old toiletry bag design on a napkin, I was reluctant to spend any money on branding. After securing my oooasistravel.com domain …YAY… I curiously found myself in the air returning from a fun-filled girls trip to St. Martin (stay tuned for that blog). I wondered if inspiration would strike the way it had 6 years ago? Flattening the United Airlines napkin I pulled out my pen and started sketching. Variations of O’s and bags appeared… ugly! Think, think , think! OOO, how could we make that look pretty, minimal, unique? Perfection was not the goal, in fact we’re trying to pay tribute to the work-in-progress, of doing this despite not feeling ready. I sketched a wiggly O, within another wiggly O, within another wiggly O. Did this look like a topographic map? It did!! A travel brand logo that looks like a visualization of elevated landmarks while paying tribute to the beauty of imperfection and the power of the work-in-progress? As far as origin stories and signs from above go, it seemed like a good start.