The Idea

By 2023, Daraab Kiani had already made the jump. A chartered accountant with a commerce degree from York and a stint as a senior accountant at EY behind him, he had walked away from the profession three years earlier to sell physical products on the internet, and discovered he was very good at it. Daniel Rios, a Ryerson marketing graduate, was working the same seam.

What the two of them kept circling back to was luggage.

The category had barely moved in decades. Same shells, same zips, same four wheels, same lifeless colours. Away had proved people would pay a premium for design, then gone quiet. And nobody was solving the part of travel that actually grates: the queue. Standing at security balancing a coffee, a phone, and a boarding pass, with a suitcase handle in the other hand and no third arm to work with.

So they started there. A cup holder and a phone mount, then worked backwards to the rest of the bag.

This was the beginning of NOBL Travel.

The Execution

• 2020: Kiani leaves accounting to sell direct-to-consumer, trading a CPA and an EY job for paid ads, email, and a Shopify stack. It becomes the apprenticeship that funds everything after it.
• 2023: NOBL launches. Rios comes in as co-CEO for product and growth, Kiani runs the business side.
• 2024: The bet is features over heritage. NOBL ships a carry-on with a latch-and-lock system instead of zips, built-in charging, a phone holder, and detachable compartments. Rios frames it bluntly: zero patience for the way traditional luggage is made.
• 2024: The details do the marketing. A cup holder, dual TSA-approved locks, silent 360° spinner wheels, and a lifetime limited warranty on every bag.
• Mid 2025: With the brand at an 8-figure run rate, NOBL hires an external Head of Growth to architect the path to $100M and starts pushing spend across new channels.
• September 2025: CNN Underscored tests the carry-on and rates it alongside Away and July, calling out the hard-shell build and the volume of features you don't get elsewhere.
• September 2025: Two years in, Rios puts the brand at 9 figures in sales, 500,000+ customers, and 3,000 orders a day.
• Today: The line has gone from one carry-on to check-ins, expandables, weekenders, duffels and accessories, with the site claiming 100,000+ five-star reviews and a 100-day trial on everything.

The lesson?

Kiani and Rios did not invent a new category or a new material. They picked a sleepy one and obsessed over the thirty seconds nobody else had bothered to look at: standing in a queue with a coffee in one hand and a phone in the other. A cup holder is not a technology breakthrough. It is just proof that somebody actually travelled with the product before shipping it. In a category where every competitor sells heritage, NOBL sold attention to detail, and got to 3,000 orders a day in two years. Find the micro-moment everyone else skipped. That is the whole moat.