Away C.E.O. Is Back, Just Weeks After Stepping Down

She apologized for her management style and stepped down as chief executive. Now, she says it was a mistake to fall on her sword and is taking her job back.

Former employees of Away luggage, one of the fastest-growing retail start-ups in recent years, accused the company’s chief executive, Steph Korey, of creating a toxic culture within the company in an article published by the technology website The Verge that went viral last month.

The article included text messages that a Verge editor described on Twitter as showing Ms. Korey using the workplace messaging application Slack “as a tool to stalk and bully junior and minority employees.”

In the article, former employees — who were identified by pseudonyms — contended that Ms. Korey pushed them too hard. In one message quoted in the article, which was sent at 3 a.m., she told employees on the customer service team that they could not work from home or submit vacation requests until customer service problems she had identified were resolved. In others, she came across as passive-aggressive.

Within hours of its publication, the article had created a social media firestorm around the company, which is worth more than $1 billion in the private market with plans to go public. For a company focused on a millennial audience and a brand that seeks to evoke a sense of community, the story was viewed internally as existential.

Within 24 hours, Ms. Korey had issued a lengthy apology. “I am sincerely sorry for what I said and how I said it. It was wrong, plain and simple,” she said. “I can imagine how people felt reading those messages from the past, because I was appalled to read them myself,” she wrote. Days later, the company said that it was hiring a new chief executive and that Ms. Korey would become executive chairwoman.

The episode, the latest example of a fast-growing company run by young founders that has found itself in a crisis, was viewed within the insular world of start-ups as a swift fall for Ms. Korey, Away’s 31-year-old co-founder.

The new chief executive, Stuart Haselden, plans to start his job on Monday, having been recruited from Lululemon Athletica, the company famous for its leggings.

But there is one new, significant wrinkle: His title won’t be chief executive — he will be co-chief executive with Ms. Korey. She isn’t going anywhere. The company plans to announce the move on Monday morning.

“Frankly, we let some inaccurate reporting influence the timeline of a transition plan that we had,” Ms. Korey said in an interview last week. With some time and perspective, she said, the company’s board members decided to reverse themselves. “All of us said, ‘It’s not right.’”

The members of Away’s board say they feel as if they fell victim to management by Twitter mob.

The company now says it disputes The Verge’s reporting and has hired Elizabeth M. Locke, the lawyer who successfully brought a defamation case against Rolling Stone magazine for a story about a supposed gang rape at the University of Virginia. It is unclear whether Away plans to bring a lawsuit.

In a statement, The Verge said, “Steph Korey responding to our reporting by saying her behavior and comments were ‘wrong, plain and simple’ and then choosing to step down as C.E.O. speaks for itself.”

Sitting in a windowless conference room at the company’s SoHo headquarters, Ms. Korey, at one point nearly breaking down in tears, said that the month since the article was published had been a tough lesson about management — and herself. She was bombarded by criticism on Twitter and other social media platforms that she thought would put the company’s future in jeopardy.

“It’s very upsetting if suddenly total strangers tell you that you should get an abortion,” said Ms. Korey, who is pregnant. One user on Twitter wrote: “Imagine how she’ll treat that baby.”

In the moment, she said, she chose to take herself out of the chief executive role and make herself executive chairwoman. “I said, ‘I don’t know if the company needs a C.E.O. under fire right now,’” she said. “‘Why don’t we just accelerate our transition plan?’”

In a separate interview, Ludwig Ensthaler, a partner at the venture capital firm Global Founders Capital and the only independent director on Away’s four-member board, confirmed that it had been Ms. Korey’s decision to step down and that there was no pressure from outside investors. He added that he should not have accepted the restructuring plan she proposed in the first place.

Ms. Korey had already recruited Mr. Haselden to the company to become its president, with the promise that, after a transition period, he would be elevated to chief executive to help take the company public. When the plan changed after the Verge article was published, she said she would become executive chairwoman and Mr. Haselden the chief executive. But behind the scenes, she said, she expected both of them to operate pretty much in their original roles, just with different titles. Ms. Korey’s co-founder, Jen Rubio, will remain president and chief brand officer.

“I honestly thought that people didn’t care that much about the inner workings of Away,” she said, “Who is C.E.O. and who is executive chairman — that wasn’t something that, at a private company that’s less than four years old that sells travel products, I just didn’t think would be news and people would care.”

But, she said, it quickly became clear that her plan to remain at Away — effectively in the same role but with a new title — was not understood inside or outside the company.

“The way it became perceived it was like I stepped down and like I left the company,” she said. “I have a very external-facing role working with new vendors, working with new partners, recruiting new candidates. And without a change, it looks like they have a board director reaching out to them who doesn’t work at the company.”

Mr. Haselden said in a telephone interview that the article didn’t paint Ms. Korey as the person he knew and said her original decision to step aside “was very selfless in trying to defuse the firestorm of social media.”

“But it just created a misconception that she was exiting the business, which was never the intent,” he added. Making them both co-chief executive, he said, “will clarify how we intended to operate from the beginning.” Ms. Korey said she still planned to eventually step aside after a transition period and Mr. Haselden will become the sole chief executive.

Whether the article reflected an accurate picture of the company — The Verge has since published several updates, clarifications and corrections — it is hard to judge if Ms. Korey herself has changed.

The company provided a trove of emails from employees that suggested they loved working for her. Yet even after the Verge article appeared, employees continued to leak screenshots of Away’s Slack channels to the site, suggesting that whatever changes had been made, some people inside the company remained unhappy.

Ms. Korey said she has done a lot of soul-searching since the article was published. While she maintained that it misrepresented her behavior, she said she recognized that she had made mistakes and could improve.

“When I think back on ways I’ve phrased feedback, there have been times where the word choice isn’t as thoughtful as it should have been, or the way it was framed actually wasn’t as constructive as it could have been,” she said. “Those are not, in the eyes of our leadership and the eyes of our board, terminal, unsolvable problems.”