Why We Built Ms. Jetsetter

August is National Black Business Month. It is the kind of moment that invites reflection, so I want to tell you how this brand actually started.

It began with frustration.

I was on vacation in the Caribbean, and I opened my jewelry case to find every necklace I had brought knotted into a single mass. It took me somewhere between thirty and forty five minutes to untangle. On a beautiful morning, in a beautiful place, that is not how you want to start your day. It changed my whole mood.

Then there were the work trips. I was flying to New York constantly in 2017, and I wanted to freshen up before I walked into a meeting. But my makeup brushes were full size, which meant they were in my checked bag, which meant they were useless to me at the gate. Every single time.

I looked for something better. What I found were either bags that worked but looked like gym equipment, or bags that looked good and fell apart by the third trip. Nothing was designed by someone who traveled the way I did.

And I knew I was not the only one. Every woman I talked to had some version of the same story. The tangled necklaces, the leaking bottle, the makeup bag that never fit anywhere. We were all quietly solving the same problem badly, and none of us should have had to.

So I created Ms. Jetsetter to help solve those problems.

When I started mapping my way out of my corporate job, I took a course on selling products online, paid about nine hundred dollars for it, and decided to bet on myself. In 2019, I left.

The jewelry case came first, because that was the frustration I felt most sharply. Then the makeup case. The hanging toiletry bag came after a trip to visit the factory, when I understood what was actually possible to build. Together those three became the Travel Trio, which is still the piece this brand is built around and still the thing I would grab first if I were packing tonight.

Luggage was never part of the original plan. It came years later, after someone I met at a trade show told me I should "get into luggage". He was right. This year we launched the luggage set.

What I did not fully expect was what came after.

Ms. Jetsetter is now carried at Macy's and Kohl's online. We were featured twice on CBS Mornings this year, once heading into Memorial Day and again around the Fourth of July, which happen to be the two biggest travel weekends on the American calendar. We were selected for Lisa's Love List, Carol's Daughter founder Lisa Price's curated collection of Black-owned brands. None of that was guaranteed when I walked away from a steady paycheck to solve a problem with a jewelry case.

That is what National Black Business Month actually means to me. It is the accumulated weight of individual decisions that people made to buy from a brand founded by a Black woman who was not just solving a problem she had, but who believed other women were quietly dealing with the same thing.

Every order matters more than you know. Every review helps another traveler find us. Every time someone tells a friend, that is how a business like this grows.

We are still small. We are still figuring things out. But we are building something that we want to last, the same way we build our products.

Thank you for being part of it.

Tracey McGhee
Founder and CEO, Ms. Jetsetter

Read more about how Ms. Jetsetter started