Despite the fact that the Barbie star Margot Robbie recently arrived at Sydney airport toting her pink vintage-inspired luggage, and that her resplendent yellow cases were also featured in Robbie’s shoot for US Vogue, Sara Banks, the founder of SteamLine Luggage, hasn’t actually seen the movie when we speak.
While Barbie has been travelling from Barbie Land to the real world, so too has Banks been on the road. Together with her husband, Mark Duckenfield, and the couple’s four sons, Milo, ten, Ruben, eight, Benji, six, and Felix, three, she has visited Greece, Mauritius, Australia, Bali, Colombia, Kenya, Rodrigues and the Maldives. She can be forgiven, therefore, for not making it to the cinema yet as she dials in on a flaky connection from her family’s remote log cabin deep in the woods of Wisconsin.
“It’s pretty isolated but really beautiful and there’s a fly fishing river just down below so we are really getting a beautiful injection of nature,” she says of the cabin, which reveals soaring pine trees through its windows. “I don’t come home very often but it’s really nice to put down roots and be calm here.”
After almost two years of travelling Banks has already done a “soft landing” with her children, who returned to school in Dublin for the last few weeks of term. “If we plan another trip – which hopefully we will in another four or five years’ time – I want them to trust that we can pull them out of things but that they can come back and settle in again.”
Banks says that it was a wonderful feeling to be embraced by community, friends and family on their return and interesting to see how fully immersed children are in the moment – whether at home or abroad. She says that they will take home “emotional and mental souvenirs” from their travels in terms of maturity and open-mindedness.