A couple of months ago, an enterprising blogger and frequent traveler for business and pleasure, Victoria of Elisabeth-Emma, wrote a blog post about packing light for business travel.
Now, if you’ve ever traveled for business — it’s pretty safe to assume you have, if you found your way to our blog — you know this is a challenge. Between dressy clothes for day and casual clothes for after work, plus the necessary footwear, toiletries and whatever needed extras you tend to pack, it’s easy for bags to become both overstuffed and overweight pretty quickly.
Crew 9 20 inch Expandable Business Plus Rollaboard
Elisabeth-Emma provided a few good tips for us to use:
She managed to choose items that mixed and matched to create 16 unique outfits — we’re impressed. The items included a navy-blue wrap dress, a navy pencil skirt, a black tiered skirt, a pair of skinny black jeans, two colored cardigans, four tops (one striped, one red, one apricot and one pewter), a gray blazer, two each scarves and belts, and two pairs of shoes.
Shoes are a big issue, of course; too many pairs of shoes can be heavy and bulky and make packing light very difficult. Stick to the basics, consider sticking to sensible flats — they’re more comfortable and easier to pack. (And if you must bring something heavy or heeled, wear them on the plane.)
As far as extras go, she packed only the necessities for toiletries — and said the carry-on restrictions for liquids were actually quite helpful in limiting what she packed.
Check out her original post for proof in photos!
Our favorite takeaways from her post: Make sure everything is color coordinated. When every piece you pack matches with everything else, coming up with original outfits every day is far less taxing. And keep in mind that if you’re going somewhere new and traveling around a lot, it’s pretty unlikely that you’re going to see someone twice, let alone someone with the gall to call you on wearing the same piece of clothing twice, so feel free to wear an item a second or even third time, especially in a new city.
Related articles