A Chat With October’s Profile, Peter Cobb, co-founder/senior vice president, eBags

CS: Over the course of your career, is there one mistake you made that has stood out? And if so, how did you recover from that mistake?
PC: Well, in 2004 we bought a footwear site and said, “Boy, we’re doing this in bags, let’s duplicate it in the shoe world.” And we bought Shoedini.com and ran that for three years, and just realized that, you know, our passion, our core competency is bags, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a $40 billion retail category, globally. When you start diluting your efforts you sometimes open up that door for losing your leadership position. That was a mistake that I think we made — getting into the footwear business. There’s guys out there, from Zappos or Shoes.com, OnlineShoes.com, that have that market. They do a nice job at that and they’ve got an eight year head start. And you know what, they’re the experts in that category, let them carve it. That was kind of something that we learned early on.