A Chat With October’s Profile, Peter Cobb, co-founder/senior vice president, eBags
CS: Is there anything done at eBags to keep a light and fun environment for employees?
PC: It’s definitely a casual, work hard, play hard atmosphere. There’s things like a softball team and a soccer team, and we try and do beer Fridays, company picnics. Once in a while we’ll have dog Fridays, where dogs can come in; you just sign up and bring your dog in.
Yesterday was a great example, where we had somebody that just joined the company as a handbag merchandiser, and a message went around, “Come meet the new handbag merchandiser at this Irish pub across the street.” That type of thing. And the nice thing was that there were people from operations there, people from Web design there, merchandising, marketing. It’s really fascinating. When you go from zero to 130 people, it’s pretty easy to lose that small company, intimate feel. So you really do need to pay attention to the culture of the company, and communication is a big part of that.