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

CS: What are one or two factors that you think are critical to future success at eBags?
PC: We have to focus on the customer shopping experience, making it easier, more interesting and compelling — a reason to shop at eBags. I think an interesting thing has happened in the last several years: Back in 2000 and 2001, there really was a nuclear winter of people just trying to survive. Everybody built a foxhole and you just got down and tried to make your cash last as long as you could. People weren’t experimenting. You had to survive and drive traffic, but it was really cost containment.
Now everybody’s peeped out of the foxhole and realized, “OK, now this is a time to grow and expand and offer different things.” In our world, we’re competing against small mom-and-pop’s, but also some of the big boys, the Amazon’s and eBay and Overstock and Macy’s and the department stores. Some of these guys sell bags and they’ve got deep pockets. So for us at eBags, we’ve got to be super nimble. We’ve got to really get our ear to the ground as to what the customer wants, and deliver it before one of the big guys do. We have something on our site, for example, a laptop case finder, where you key in the laptop that you own and hit go and it searches and brings forward all of the laptop cases that fit that laptop. You’re not going to see Kohl’s or Wal-Mart or Penney’s building out features like that, probably, because they’re just not thinking about bags 24 hours a day like we are. Those are the types of things that set us apart.
Another perfect example is, starting last week, the TSA at airport security is allowing certain bags that are checkpoint-friendly, where you don’t have to take your laptop out of a bag for screening. I actually had this case where I took it out, like an idiot got to my plane and realized that I never picked up my laptop, and had to run off the plane, go get my laptop and I missed my flight. Fortunately I was going Denver to L.A., so an hour later there was another one. But I was like, “Oh my God, what if I was going to Europe or something.” Now they have bags, it just started last week, where you can keep your laptop in because it’s a special pocket that has no other pens or anything — it’s just there for the laptop and it’s TSA approved. And eBags was the first company to offer that online. It’s called CODi.
eBags is the one that’s offering this product first, has a video on how it works and why it’s important, what TSA is looking for, and then did a press release to tell the world that TSA has just approved these bags (it was August 16) and go to eBags.com to buy it there. Our feeling is you’re just not going to have some of these big guys. They’re going to wake up and realize, “Oh gosh, we need to have this TSA checkpoint-friendly bag also.” But we’ll have already been out there, people will have told their friends. We want to be as viral as we can. We have to be scrappy. And we’ve got to be the first because we will not be the biggest, at least in that kind of overall, I’m talking vs. Penney’s and Sears and Wal-Mart and some of these big guys. But we’ve got to be the best in our category.