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

CS: What’s the primary merchandise offered in the catalog?
PC: I’d say that we have four major categories: handbags, luggage, backpacks and laptop cases. Those account for pretty close to 80 percent of our sales. Handbags are a great example, and this gets to the point why I think eBags is successful. We have over 200 brands of purses and handbags; over 12,000 individual SKUs. So if a woman says, “I just want to shop for myself,” maybe browse at lunch while she’s having a brown-bag lunch at her desk, she can click on eBags and scroll away and shop for over 12,000 handbags.
But I want to say, it’s really important to us that it doesn’t stop there, because it’s not just like flipping through pages in a catalog. We try and really advance the experience. An example of that is we have an area called “On the Streets,” where we find emerging handbag designers that can’t make it into a big-box department store — Neiman Marcus or a Bloomingdale’s — but you may find them in SoHo in New York City or the Highlands area here in Denver or Jackson and Fillmore in San Francisco. We find them and have them come onto eBags. We do a video of them; just tell us a little bit about how you got your start and your inspiration, and why your handbag designs are different from everybody else. They send us copies of where they’ve appeared in Vogue or Cosmo or Lucky magazine and we put those in their own personal boutique.
So all of a sudden, this small little designer who can’t really make it in, and thinks she’s the next Kate Spade but no one will give her a chance, we have over 80 of them on our site. That’s what the Internet’s about: discovery. That’s an example of why someone would shop at eBags — the woman in Des Moines or San Antonio or Boise, Idaho can see the same things that are currently in SoHo in New York City.