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

CS: What’s the sales breakdown via the different channels, catalog and Web? And do you operate any retail stores?
PC: No retail stores. This is one of the issues that I think we all face with the catalog business. And that’s that it’s really challenging … you don’t know whether the sales are coming from catalog anymore because we no longer ask people to put in key codes. It’s challenging: Are they buying because they got the catalog or these happen to be the people that we e-mail as well?
So our catalogs, we really look at it as a 360-degree holistic program of let’s figure out our best customers, do some segmentation. For instance, we just sent out 750,000 back-to-school catalogs, and those are for people in households that have purchased backpacks within the last several years. I have three kids, so I know every back-to-school period it’s … kids just get new shoes, new clothes and their backpack. And that’s really what we’re targeting.
But to your question, we’re primarily online and the catalog is a small portion of that. We just hired a catalog manager, a direct mail and marketing manager in the last two months. Her job will be to continue more of that offline direct marketing.