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

CS: Was this your first venture into the catalog business?
PC: I’d done direct mail in the past; I ran the marketing for Samsonite. We’d done some direct mail, but this was really more from a consumer catalog, this was the first time.

CS: What initial challenges did eBags struggle with breaking into the catalog industry?
PC: I think the challenges for all of us now are how do you … the Internet, regardless of what people say and think, is still a direct marketing channel. And everything on the Internet, online sales, you can attribute to a certain source. With a catalog, it’s difficult to do that. With offline advertising, it’s difficult to do that. If you place a print ad in People magazine or Lucky magazine, you don’t really know the people that are driven to your site because of that ad you ran. And the catalog I think has some of those same aspects. So that’s one part of it — figuring out the sales attribution.
The second part of it is the Internet’s dynamic. We have products that come on the site that come off the site daily. With a catalog, you’re locked in on a 90-day or 120-day period, because of the nature of a printed piece. Not only putting it together, but also it sits on a coffee table and somebody may pick it up a month later, two months later and go in and purchase. So, not only from product availability, but also pricing. And there’s promotional pricing that goes on — there may be free shipping. So there are some issues sometimes with different consumer offers floating around, one via Internet, one via catalog.
And then I think rising costs makes it more and more challenging. It puts a lot more demands on those of us putting together catalogs. You just have to be smarter — things like list rentals, paper and postage costs.