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

CS: Has anything been done in particular at eBags to offset the rising costs associated with mailing catalogs?
PC: Well, our last couple of catalogs we’ve actually teamed with Shoes.com, where the first half of the book is eBags.com products and the last half of the book are kind of complimentary Shoes.com products. The nice thing about that is sometimes you have the same brands: North Face has bags, they also have shoes; Nike, has bags, they also have shoes; Columbia has bags and shoes; Michael Kors, Stuart Weitzman, Kate Spade, Cole Haan, etc. So it’s somewhat compatible from that end of it.
And in this regard we can share in the cost of the marketing vehicle and also share our lists. Shoes.com is now able to send a catalog to our best 300,000 to 400,000 customers, and we have access, at no charge, to Shoes.com customers. To the Shoes.com customers, Shoes.com has the first eight pages or 12 pages or 16 pages, whatever the book size is. We reverse it to Shoes.com; they have the cover, they have the first 16 pages, we have the last 16 pages. That’s a way where you’re basically splitting the cost and getting it down to something that’s kind of maybe more easy to hit your return on investment hurdles.