eBags

» see ebags.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

a suitcase is a thing you buy near where you live. you want to feel the zipper, guess whether it survives an airport. ebags asked americans to skip that and trust a website in Colorado instead, and for a while a lot of them did. that trade was easier to make inside one country with one shipping map. it did not extend to a teenager on dial-up in Ankara, who bought bags from a shop with a door.

ebags was founded in 1998 by Jon Nordmark and four cofounders in Greenwood Village, Colorado, and the store went live in 1999 with a handful of luggage brands. It grew into the biggest online seller of luggage and travel gear in the United States, carrying hundreds of labels and building a following around detailed customer reviews and its own house line. By February 2016 it had sold more than 25 million bags, which is a strange and specific kind of monument.

Samsonite bought ebags in 2017 for about $105 million. That is the moment the clock started, though nobody framed it that way at the time. A luggage giant does not buy a rival storefront to keep running a rival storefront. It buys the traffic and the house designs, then decides how much of the old thing is worth carrying.

~ the dossier ~

~ the slow absorption ~

The visible change came in 2020, when ebags stopped selling brands Samsonite did not own. A store whose whole pitch was hundreds of labels under one roof became a store that sold you Samsonite and its sister names. The reviews and the interface stayed, but the reason to go there instead of anywhere else quietly left. Around the same time the headquarters moved from Colorado to Massachusetts, closer to the parent, further from whatever ebags used to be on its own.

~ the day it died ~

In August 2024 the ebags website went dark, and the Amazon storefront went with it. Samsonite did not stage a closing sale or a goodbye page. It took the parts it wanted, most notably the well-loved Mother Lode travel bags, and reissued them under the Samsonite name. The corpse was recycled so cleanly that a casual shopper might not notice a death happened at all, only that a URL they used to type now went nowhere.

~ what got buried with it ~

What went with ebags was the idea of the neutral shelf. For twenty years it was a place you could compare a JanSport against a Samsonite against a dozen others without the store having a horse in the race. An acquisition does not have to end that outright. It can just narrow the shelf one brand at a time until the store is a catalog for its owner. That is the quieter way these things go, and it leaves less to mourn because there is no dramatic failure to point at, only a slow settling into someone else's furniture.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »