Exiting to Samsonite After Selling 29 Million Bags with Jon Nordmark

The Exit - Presented By Flippa

Technology

5 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 6 February 2023

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week on The Exit: Jon Nordmark was working at Samsonite in the 90s, for eight years Jon learnt about the bag business from the ground up and managed 21 different marketing and distribution channels. When the internet popped up, he was excited to talk to the CEO about this new distribution channel. But the CEO didn’t see the potential of selling bags online, so Jon quit to start eBags. Early on, eBags were focused on conversion, going from $13 to acquire $1 in revenue, to a low of 12c to acquire $1 in revenue in the first year. eBags had a number of acquisition offers but investors weren’t happy with the early offers. Seven years after their first offer, they finally exited to Jon’s previous employer, Samsonite. At the time of exit the business was generating $165MM in revenue with just 120 employees. Listen to find out about the challenges of working towards an exit for 7 years and why they should have taken the first offer to exit. Jon Nordmark is the Co-founder and CEO of Iterate.ai (2013-now), and was the Co-founder and CEO of eBags. After selling 29 million bags (worth $1.6 billion), eBags was acquired by Samsonite in 2017. Iterate.ai’s goal is to speed up Digital Transformation in a modern way, while 90% of Iterate's revenue comes from their patented drag-n-drop, low-code AI app platform called Interplay. Website - https://www.iterate.ai/ Twitter @Jon_Nordmark - https://twitter.com/Jon_Nordmark LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/nordmark/ -- The Exit—Presented By Flippa: A 30-minute podcast featuring expert entrepreneurs who have been there and done it. The Exit talks to operators who have bought and sold a business. You’ll learn how they did it, why they did it, and get exposure to the world of exits, a world occupied by a small few, but accessible to many. To listen to the podcast or get daily listing updates, click on flippa.com/the-exit-podcast/

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, and welcome to the exit presented by flippa the world's largest marketplace to buy and sell online businesses and startups
0:06.5	The exit is a 30 minute podcast for you doing amazing entrepreneurs who have been there and they have done it
0:11.4	The exit talks to operators who have bought and sold businesses of all different sizes
0:16.0	You'll learn how they did it why they did it and get exposure to the world of exits
0:20.6	It's a world occupied by a small few but accessible to many now on this special episode
0:27.1	I sit down with John Nordmark. He's an awesome entrepreneur who sold e-bags
0:33.9	And this was back in the day when he's talking about how they had to build out a whole e-mail
0:39.3	Database just to send emails
0:41.3	This was before the mailchamps of the world and he talks about building this from the ground up and there's multiple times in this interview where he talks about
0:51.3	Revenue figures and going from you know
0:54.1	$13 to acquire one dollar and revenue all the way down to you know 10 cents or so to generate one dollar and revenue
1:01.5	And just that radical change that they did through marketing and e-bags
1:06.4	Was acquired by Samsonite and he talks about the level of volume that they did at
1:13.1	160 million dollars in revenue and that's exceeding 1.5 million on average per employee
1:21.2	So if everybody to you know wrap their heads around this a million and a half dollars per employee is
1:28.5	fantastically efficient
1:30.5	Company and something to really praise when it comes to a tech company
1:34.9	So I got a chance to kind of unpack this with John and we go through his whole
1:40.7	story of the
1:42.7	Multiple offers that were presented to acquiring e-bags back in the day and
1:47.6	Investors kind of not agreeing with it and just the incredible
1:51.7	Alchem there of you know getting all these offers and then ultimately you know exiting as they were making 160
	...

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