The journey into our own brand began as a side hustle. At this time in 2016, things were very different to today. Amazon was the wild west and things like incentivised reviews were allowed - you could give away free products in exchange for a review! The good old days...
We found a niche and ordered some samples from China (finding suppliers on Alibaba.com). When receiving the initial samples, none of them met our expectations of quality. However, we were eager and nearly moved forward with one of them despite this.
Thankfully we did hold off and ordered some more samples of another similar product from another supplier. These samples were much better and we gladly went ahead with the bulk order.
Once these goods arrived and became available on Amazon, we were surprised to see a few sales come in on the first day prior to starting pay per click (PPC) advertising and prior to running our launch strategy. This is pretty much unheard now-a-days, but even we didn't expect this back when we started.
This product ended up exceeding our expectations and we ran into the common issue with most successful products - we couldn't get the next order in quick enough so we temporarily ran out of stock.
We saw things working so we started developing more products to add to our brand. When our second product was in transit to us, Amazon made the dreaded announcement that incentivised reviews were no longer allowed. We were screwed! How were we now going to launch the product?
Obviously, it was not the end. A new strategy was required that would require a bit more investment to get things going.
As we continued to add more products and grow the brand, the competition did also. We needed to get more creative to keep our market share growing. This is where we really excelled. A snippet of what we implemented to excel the brand:
1) Investing into new product imagery to make our brand stand out from the rest
2) Emotionally connect with customers (via the use of packaging, inserts, email sequences, social media, listings, etc)
3) Increasing our PPC aggression (but in a very strategic way) - this required close monitoring of many KPIs and a wider understanding of the impacts of PPC spend
4) Continually improving our products by making adjustments on future orders based on the feedback - we never settled with mediocre quality
5) Launching into international markets
6) Pivoted strategy where required - for example, when we entered into the US market, things really didn't go to plan, but we figured out how to navigate the issues
7) Traveling to China to meet our suppliers and to find new ones
8) Never taking our eye of the ball and getting complacent
When we started up the brand, we had no intentions to one day sell it, but we soon came to realise this was the obvious ultimate goal.
In 2019, we started to really optimise out things and structure the business in a way that would make it one day sellable. At this time, we didn't have a plan on when we would sell, just the idea that we would one day.
In 2020, as we started planning out future growth plans, we saw it was actually a good time for us to sell. Prior to listing the business for sale, we ran our numbers, understood the trajectory of the business and came up with the minimum amount we would accept for selling the brand. This meant we were aligned when going into negotiations.
In March 2020, we were in solid negotiations with the buyer, and in the middle of the negotiations, Covid-19 resulted in the first lockdowns in Western countries. Amazon FBA shipping times went from 1-2 days to 30 days leading to plummeting conversion rates. Amazon stopped accepting new inventory into their Fulfilment Centres. Through all of this chaos, we were able to figure out contingency plans to minimise disruption where possible.
Fortunately, the buyers were still interested, but they were after a discount in light of the pandemic. We held strong and were ready to let the deal pass as we were happy to "weather the storm". We didn't know how long the effects of the pandemic would last, but knew we would get through it eventually. At this point, when we were ready to let the deal go, the buyer surprisingly accepted. A few months later after a rigorous due diligence process, the business was sold.
