Episode #17 - My $11,000 per month product Amazon Case Study

There's something out there that you want and it's genuinely gonna make your life better, then you should go for it. And even if it's scary, and even if it's, you know, seems like a huge deal, you should just go for it because we're not really on this planet for that long. So.

Welcome to the E Commerce Freedom Podcast with your host, Oliver Denyer. Learn the practical steps you need to take to build a business you can run on your own terms. Escape the 9 to 5 work from anywhere in the world.

Hey, how's it going? It's Olly here. Very, very warm welcome to the E Commerce Freedom Podcast. So in today's episode, I wanted to tell you about my product that's doing more than 11k per month on Amazon. This is a crazy story. This is one of my best products, actually. And I wanted to tell it to you because it really demonstrates the power you have with an Amazon business. It really illustrates how you can design a lifestyle using a business and kind of decide first what you want to manifest with this stuff and then go out there and get it. Really, really inspiring. And it just makes things fun. So last year, you'll probably know what happened with my girlfriend in 2014, right? Back a few years ago, she had to leave the UK because we had problems with her visa. And so I was stuck in the UK by myself. We were completely separated and it sucked. So, long story short, I built the E commerce business and we wanted to find a European country where we could live to continue our relationship. And my dream was to be running this online business from there. So I built up the business. It was crazy. I had six figures in the first year and things just really kicked off. And then we finally realized actually moving to Sweden would be a perfect fit. Getting residency there seemed to be quite easy for me as an EU citizen and her as my partner. So we realized that Sweden was the place to go and this was our plan. So last year we actually achieved this. And it's like crazy, like amazing that going from broke and. And having no girlfriend to being back with my girlfriend, having an amazing business, like, it just feels like I can't describe how amazing the journey has been so far. And last year we were living in like a really nice apartment in Stockholm, a place called Sodermalm, which is kind of a bit southern Stockholm, kind of hipster area, maybe equivalent of Shoreditch in uk, in London. And we just had an awesome apartment there. And I'd found the apartment a few months before moving to Sweden, had Loads of time to do it. But then all of a sudden my landlord was actually living in Turkey at the time of his family. And all of a sudden there was like a huge political thing in Turkey. There was a failed coup, the government. So this meant that Turkey was all of a sudden really, really unstable. Like when there's a military coup, like, you don't want to be living in that country. You know, in that situation, really, infrastructure is actually starting to fall apart. So they had to quickly move back from Turkey back to Sweden, and they wanted their apartment back. So we had like less than a month to find a new place. It was kind of like bit of a stressful situation. And don't know if you've ever lived in like a big city, but finding apartment, like, it takes time, finding right location, right size, right rent per month and all that stuff. Like it takes time to find something. You definitely want more than a month to do it. So we found it really difficult to find a new place. And we ended up moving into some temporary places in the middle of trying to find a new permanent place. And some of them were kind of a bit terrible, like falling apart, not the best places to live in. And then after a while, couple months of living in temporary places, we found possibly the most beautiful apartment I've ever seen in my life. This place is amazing. I'm living here right now and it's actually owned by a Swedish Rockstar. Like, I'm not going to tell you who it is, but it's actually owned by Rockstar. So he put it on the marketplace and I was just looking at it on one of the, like rental websites in Sweden, thinking, this will be my dream apartment. It had everything, I'm talking like built in, coffee machine in the wall, recording studio, huge bedroom, massive amount of space, fireplace, working fireplace. Like everything you possibly want in an awesome apartment and have it like perfectly newly renovated kitchen. It was a dre. But there was one issue with this apartment, and that issue was the fact that it was going to cost me $4,000 a month, four grand a month to live in this place. Now that's a lot of money. Like, to be honest with you, it's not like I can't afford it. It's just that I could be putting that money into other areas of my business. I could be putting that money into other things. You know, I could be putting into growth. I could hire staff. Like there's by products. Like there's loads of stuff I could do with that money. So, like, should go for this apartment. Or am I just going to feel guilty that I'm spending so much of, you know, our capital on where we're living? Well, I've always been a huge proponent of the abundance mindset. I believe that, you know, if there's something out there that you want and it's generally going to make your life better, then you should go for it. And even if it's scary, and even if it's, you know, seems like a huge deal, you should just go for it because we're not really on this planet for that long. So I'd love to live in an amazing apartment. So I thought to myself, well, look, I can come up with a compromise. I can move into this incredible apartment, but in exchange for living there and enjoying it, have to earn more cash to actually pay for it. So I said to myself, look, tell me what I'm going to do. I'm going to launch a private label product that's going to pay for the rent in this apartment. If I can do that, then I'll live there and won't have to feel guilty. So I set out to actually do this. And I use Jungle Scout, as everyone does every time I launch a product. Use Jungle Scout to find something with great revenue, lots of volume, high demand and not too much competition. And I found a product. It was actually a kitchen at home product that fits really, really well within my brand that was doing nine grand per month. That's in English pounds, £9,000 per month. The sort of average potential profit ceiling was about 3,000 pounds, which is about $4,000. So this product looked like it was going to facilitate the profit I needed to cover my rent. Okay, so this, this got me excited. I was thinking, of course, launch this thing, get it selling, then I can justify living in a crazy expensive apartment. So I went over to Alibaba, found a few suppliers, message a couple of them, you know what it's like back and forth, trying to figure out the perfect design that I wanted to choose, the perfect branding on their packaging, all that stuff that just takes forever. Finally found a supplier I was really happy with. They sent a really nice selection of samples. They actually sent it to my house in the uk and my mum was the one who tried out the samples and she said they were, you know, one of them was a lot better quality than the other two. So I said, all right, Mom, I'm going to take your word for it. And we went with that product. I actually got the box designed by an American designer who does a lot of packaging for E Commerce Products. He was great. I found him on Upwork. He was awesome. And then I got the boxes manufactured in the uk. So I got the products made in China, imported them, and I had them assembled with all the boxes in the uk. Also, I actually sourced a product I was bundling with this product in the UK as well. So there was a product from China imported in a. In a box from the UK with some bundled wholesale stock from the uk. This is kind of what made my product. So my initial batch was an order of 500, right? Actually quite a big initial order. But I was very confident this product had good demand and I had a bit of capital to put behind it. So I felt confident. And you guys can do smaller test batches if you want. Obviously, 500 is quite a lot, but I felt confident. When you feel confident and you've got the data to back it up, you can do bigger test batches as well. This is what started me off. So I got this product imported. I did all the marketing stuff that I usually do with products, did paperclip advertising, did promotions. I really optimized my listing, got it looking as good as possible, did a lot of copywriting research and what customers wanted, fed that in there, got really nice pictures taken, put them on the listing, and just made it look really, really good. Long story short, within two months, this product was doing over $11,000 in revenue. Like this was unbelievable. It was doing about £9,500, I believe. And yeah, in dollars, that's about 11k. A third of that was profit. So within two months, this product is now paying the rent for my apartment. Unbelievably cool. So there's a few takeaways I want you to grab from this case study. A few things I want you to apply in your business. Number one, if something sounds scary, like a new venture, maybe you're thinking about moving to a new city, maybe you want to design a new lifestyle, maybe you want to get a new car. Whatever it is, you can build a business that facilitates that. But here's the thing. Before diving in and making it all happen, you want to test the idea that's gonna eventually build into that business first. So for me, I tested with an initial order of 500 units. For you, you could test with 50 units, right? If those units didn't sell, then I probably wouldn't have gone on to order more. Like my second order was 2,000 units. I would never have ordered 2,000 units first. So test the thing that you want to experiment with first. And by the way, if you want a rundown of how I test and validate products, then if you go back to episode 12, I actually give you an example of how I'm about to test 10 private label products at once, spending no more than $100 on each import. So go listen to that episode 12. You can go to ecommercefreedom.com 12 to listen to that one and I'll give you a breakdown of how I validate products. So you can do very small test batches. So that's the first thing. Second thing is the reason why this product kicked off so well is because I look for something with very, very high demand, very low competition. A lot of the other sellers didn't have many reviews and they didn't look like their listings were really laid out very well. The revenue was really, really high for this product, especially for the uk. I was very happy with it. There's obviously a lot of products out there that sell a lot more, a lot better. But for the UK, this product was pretty good. 10k a month is like really solid. So you have to find a product where there's high demand, otherwise, you know, you're not really sure whether it's going to sell well or not. So I hope this case studies inspired you. I really want you to build a business that enables you to upgrade your lifestyle, move to a better place, live in a better city, surround yourself with awesome people. So if you go to ecommercefreedom.com 17 you can grab my 3 Steps to Seamless Imports PDF. This is a completely free resource for you. Go to ecommercefreedom.com 17 you'll get this shown notes for this episode, the transcript, and you'll also get my three Steps to Seamless Imports PDF that will teach you exactly what to look for when you're importing products. If you don't want there to be any hassle along the way, you want to deal with legitimate suppliers, you don't want to have to deal with loads of importing nightmares, and you want to make this business as simple as possible for you to set up. So I hope you've enjoyed this episode. I really enjoyed putting it together for you as always. Can't wait to catch you next week. By the way, if you haven't done so already, subscribe to this podcast on itunes. If you found anything valuable, it would be amazing if you could leave me a quick review. I really appreciate that. I haven't got many yet, so I really love for you to do that. Also go over to YouTube, type in ecommerce freedom and find me on there and subscribe and you'll find a ton of videos where I'm giving you even more value bombs to help you on your journey. Thanks so much for listening. And you know what? I'll catch you next week. Take care and I'll speak to you very, very soon.