The Amazon Accelerate annual selling partners conference is the opportunity for business owners who are actively selling on the world’s largest online retail platform to be the first to learn about Amazon’s latest tools and innovations, speak one-to-one with experts and connect with other selling partners.
NAWBO’s CEO Jen Earle was honored to meet with executives at the fifth annual event last month in Seattle, Washington, as Amazon is a valued partner. She brought with her two women business owners who have product-based businesses and are currently doing business on Amazon and looking to grow it.
Nichole MacDonald, Founder of the Sash Bag, San Diego, California
It’s been said that failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently. That was true for Nichole, whose first women’s handbag business that she launched in 2008 failed after just a few years.
With a background in retail packaging and product design, she went back to work freelancing, but it was during a recession when work was hard to find. “I was a single mom, my car had been repossessed and my credit was ruined,” she recalls. “It was so hard to recover from that, so when I came up with the idea for Sash Bag, I thought I had no business starting another company.”
The idea came to her while attending an event at Legoland with her son. They ran a mile through the amusement park and then stayed after to enjoy it. In between, Nichole went back to her car to grab her purse—another bag she had designed. She felt so frustrated trying to fit and organize everything that she was inspired to create something better.
“I realized it was still just a bag and thought what if there was something that wrapped around your torso and had pockets?” she describes. “It wasn’t working because what I really needed still held all your things, but wasn’t a bag at all.”
The next day, Nichole reached out to a good friend and seamstress. They went to the fabric store together and she helped Nichole make the first “Sash Bag.” That night, Nichole wore it out for wine tasting and dancing and three strangers approached her to ask about it. She knew she was onto something special.
Nichole had nothing to invest in her new business and had no way to get a loan, so took it slow. She developed a prototype and got feedback. She pre-sold a few bags at a time. Then, she made 50 to 100 bags at a time, sold them and adjusted the design based on feedback. “I did that for two years, so by the time I officially launched in October 2012, I had enough validation from strangers.”
For the next several years, Nichole sold Sash Bags—one customer at a time—at farmers markets, street fairs, county fairs and the state fair. She had grown her business to around $350K in annual sales, but it wasn’t her whole vision. “I thought if I can go to a farmers market and sell a $140 bag next to someone selling kale, I had to get it online,” she explains.
Nichole set up a Shopify website and invested in Facebook digital advertising, which was a lot less crowded and less expensive at the time. It boosted Sash Bag’s sales into the multi-millions almost overnight.
In 2018, she got Sash Bag on Amazon as well. She did a kick-starter campaign and raised $1 million in 30 days to expand manufacturing and into various Amazon distribution centers. “That strategy takes time to ramp up, so by the time we deployed it, it was the pandemic and factories were shut down, so it had to be put on the backburner,” she shares.
Nichole knew there were benefits to selling on Amazon and revisited the strategy last year to make Amazon a larger part of the business. Currently, it’s 10 percent of overall revenue. “If you’re on Amazon, people know you’re a legitimate company,” she says. She sees Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA) as a good way to expand internationally, too, since everything can be done through Amazon and their international distribution partners.
“That’s one reason why I was excited to go to the conference,” she says. “There’s nothing but opportunity for us on Amazon. Ninety percent of our business is direct to consumer. Most everyone I met there is trying to do it the other way around.”
Nichole is particularly excited for new, higher end specialty product she plans to introduce next year and how she’ll leverage Amazon to differentiate it from her core product. “Core product will be on Amazon and specialty product on my website,” she shares. “I wanted to learn more about how to sell on Amazon, and holy cow, I can’t tell you how glad I am that I went.”
Some of Nichole’s key takeaways were:
- New generative AI prompts are being rolled out to more easily create product listings and more.
- Buy with Prime, which is different from Amazon Prime, is a benefit to being on Fulfilled By Amazon (FBA). With Buy with Prime, people can use their Prime account to check out on Sash Bag’s website. The website can also feature the Buy with Prime badge.
- Through Buy with Prime, you can now do video ads, which are important for Sash Bag since it’s such a demonstratable product. You just work with an Amazon-approved service provider who manages and runs the ads.
- Amazon’s “mind-blowing” plans for the future—to have 500 million drone deliveries per year by the end of the decade.
Kimmi Wernli, Owner of Crazy Richard’s Peanut Butter, Plain City, Ohio
World War I, with its wartime meat rationing, solidified peanut butter’s place as a delicious, protein-packed pantry staple. Today, peanut butters are more popular than ever—including one from Crazy Richard’s that’s made from 100% peanuts.
Kimmi took over this family-owned business from her father in 2015. “It’s been in my family my whole life,” she says. “I grew up with the business and with peanuts and peanut butter—I was obsessed!”
Indeed, Kimmi spent her childhood “working for peanuts,” as she likes to say. Crazy Richard’s had a manufacturing facility, where Kimmi cleaned floors and drove forklifts. There was also a storefront, where she ran the cash register, talked to customers and upsold them. When Crazy Richard’s began doing mail orders, Kimmi took customers’ orders by phone.
Later, when Kimmi was in college and no longer part of the day-to-day business, she helped with the website and a recipe blog featuring tips on using their product in cooking. “I said, ‘We’ve got to bring this company out of obscurity and get it online’ because that was a new thing,” she says. Kimmi also launched their social media presence, and about 10 years ago, began collaborating with influencers.
When Kimmi received NAWBO’s invitation to attend the Amazon conference, she was excited to explore opportunities to grow Crazy Richard’s business on the online retail platform. She was also excited to continue a family tradition. “I don’t remember a single family vacation growing up where we didn’t visit a grocery store and check on our product,” she explains. “I still do that today.”
For Seattle, Kimmi brought along her four children, an 18-year-old, 16-year-old and 13-year-old twins, and they visited local grocery stores together. “It’s so fun,” she says of their involvement in the business. “They were very helpful during COVID, and that’s when our Amazon business took off. Peanut butter is this pantry staple protein and comfort food. People either couldn’t go out or the shelves of their local stores were empty and they were looking for alternative places to find food.”
Pre-COVID, Crazy Richard’s Amazon sales were nominal, but when the pandemic started in March 2020, the company was suddenly fulfilling hundreds of orders a day. “It was a fulfilling experience for our family,” she remembers. “We would come into the office and pack and fill orders and felt like we were doing our part to get food to people who needed it. It really gave us a sense of purpose to be providing something so nourishing and sustaining during such a scary time.”
When Crazy Richard’s first ventured onto Amazon, Kimmi says it was a little overwhelming and they had to think outside the box—or jar—because they were using glass, which wasn’t ideal for shipping. The glass jars were having to be double-boxed with extra padding and they weren’t exactly lightweight.
“The extra labor and packaging added up so we switched to plastic and that’s been better all around,” Kimmi says. “There’s less damage and it’s lighter weight. There’s also less of a carbon footprint on the environment.”
One of the early challenges of selling on Amazon as well as through the Crazy Richard’s website was the need to be consistent and not compete with themselves. On Amazon, consumers see an all-in price. If they looked on the company’s website, they saw the price per jar and then shipping was added later, which made the peanut butter appear expensive. As a result, they adjusted their website pricing so it’s consistent with the Amazon pricing with free shipping.
“We’re not trying to compete with Amazon on our website,” Kimmi shares. “I see them as a great marketing tool, especially with all the customer reviews, so wouldn’t want to take sales away from that even though it’s a higher margin if they bought from our website. The long-term gain is how I look at it.”
Crazy’s Richard’s business is still primarily brick and mortar in grocery stores like Walmart, Kroger, Whole Foods and more. Their website accounts for 1 percent and Amazon 10 percent of overall sales. That’s why she was excited to learn from Amazon at the conference.
Some of Kimmi’s key takeaways were:
- The big announcements—in almost every session, they announced a new program or platform they’re going to be implementing.
- One announcement was about a new partnership with TikTok, which Crazy Richard’s wasn’t on, but Kimmi immediately texted her marketing person to get the ball rolling.
- Another was about an Amazon influencer program launched for creators to promote product through Amazon.
- Both TikTok and the influencer program have since been incorporated into Crazy Richard’s 2025 marketing plan and budget.
- She can tell they’re consistently trying to find better ways for sellers to navigate their platform.
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