332: How Amanda Recovered Her Business After Getting Crushed By Covid-19

00:00
You’re listening to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and dig deep into what strategies they use to grow their businesses. Now today I have Amanda Wittenborn back on the show and Amanda is a student in my Create a Profitable Online Store course who makes seven figures selling party supplies online. But during COVID-19 her business got crushed because no one was having parties any longer. But today’s episode is perhaps one of the best e-commerce comeback stories of all time. You’ll learn how Amanda quickly pivoted

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and grew her business even larger than before the pandemic hit. But before we begin, I want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. If you’re behind on planning for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, well Klaviyo is here to help. Klaviyo is the ultimate e-commerce marketing platform for online brands of all kinds and all sizes. With email automation, SMS marketing, list growth tools and more, you’ll get everything you need to build strong relationships that keep your customers coming back. And with the holiday season right around the corner, there’s no time like the present.

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Get up and running quickly with Klaviyo’s lightning fast integrations, pre-built marketing automations, and beautiful email templates. So whether you’re a billion dollar business or just starting out, Klaviyo is the e-commerce marketing platform for growth during the holidays and long after. Now you can get a free trial over at klaviyo.com slash my wife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash my wife. I also want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode. Now if you run an e-commerce business of any kind, you know how important it is to own your own customer contact list.

01:25
And this is why I’m focusing a significant amount of my efforts on SMS marketing. SMS or text message marketing is already a top five revenue source for my e-commerce store and I couldn’t have done it without Postscript.io, which is my text message provider. Now, why did I choose Postscript? It’s because they specialize in e-commerce stores and e-commerce is their primary focus. Not only is it easy to use, but you can quickly segment your audience based on your exact sales data and implement automated flows like an abandoned cart at the push of a button.

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Not only that, but it’s price well too. And with the holiday season rolling around, SMS is the perfect way to engage with your customers. So head on over to postscript.io slash Steve and try it for free. That’s P O S T S C R I P T dot IO slash Steve. Now onto the show. Welcome to the My Wife, Quit Her Job podcast, where we’ll teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here’s your host.

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Steve too.

02:25
Welcome to the My Wife, Quit Her Job podcast. Today I’m really happy to have Amanda Wittenborn back on the show. And Amanda is a student of my Creative Profitable Online Store course. And if you don’t remember her, she was a guest back in episode 269, where we talked about her seven figure e-commerce business selling party supplies. She was also the runner up in the five minute pitch, My Shark Tank Lake Show, where she almost won 50K, so close. Anyways, things were going great this year for her business.

02:52
And I believe she was on track for a record year until COVID-19 hit and she lost a significant portion of her business overnight. No one was having parties anymore and very few people were ordering party supplies. But if you know Amanda by now, she is a fighter. And today we’re going to talk about how she pivoted her business during the pandemic and grew her business even more while sheltered in place with her kids and her husband. And with that, welcome back on the podcast, Amanda, how are you doing?

03:19
I’m doing great. Thanks so much for having me back. It’s weird, right? We were just talking about how the kids are literally in another room in school right now. Yep, I have three of them on zoom. So one’s in the dining room, one’s in the kitchen, one’s in the basement. So I’m, you know, hold up in my bedroom to stay away from everybody. Yes, same here. My kids just logged on. And usually I have problems doing video. So fortunately, this is an audio

03:45
podcast. Otherwise, I’m not sure if the video would hold up with all the zoom sessions going on simultaneously. I know it’s crazy. So Amanda, please tell the audience, let’s catch them up a little bit how your business was doing prior to COVID-19 and where most of your sales were coming from in terms of product. Like kind of walk me through the timeline. Yeah, we were experiencing growth. We did finish the year last year at seven figures and we were on track to do even better this year.

04:13
January and February were great months for us and 99 % of my business was party supplies. So we were selling things like invitations, stickers, candy bar wrappers, water bottle wrappers, and we were working on expanding into paper products, paper plates, cups, and napkins. And then COVID-19 reared its ugly head and nobody was allowed to have parties anymore and pretty much

04:42
our sales, saw them drop 95 % in mid-March. Wow, just was it all of sudden? Pretty much, yeah. Okay. Yeah, pretty much overnight when it was like somewhere around March 13th, like our state shut down around then I think California had already shut down at that point. Yeah. And you know, more states started following and it was pretty much immediate. And I think maybe March

05:11
We were gonna bring in like $1,500 total in revenue. I mean, it was really bad, really bad. Can you remind the audience? this is your full time thing, right? Is your husband’s full time thing also? Correct. Yeah. So two years ago, he quit his job to work for me. So this is 100 % the only way our family makes money. Okay. So when that hit, can you just

05:37
kind of walk me through what was going on in your head at the time and what your contingency plans were and that sort of thing. Yeah, I mean, it was certainly unexpected and there were a lot of things going through my head. You know, I was definitely worried because I didn’t know how we were going to pay our bills and how we were going to buy groceries. I mean, obviously we had, you know, money saved up. So I knew we could do it for a couple months and not have too much trouble.

06:05
But there was that worry in the back of my mind, like we didn’t know how long this was going to go on. And if we didn’t, you know, have sales pickup, where were we going to make money from? How were we going to have an income? You know, there was a part of me that was mad at myself, uh, that I had a business that could be lost so quickly. I mean, nobody could have anticipated anything like this happening. But at the same time, I was like,

06:36
I should have a more pandemic-proof business. Maybe it’s just… That’s the first time I’ve heard that term actually, pandemic-proof business. You know, I tend to be a little hard on myself. So I was really mad because at that point too, you know, we had people working for us and I basically told them, I don’t have any work for you. We can’t continue to do what we’re doing.

07:01
I can’t keep paying you to take photos. I can’t keep paying you to package product. Like I had to let them all go because, you know, I didn’t know how much income we were even going to have. So I couldn’t just be spending money on anything. So you fired your kids. Is that is that what I’m hearing? The kids got fired. No, actually, the kids got hired because I was like, listen, this is a family business and you’re going to have to work for free.

07:29
We’re going to talk about it a little bit later, but go on. Sorry. Yeah, yeah, we can. So, I mean, that’s really where I was at the beginning and it was really depressing. mean, it was I was heartbroken, you know, like to watch what you’ve built for years just crumble like that. And so I think I spent a couple of weeks just laying on the couch and watching Tiger King like the rest of it all the while, though, you know, the creativity is churning, right? Like

07:59
I’m thinking through all of the scenarios and how are we going to do this and how are we going to make this work and what do people still need right now? Like what could I possibly offer with what I’m good at that people would still need even at a time like this? And that’s really where I was driven from was what do people still need and how can I provide it? And

08:29
It was about three weeks. I think I gave myself a few weeks of just, you know, we were baking cookies and making homemade pretzels and, you know, doing all those fun family activities and just enjoying being together. about three weeks and I was like, I need to get to work and I need to figure this out. So I started, I started making all sorts of new products that I thought maybe would be of use.

08:56
So some of the things I made were color your own stickers where they’re just black and white outlines and you could purchase them and the kids could color on them and just seemed like a fun little activity to do. I branched out and did small business stickers. So stickers for packaging for small business owners that are real cute that say things like, don’t worry, she won this or hide this from the husband or, you know.

09:25
Thanks for shopping small. Thanks for supporting our business. So I made a whole line of small business stickers. How did you know to do that? Was it just were you just kind of throwing things out there and seeing what was going to sell or? Yeah, that’s kind of what I was doing. I was kind of just racking my brain for anything that I thought would still be useful, even with what was going on. And I thought, you know, people want to connect. They want to connect with other people. And especially, you know, once you got a few weeks into lockdown, people were lonely.

09:56
and needing connection. So that was just one of the ideas. Another idea I had was package inserts, same kind of thing where small businesses could just say, hey, thank you so much for supporting our business. And they were just cute. One of the very first things I came up with is a change of plans postcard. Cause I thought there’s a whole bunch of events that are being canceled. Weddings were being canceled, parties, all sorts of things. So I was like, people are going to need to change their plans.

10:25
And so I designed these really cute change of plans postcards and one of them in particular was really funny. It had a little TP emoji on there and a little poop emoji on there and it said, this stinks, but we’re rolling with it. And on the back, you know, it was like our event and you could fill it in and then you could check a box has been rescheduled, has been canceled, has changed the date. And I put that out there.

10:54
And when I put that out there, I had a couple friends. You know, backstory. I have my degree in education, so a lot of my friends are teachers and a couple friends go. This postcards hilarious. I would love to send it to my student and I was like, well, there’s an idea and so I reworked the postcard so that it wasn’t to change plans, but it was a way to connect a teacher to a student and I designed a set of postcards that were for teachers and.

11:23
They were really cute. just was, you know, six different designs. You know, I need some more students like you. And I had a little s’more guy on there stay sharp and there was a cactus on there. A little schoolhouse that said a note from your teacher. And I just made this adorable little set of postcards for teachers to send to their students. I did you have a process for this creativity? I don’t know if I do. I mean, do you just go, okay, I’m going to use a poop emoji here. And I mean, is it just whatever comes to your head or?

11:53
Or is there like some guidelines that you follow? No, I mean, it kind of is. I guess the only guideline that I do tend to follow is I love puns and I love clever use of words and witty. so, you know, like the poop and the TP was funny because it was this stinks, but we’re rolling and it was, you know, roll the toilet paper. So I just like to work with words that way. And my design style is very fun, colorful, playful.

12:23
and I like jokes and things like that. really, whatever it is, like I had somebody email me asking if I had a Penguin postcard. I was like, I don’t, but I could totally make a Penguin postcard. And so then I started thinking, okay, well, what kinds of things go with a Penguin? Cool, chill, they kind of waddle. And then I’m like, what will you do in school this year? And I’m born. You know, so.

12:53
I don’t have a real explanation of how it happens other than the fact that I really love play on words and I just start thinking through it. I think over the years I’ve really honed in on that skill because the more you do it, the better you get at it. I can pretty much find a pun for most anything and I just love to work with that. A lot of my items have puns on them.

13:21
So before we talk a little bit more about the product itself, can you just kind of remind listeners how your business model works? Like you’re creating all these products. Are you actually getting them printed or are they on demand as someone orders them? Yeah, they are printed. So I’ll design a new product and then we have local printers that print and package our products for us. And then we ship them into Amazon and they’re filled the FBA and so they’re ready to go.

13:47
So can you talk about like the quantities like in the beginning when you’re just kind of throwing stuff on the wall to see what would stick How much of each were you printing and how did you know what was a hit? Yeah, so the teacher postcards When I first put them out there, I think you know, I aimed to start with maybe putting 20 packs You know, I ordered 20 packs of them just to see how it would go. What how many cards are in 20? What’s your cost for 20 packs? Cost is

14:16
Well, cost per pack is like a dollar 80. Okay. So it’s a small investment. Yeah, it wasn’t a lot. Yeah. I mean, I was very nervous to invest anything at that point in the business because, you know, we didn’t have money coming in, right. But I knew that if I didn’t, you know, we weren’t going to get any more money coming in. So that was one of the hardest decisions I made back then was, you know, I think with the change of plan, postcards and the teacher postcards, it was about a $700 order. Okay.

14:44
But when you’re not making any money, that’s a scary, scary number. But were you able to invest that money? it sounds pretty inexpensive to me. Is it because you already had these relationships with the printers? Would you have gotten those pricings if you were brand new? Yeah, yeah, because I work with the local printers and we are established with them. We are able to order low quantities of things. OK, we could get better pricing per pack if if I ordered in mass quantities.

15:14
but we’re able to order in small quantities, which is really nice. And the turnaround time is really great because they’re local. So if we order on a Monday, we usually have our order to us by the next Tuesday. Okay, wow, that’s fast. Can you kind of comment on the trade-offs between using your local printer versus like a pure print-on-demand where there’s literally no risk at all? Yeah, it’s the cost savings. mean, with what we’re currently doing,

15:44
it becomes very difficult to do print on demand when you have a variety pack of something. So if it was a solid pack where every design was the same, we could do print on demand. But because it’s a variety pack and you’re getting five of each card of six different designs, there’s no print on demand that can really handle that kind of fulfillment for us. So we actually started first by ordering

16:13
postcards from Vista Print. And I had them come to my house and I ordered, you know, whatever, 2,000 of each card and we were hand packing these. So we were taking five of each design and packaging them in bags. And that’s how we first started doing it just to test it out. But now with the printer, they’re packaging the variety packs for you? Right. Ah, I see. Yeah. So when we first started doing it, we were doing all the packaging.

16:43
So all of the stuff was coming to our house. We were hand packaging, counting the cards, and that’s when the kids got involved. Is the price about the same or significantly cheaper going with the printer? It’s about the same after you factor in the cost for the bags to package and the cost for the labor to have people hand pack them. We were at a point where we could get about a hundred

17:13
packs made in two hours. Okay. Whereas when I order from the printer, you know, a week later I could have 2000 packs show up at my house and they’re ready to go with a barcode on them and everything. Oh, totally worth it. Yeah. You know, now the children of everybody that works for me would tell you that was great. They’re like, these kids are going to have like the nicest bikes and shoes and clothes because these kids were rolling in the dough because they had nothing to do.

17:43
you know, so they were counting and packing postcards pretty much all summer long, which was kind of crazy. Wait, so that means you just recently went to this model then, right? Because those pictures that I saw on Facebook, where you were employing all these kids, your kids, yeah, that’s relatively recent. So does that imply you just went with that local printer recently, where they did everything? Yeah, it was kind of a transition period. So when we first started it, it was all, all us, because

18:11
Well, what happened with these teacher postcards was they just went bonkers. Within four days of me putting them up for sale on Amazon, they were the number one selling item in the postcard category on Amazon. Walk me through that. You sent in 20 packs, right? You said? Yes. So those 20 packs went quickly and did you go FBM immediately or? We did. Okay. Was kind of the problem because I had no idea.

18:41
that they were going to take off the way they did. And so what we had done was we had ordered the supply. And usually, I’ll place the order for our product and I’ll put it FBM just to see and have it start ranking and all that stuff before the product gets to us because by the time the product gets to us, we’ve had a couple orders, we’re still within the timeframe to fill it and it all works out.

19:11
The problem with this was by the time the order of the cards arrived, I think we had six or 700 orders to fill. Wow. And it was insane. It went, it was just insane. So when the postcards arrived, it was immediate, like who can pack these, you know, who can help us count these, who can help get them packaged and shipped out.

19:39
Immediately we had to place another order for cards just to try and keep up and Dave and I were working probably 14 hour days from the moment I woke up until 9 or 10 o’clock at night we were just packing or shipping orders and we were shipping out three or four hundred orders a day and barely keeping up. Crazy. was insane. Wait so uh

20:04
At some point, you couldn’t just switch over to FBA? Or is it because you actually had to physically manipulate the stuff before sending it in? We couldn’t switch to FBA because Amazon had all of those restrictions. That’s right. So I think they were only allowing 50 units at a time. Right. And we were selling 400 a day. I mean, it it just we couldn’t have done it. So those were specifically FBM only.

20:35
that and one other one. Because in the meantime, while this was all happening, I designed other ones. So we had multiple design packs. Because once those went live and people started seeing them, I started getting requests for other things. Specifically, teachers wanted something that said, I miss my students. They didn’t just want cute teacher-themed cards. They wanted it to actually say, I missed my students.

21:05
And it’s really bad, by the way. People email me and ask. I get messages on Amazon a lot asking, do you have this or do you have that? Or they’ll email me through my website or Facebook friends will say something. know, and typically if one or two people ask me the same thing, it’s a good indication that there more people that would be interested in that. So the miss you, I kind of avoided doing that because.

21:33
I was hoping that this pandemic was very short-lived and that I didn’t want to invest in a product that wasn’t going to sell for a long time. But I ended up doing it anyway because I think I must have had 10 or 15 people ask if I had a card that said I missed my students. And so that was the second pack that I did. And again, I used the puns. So there were cute ones that had like a little waffle on there.

22:02
said I miss my students a waffle lot. A pig, I miss my students pig time. A frog, I totally miss my students and it was just a set of six. Honey, I miss my students. And that one within five days became the number two selling postcard. Only second to my first design, so. Okay, Amanda, so can we just talk Amazon real quick? Was it because of

22:31
people searching for a specific keyword to find these cards? Did you do keyword research or was it just based on feedback and then you kind of made the keywords work? I don’t know. I didn’t have a chance to dig into why it was going so well. The only thing I could think was that we found a need right at the exact right moment and we were there. It was immediate.

22:59
I’ve never experienced anything like that. I’ve been on Amazon almost six years. Nothing has ever within days just gone crazy like that. And I think, you know, I want to go back to I wanted to find something that people needed. Well, I knew my kids were missing their teachers. I knew teachers were missing their students. And I knew that everybody just wanted things to go back to normal.

23:28
and they needed a way to connect. I know how my kids would feel if their teacher took a second to write them a postcard and they got that in the mail, how it would have totally made their day and made them super excited. And I think a lot of teachers just really wanted that. They wanted that connection with their students. They weren’t able to get it.

23:53
And it just gave them that extra little bit to let their kids know like, hey, I miss you. This really isn’t a great situation. And I really wish we were in school and I wish I could be teaching you in person. And here’s a note just to let you know that I’m thinking about you. And I think we were just there for them at the right time. If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand.

24:20
And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at Bumblebee Linens. Now what’s unique about Emerge Council is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce and provides strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their IP. So for example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself. Now, first and foremost, protecting your IP starts with a solid trademark and Emerge Council provides attorney-advised

24:47
strategic trademark prosecution both in the United States and abroad for a very low price. And furthermore, the students in my course have used Steve for copyrighting their designs, policing against counterfeits and knockoffs, agreements with co-founders and employees, website and social media policies, privacy policies, vendor agreements, brand registry, you name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to EmergeCouncil.com and get a free consult. And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a $100 discount.

25:15
That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L dot com. Now back to the show.

25:21
So there was no like launch, were you running PPC or anything? was it literally just listed it and it just went bonkers? There was no PPC. I turned off all of my PPC as soon as all as my business dropped. And it’s funny because Amazon really wants you to be running ads. So I would get 10 to 15 emails a day about why I should run ads and

25:48
You should be doing this and how about you spend money on ads and it was funny because like the longer it went without me running ads The more Amazon started to offer me so I got like an account manager They built me a store somebody offered to make me free video content like all sorts of things were starting to happen because I was not running ads So this was 100 % done or organic

26:17
Amazing. Yeah, it really was just a it was just a huge blessing for us. We were able to hire back everybody. And, you know, I think it was a really big blessing for the teachers who wanted a way to connect with their students. I mean, we just we were we were there for them when they needed it. And it just worked. And it was great. Unfortunately, it came with consequences.

26:45
You don’t want to be number one and number two on Amazon, right? I was gonna get to that in a little bit. Yeah, that’ll attract some attention So is your FBA all like your inventory limits? Are they all back to normal again or raised? Well, they were for a little bit and then You know now Amazon’s got the 200 limit for new items and then based on your most recent history

27:14
So some of our items are okay where we’re able to send in enough to keep it going. And some of our items, like we’re moving into our holiday season of things and because they haven’t sold in the past month, you know, we’re not able to stock as many as we would usually like our letters to Santa kit. Um, they won’t let us send any more in. And I know that based on our sales last year, we really need to send more in. Right. So that’s a little bit of a,

27:43
that’s gonna be a little bit of a struggle going into quarter four for us. Some of those bigger seller items from the holiday season. I don’t know, I don’t know what we’re gonna, how that’s gonna pan out. How do you balance, since you’re the creative in this business, how do you balance working on new designs versus kind of making sure the wheels don’t fall off of the actual business? Yeah, I think it’s a really interesting

28:12
process creativity and I get into These modes that I refer to as in the flow. I don’t know if you talk to a lot of creative people But if you are a creative person They’ll understand when you’re in the flow And I basically design My whole schedule around that creative process so when I get into the flow all I do is design

28:41
I don’t check emails. I don’t talk to my family. I don’t leave my room. I just design. And when I am in the flow like that, I can design hundreds of items in a week. My last bout of that produced 140 new postcards. Wow. A couple of weeks ago. But this ebbs and flows. So I can’t do that all the time. I can’t…

29:11
that’s not a constant state for me. So it comes and it lasts about a week to 10 days usually and I’ll just design and then when it kind of tapers off and I notice like things are not coming together as quickly as they usually are or I don’t like what I’m making, every design I do I think is trash, then I’m like it’s time to take a break and then that’s when I’ll go into you know.

29:37
working on Facebook ads or redesigning my website or working on email sequences or things like that that need my attention. But I try to do it, it’s kind of done in chunks of time rather than doing a little bit each day of everything. do a week or two design, two or three weeks of other work. And then I do have my husband who helps with the operations. mean, he mainly handles all the inventory, ordering.

30:05
and then we have another girl that works for us that handles all the shipments and miscellaneous tasks and stuff. So I do have support with that. There is still a lot that as the owner that I handle and I do, but that’s how I balance that. I’ll design when the designing is good and then I’ll work on everything else while it’s not. How do you get into your flow state? Do you have any strategies for getting into that state?

30:35
Not really. It’s something that I haven’t quite 100 % figured out yet as to what makes that happen. I do know that quiet time and alone time is the best for me to start to get into that. When I’m stressed, when I’m anxious, when there’s a lot going on, when my children are being loud, that is not helpful. So the more downtime I have, peaceful time.

31:04
the more likely it is that it will start. And then it’s so funny because it’s like I need silence so I can hear my own thoughts. And it’ll just take one idea. One thing will spark and I’m like, I gotta make that. And then that one thing turns into, oh, here it goes, it’s going again. Okay, let’s switch gears and talk about being number one on Amazon.

31:32
Because I know you ran into some problems. So if you wouldn’t mind just describing what happened to the audience Yeah, silly me. I thought oh my god I’ve made a number one and a number two selling item on Amazon and I was all excited. It’s like this is great I’ve arrived right isn’t this what everybody wants? problem with that is Because Amazon has tools that allow people to see what your sales are

32:01
It made it really easy for hijackers to go look at my listings and see that we were doing really well. And it was about three and a half, four weeks in to the sales of those postcards. So May, May-ish? Yeah, beginning of May. That I was just checking my email one day and in my email there was an ad for my postcards.

32:32
me and I thought well that’s really interesting because I’m not advertising which led me to go look on Amazon and find that somebody had 100 % copied my listing and was selling it under their own brand name and I immediately filed copyright infringement and everything and I think they took it down

33:03
almost immediately.

33:06
I’m trying to let me think about it. I think they took it down almost immediately. It must have been the same day. It was in the morning, filed the infringement, got the listing taken down. And immediately after it was taken down, the person that had had it up for sale jumped onto my listing and was taking the buy box. So because it was fulfilled by merchant, he was able to do that. He hopped on the listing, sold it for less than me and was taking the sales.

33:36
How did he get your exact design? Did he like scan it or something or? I don’t know what he did. Okay. Um, I think he might’ve bought it from me to be honest with you because we did order a pack just to see. And it looked like it was pretty high quality for what we received, but you could tell in some of the subtle patterns on my, my cactus design in particular, had like a little.

34:05
subtle polka dot background. And when you compared that to the original, you could tell that it just had lost some of that sharpness. And so I almost think he scanned it. He might have bought a pack, scanned it, and then was printing a scanned copy of mine. The back was not the same. I think they were blank. And mine weren’t blank. They said, please deliver to the amazing student, and had my website in the bottom corner.

34:33
You know, that was important for us to have to prove that, you he was counterfeiting our product. It took me a little bit longer to get him off my listing. I didn’t know all the proper places to go to file the proper thing. So I kept filing copyright infringement claim, but it was really a trademark infringement. So it took me a little bit to figure out how to get him off. Once I got him off the listing, that’s when the real problem started.

35:00
He then went and filed copyright infringement against me on three of my items and got my listings shut down.

35:10
See, this is where it just sounds so wrong. Yeah, it was very wrong. Did you have a registered copyright on your stuff or was it just the regular copyright? Yeah, it was just a regular copyright. I immediately went and filed registration when that happened. But you know, that takes time, right? And apparently Amazon doesn’t really listen to you. And really, we could spend an entire episode on copyright registration and why it’s not even worth doing.

35:39
That’s, that’s another story for another day, but I don’t know how he was able to get Amazon to take down three of my items, but it was the top one and two bestseller. And then I had a 90 pack. I sold them in 30 packs or 90 packs and he took down the 90 pack of the bestseller as well. And then guess what? His, his copied version popped right up and was available. So I was.

36:06
Was this competitor in the US, Asia, overseas or do you know? Canada. Canada. Okay. Canada. Yeah. So wasn’t Canada was using a fulfillment service to handle all the shipments from Canada to the United States. And I got the three listings back, I think within four days or something like that. And

36:34
I filed the copyright infringement on him again, got his item taken down. And then it was like, um, just a couple of days later, it was always on a weekend. He would file this stuff because he knew nobody was around. It was like Saturday morning. He got 11 of my items taken down.

36:54
Wow. Yeah. So that was also talk about roller coaster year, you know, we were, we lost everything. Then we had sales better than I’d ever had. And then we lost all of that too. It’s like, did you ever get those back? I did. Okay. Because it was a false infringement claim that he filed, I was able to file a counter notice.

37:23
which basically says you have 10 days to sue me. I’m calling your bluff. And if you don’t sue me in 10 days, I get to have these items backlisted because you filed a false infringement claim. At that point, I got a lawyer involved and you know, we worked up the case. We sent it to Amazon legal. had emailed Jeff Bezos at that point to let him know.

37:51
what was going on, where this person was really targeting me and just systematically attacking listings so that he could sell his. But then mine weren’t there for competition. We detailed the whole case, everything that was going on. We showed pictures of the counterfeit product. We showed pictures of the copies of the items.

38:15
And I had an executive from Amazon that was kind of working on my case. And I will just say like nothing clear ever came from any of it. So we never got any kind of clear response from Amazon or anything of that nature. Just, I ended up getting the listings back 10 days later, but at the same time they had taken all the inventory from those items because some of them were able to be FBA. Oh, by that time.

38:45
I was able to have them FBA. So the best seller had 1300 units in stock when it got taken down. And it was last week. And we’re in September. So at beginning of September last week was I finally got them to release that inventory. Oh my goodness. So they held 1300 units for months. Yes. And that was only on one of the 11 listings. They had inventory from all 11 listings that they were holding. All right.

39:14
You got your listings way before then, right? So I did. Yeah. Were you sending, were you not using FBA anymore at that point? No, we couldn’t because if we sent it in, it’s like it went in, they checked it in and then it just went into FC processing and it just sat there. So no matter if I sent in 10 units or 50 units, none of it was going live. They were just holding it. So it would get shipped in and then they would just hold it. Apparently.

39:42
It was in quarantine. That’s the best term that I had gotten from any seller central person was that it was in quarantine because Amazon assumed that I was wrong because the copyright infringements were filed on me. So even though I proved that they were my items and got the other person kicked off of Amazon completely, unless he’s there under a new brand name.

40:10
They were still holding the inventory and every time I would call seller center, they’d be like, well, there’s no problems with your account. There’s no problems with this inventory. You know, we just need time to process it. I mean, I can’t tell you how many phone calls I made to seller central and how many hours I spent on the phone trying to figure this out. And nobody seemed to know what was going on. It wasn’t until one of the associates said, you have to email the quality assurance team.

40:39
and ask them to release it from quarantine. And it gives me the quality assurance team email. So I get off the phone with them and I go to email this team and the email won’t go through. So I’m like, ah, he gave me the wrong email. Or I have a letter wrong or something. So I call seller central back immediately. And I was like, I just talked to somebody and they said I needed to email the quality assurance team. And this woman on the phone would like not having it. She’s like, you cannot have that email. And it was a two hour phone call with her going through.

41:08
every single detail. And I think that that was the one person that was able to start getting it actually fixed. Did you email to Jeff, do anything? It got me an executive assistant to him to look into the case. There wasn’t a ton of communication there. He would email and say, you know, we’re still working on this, we’re still looking into it. And then I would send him new evidence, like, oh, look, he popped up under this brand name or oh, look, you know, my copyright

41:37
claims are being rejected, and then things would maybe happen, but never tied to him. And we called them Amazon David because his name was David. And when I was mad and yelling at David, I had to make sure my husband knew it wasn’t them. So we lovingly referred to our executive assistant as Amazon David. And he was not that helpful, unfortunately. But I think Amazon just has these systems.

42:06
in place and they don’t, they don’t always work the way they’re supposed to. And when something gets stuck in some sort of loop, just takes time to fix it. You know, ultimately it was just waiting. You know, it was just the time to wait before it resolved itself. In the meantime, you know, it’s been a nightmare and a struggle just to get that inventory back. I mean, I think we added it up and it was like,

42:35
Thirty six thousand dollars worth of inventory. Jesus. Wow. It was crazy and the lawyer didn’t seem to Make much of a difference either It’s not like you send Amazon a full legal letter from a lawyer and then they listen to you or they act fast they don’t

42:55
Let me ask you this, Amanda. If you were to do this all over again, or if this were to ever happen to you in the future, what would be your procedure? Well, I’ll tell you what my procedure is because I successfully did it for the back to school time. OK. So it became apparent, very, clear that you don’t ever want to be number one or number two. And the reason I was number one and number two was because that was all that was there. And we created a new item that didn’t exist before. And it became very popular.

43:23
What’s funny is you can go on Amazon now and look and you can see all sorts of copycats off of my original idea. And it, you know, did you ever play telephone as a kid where you sat in circle and by the time it got to the end, it was like not the right phrase. That’s kind of what happened with my postcards is that they copied me and then somebody copied the copy and then somebody copied the copy. And we got to the point where one of the cards that somebody designed

43:52
said I miss my students monkey time. I was like, this doesn’t even make any sense. So of course we had to buy it and we’ve hung that on the office wall as a reminder of all the fun shenanigans we’ve been through. They were bad. mean, poor grammar. You can’t just like, I miss my students ice cream bunch. That doesn’t work, you know? So you could tell like it was somebody trying to translate a pun, but they don’t know the language.

44:22
You know, was obvious that that was what was going on. So the next thing that I got to actually while all this was going on and the listings were deactivated, I was like, back to school is going to be huge because whether they’re going in person or they’re learning remotely, teachers are going to want to make a big deal out of this because if they go back, that’s going to be a huge deal. If they don’t go back, teachers are going to want to connect.

44:49
So I immediately got to work on back to school postcards. But instead of designing two sets, I designed 38 different ones. Woo. Yep. And the beauty of that was that no one single back to school postcard ever did so well that it caught anybody’s attention. So the success was spread over 38 different listings. And nobody was able to tell that

45:18
we were doing six figures with back to school postcards because not a single postcard was really bringing in anything significant. But combined, all 38, we had our best month ever last month. So let me ask you this. So if you’re releasing all those products, are you printing those ahead of time also? Those we did. Those we were more prepared for. We were just unprepared for what happened in April with those teacher postcards because

45:48
I just had no idea that that was going to happen. I suspected something like that was going to happen for back to school. So that was a different scenario. We started printing those immediately in June. How did you know how much to print? Like, did you already know that they were going to be a hit or? I had a good feeling. Okay. You know, there’s always that unknown because of course, you know, I’m like, what if I’m buying all this and it’s not a hit and, know,

46:16
What if, you know, we’re just stuck with all this product and then I’d have to go, okay, realistically, you’re not going to be stuck with this product. People are going to like it. It’s going to be fine. But no, I didn’t know for sure. So I think we, you know, we kind of just use the numbers from what had sold and, you know, I think I, you know, over-prepared a little bit. So I think we maybe did 500 mixed packs of three different packs.

46:45
And then I had individual ones like welcome to kindergarten, welcome to first grade. Those, think we did a hundred of each and just kind of spread it out over all of them. And, you know, my goal was to have them live July, but not until they were all shipped into FBA because I didn’t want anybody to swoop in and copy them before we had a chance to sell. Yeah. So we made sure that everything was ready to go early.

47:15
and shipped in and packaged. And then we turned those listings on and they immediately started selling. But like I said, it was spread out over so many different listings. We sold out of most of what we sent in, which was great and never caught on anybody’s attention. I, know, they would, they, some of them would sneak into the top 100.

47:44
you know, 25, 26, you know, sometimes I’d have them hanging at 80 or 90, but never one or two or top five. And so we made it through that back to school season and I didn’t see any, any copies of the back to school. That’s funny. So you didn’t actually solve the copy problem on Amazon. You basically figured out how to avoid attention. Correct. Wow.

48:11
That’s kind of sad. Yeah, you’re not going to solve the copy problem. It is really, really sad. And what’s the most irritating thing ever is you can go on Amazon and you can see my what we refer to as the original teacher postcards. I think once the FBA went live last week, we shot up to 20 number 25 for that item again. I mean, it immediately became popular again.

48:39
There’s just something about that set. I don’t know what it is, but it’s currently number 16, but there’s the copycat is number 12. So let’s talk about totally irritating. And it’s so ugly too. mean, you see mine and you see the copycat. I don’t know how anybody’s buying that ugly thing, but whatever. There’s somebody for everything. But I’ve hesitated to file any copyright infringement claims.

49:08
to get it taken down, which I totally have the right to do because of the retaliation. It’s not worth it. After going through all of that and losing my listings and all the hassle and hiring a lawyer, it cost me over $10,000 just to fix that problem. So no one won. Really? No. Yeah. No. mean, there’s still copies up there. And, you know, my thing is mine are still doing well and we’re still

49:37
selling them and we had a wonderful back to school season and the best way to deal with this is to stay under the radar and not be number one or number two. That’s depressing, Amanda. But I know, don’t to the podcast on a depressing note. I just I just want to end it kind of by asking you, there’s a lot of businesses that were hurt due to the pandemic. What would be your best advice?

50:06
Like if your business got really hurt on how to kind of convince yourself that you can make a change and come back. Yeah, I think making a change is exactly what needs to be done. If we had held fast that we were a party company and we sold party supplies and that’s all we do and that’s what we do, we would not be okay right now. We just wouldn’t be.

50:35
So you have to move past what you think it is your business does, and you have to be willing to do something else that is needed right now. Because not everything is needed right now. And we all have different skills and different talents. And it’s not just one thing. Like, yeah, I make party supplies, but I can make other things too.

51:04
I don’t have to just make party supplies. So was finding a way to use what I had as my talent to bring something to the world that was still needed at this time. And I think that that’s where people need to start, what they need to start thinking about with their business. If their business isn’t doing well right now because it’s just not a needed service, what is needed and how can you provide that need? How can you fill that? And that’s how you’re going to get through the pandemic.

51:34
I mean, we’re still seeing ups and downs. I’m still reinventing what we’re doing. I’m still releasing new products and trying new things because back to school postcards are over. So that’s done. So what are we going to do September, October, November, December? And I’m still thinking through that. I’m not designing party supplies, even though that’s what my company does. Right. That is great advice, Amanda.

52:02
And I really appreciate you coming back on the show and telling your story and basically just being really transparent about what’s happened to your business this year, all the ups and downs and the roller coaster rides. It’s been very interesting. Yeah, it’s been interesting to live through it. I’ll tell you that I am ready for 2020 to be done. yeah. So why? I always have faith in you, man. I never worry about you. Like you’ll figure something out. I appreciate that. Yeah.

52:30
And it’s really funny to hear that from other people sometimes because when you are that person, the self doubt and you know, it’s ugly and I didn’t know if I could do it. I had no idea that I had that in me, you know, but then you say something like that, you’re like, oh yeah, you’re going to fix it. That’s how my husband is. He’s like, it’ll be fine. You’ll be fine. Like, how can you be so sure? You know, so as the entrepreneur, sometimes you just don’t know.

52:59
And so I just, you’re right though, I will just keep fighting for it and I will keep trying to find ways to make it work and no matter what, we’ll find a way because I don’t want my husband to go back to work. He knows that you’re a keeper. That’s true. He does. He’s also a keeper as he’s, you know, going back to kindergarten for me so that I can work. All right, Amanda. Well, thanks a lot for coming back on the show. It’s been a great talk.

53:29
Yeah, thank you. All right, take care.

53:34
Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now Amanda is an amazing woman and a true fighter, and she’s the perfect example of how when there’s a will, there’s a way. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 332. And once again, I want to thank Postscript.io, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is the next big own marketing platform, and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash Steve.

54:02
That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T.I-O slash div. I also want to thank Klaviyo, which is my email marketing platform of choice for eCommerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned cart sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign. Basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Now I talk about how I use these tools on my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store,

54:31
head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.