Ecommerce marketing strategy leads to 5x growth & an acquisition

Oliver James Group was an e-commerce company with Amazon FBA as their primary sales channel. After some early success their growth started to plateau. I was initially hired in a consulting role to try and get things moving, and soon become a partner in the business, leading marketing & growth.

After some initial investigation I found there were 3 areas that needed attention:

1) The operations & admin processes were very inefficient, resulting in the founder spending a lot of time working on low-impact tasks each day.

2) The product quality was good, but there was significant room for improvement in terms of marketing (brands, copywriting, packaging, product listings etc)

3) They had not taken full advantage of Amazon's strategic shift towards paid advertising to increase their sales

I decided to tackle them in that order: prevent wasted time by removing inefficiencies, sort out the marketing to increase conversion rates and lower CAC, and then push the gas on paid acquisition when we could be confident it would have a good ROI.

I solved the efficiency issues by designing more efficient workflows, and using automation tools to remove human input wherever possible. This cut the average time the founder spent on operations and admin work from approx 3h to 30min per day.

The next focus was the products. I performed a complete overhaul of the marketing to make it more cohesive and appealing to the target audience, including rebranding, updating packaging, product images, product listings, marketing videos etc.

Finally, I overhauled the paid advertising account, made changes to the bidding strategy and significantly increased our daily spend.

The strategy allowed us to secure a number of category leading positions for our products, including the #1 position for our key product across all of Amazon's major European marketplaces.

The result was a greater than 5x increase in sales and profit within 18 months. The company was then acquired by a leading aggregator. I was heavily involved in the sale process, and left the company when the handover was complete.