June 2022 Brand Report ($850,883)

Welcome to the June 2022 edition of Brand Report! Each month, we’ll break down our monthly revenue so you can see what’s working and what’s not.

We’ll give you aggregated numbers across the eight brands we either own or have significant equity in. In our exclusive Secret Sauce Brand Report, you’ll get our numbers broken down brand by brand. We’ll also give you a 60-minute class each month detailing one particular thing we’re working on right now that you can use to start and grow your own business. Our next class is on July 27. We'll share how to use the Cockroach Approach to find oversized and low-competition products on Amazon. If you've struggled with finding products to source and sell in the past, this one is for you. Get the Secret Sauce for your brand.

The revenue for June 2022 was $850,883. This is our largest month ever and fueled by a couple of factors: Ice Wraps was up nearly 50% over this month last year, and our season Offroading, Tactical, and boating brands were hitting their peak seasons.

Revenue will likely decline month-over-month from this point on until the holidays, when we should see another positive seasonality bump.

What We Worked on This Month

• A Week in the Philippines. Mike had set off for the Philippines in May for a three-week trip to visit some of our staff over there, and I joined him in early June for a much shorter visit of about a week.
  
  We rented a meeting space for most of the week and pretended to work on some things. But overall, the main purpose of the meeting was just to spend a bunch of time with everyone over there, especially some of the newer people we had hired since COVID and never had a chance to visit (and, of course, we rented a jeepney for a day as well).
• New Amazon account/Website/Trademark/etc. Brand Setup – We're getting closer to the product launch of the new brand Mike and I are launching, so we're starting to arrange all the nitty-gritty of the eventual product launch, i.e., getting our Shopify store set up, opening a new Amazon account, getting Brand registered using IP Accelerator, etc.

Two Wins This Month

• Enrolling in the Growth Program with Amazon. Amazon tries to heavily recruit established brands that aren't yet selling on Amazon to sell on the platform through their Brand Growth program. They offer some incentives to new sellers such as a free Account Manager, storage limit adjustments, etc. Through some of the circles we run in, we were able to get our new Amazon account registered in this program (completely free of charge).
• Ice Wraps margins at 12%. After discovering our little costing oopsy-doopsie (see last month's brand report), we've managed to get our margins on Ice Wraps up to 12%, up from a dismal 2% a few months prior. We did it by upping prices, being more proactive with PPC, and overall improving our logistics by using Amazon Global Logistics.

Two Fails for This Month

• IPI Score Storage Limits Coming to an Account Near You – I had mentioned in last month's brand report that we were in danger of getting storage limits in place for Q3 because our IPI score was below 400. We did, in fact, get these limitations put in place. The good news is that, as suspected, these storage limits are way beyond what we needed.

  

  I've heard of people getting severely screwed over from IPI storage limits, but it's never been the case for us.

• Hacked Amazon AWS Account with Thousands of Dollars in Fees. Many moons ago, I opened up an AWS account (you know AWS? The cloud computing service that basically makes all of Amazon's profit?) to host one of our websites. We stopped using it over three years ago, and I never gave it another thought.
  Well it turns out that some time earlier in the spring, someone hacked into this account and started racking up thousands of dollars in Elastic Compute charges. I have no idea what the hackers were doing, but it was probably some type of phishing scheme or other scam. Long story short, they used about $3,000 in services that we've been charged for. Amazon has essentially said the fees will be refunded once we jump through numerous hoops, but we'll see.