Coming live from StarBucks his name is Brandon Young,  who has not one, but two amazon businesses that pull over a million dollars yearly. He does cross platform, and is international. In advanced, our audio had some background noise and was not 100% perfect, but the amount of golden nuggets and insights in this episode is invaluable to all amazon sellers and e-commerce sellers.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How to build brands into the future


• How to scale your amazon business


• How Brandon dealt with multiple amazon suspensions


• How persistence is key


• Strategies to selling on Amazon


• Diversifying your Amazon business into Walmart, Wish, and Wholesale


• Many of the ways about navigating an Amazon suspension


• Confusion with Amazon suspensions


• Our frustration with Amazon suspensions


• Growing an Amazon Business to newer heights

And lots more!

DAVID ALADDIN: Great to have you on the show, Brandon!

BRANDON YOUNG: Yeah, thanks for having me, I appreciate it! It’s a little bit of an awkward day, because, you know, Fridays what I do is I take my son down to school in Miami and I usually work remotely down there, but today he had the day off because we have a few doctor appointments, so he’s hang out with me.

DAVID ALADDIN: Very cool!

BRANDON’S SON: Hi!

DAVID ALADDIN: How is it going? So, you are live from Hollywood, Florida or Hollywood, California?

BRANDON YOUNG: Hollywood, Florida!

DAVID ALADDIN: Very cool! I am from Naples by the way. Can you take us to the beginning, before your first company? Where did your journey begin?

BRANDON YOUNG: Well, I mean… So, for the few years before I started ecommerce and online, I was doing consulting for startups, so I would help people that had ideas formulate those ideas into viable businesses. So, a buddy of mine actually reached out, said that he wanted to get started with a business, leave his job. He had some job insecurity issues and told me that he was very interested in doing the Amazon thing. We had a couple of buddies that were doing Amazon and doing really well for, you know, previous year or two. And so, you know, the two of us started looking into it, I started doing some research and we would share some ideas back and forth. And they were doing retail arbitrage stuff.

At that time I, you know, I was looking at more of a way to make it a sustainable business and scale it rather than, you know, doing retail arbitrage. Just simply because, to me, RA is more of a job than a business, if you are not out there sourcing and you are not home processing things, then you are, you know, you are not making money. And so, I started looking at wholesale, liquidation, private label. I realized that private labels are a little bit further down the growth curve, but we started pretty much with liquidation and, you know, finding some sources. We get a little bit of online retail arbitrage.

We reached out to some brands. I used some of my previous contacts within the, you know, an industry that my parents had a business when I was growing up to reach directly out to manufactures and directly to suppliers and seeing whatever their own margins are. And so we started growing the business from there. So, that was about July of 2015.

DAVID ALADDIN: Oh, very cool! So, two years into this, right?

BRANDON YOUNG: Yeah, not even two full years into it now. And at the time I was, you know, dating my now wife (poor Audio) actually from China. When we were looking at the private label side everyone was like: China, China, China! You know, to quote Trump, right? And so, we decided to start looking at what connection we could make there with the strength of having her on the team. So, we went to China last April, we went to fairs, we went to electronic trade shows in Hong Kong, we spent about a month there. We visited factories for couple of weeks in Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Dongguan. And we decided to pull the trigger on launching our first two products and creating a brand. And since then we’ve got two brands, we are launching a third brand, we’ve got about 15 different products and we’re launching five or six more in the next two months.

DAVID ALADDIN: Holy cow!

BRANDON YOUNG: Yeah, the private label accounts are doing, you know, a hundred and fifty thousand a month and growing. We just got into Europe, so we don’t even know the impact fully of that yet. Our first shipment actually lands in Europe next week.

DAVID ALADDIN: Great!

BRANDON YOUNG: Yeah, man!

DAVID ALADDIN: So, there’s a lot going on! You guys are straight hustling! It’s only been two years and you’ve got two brands and you are launching another. Why do you guys want to launch multiple brands rather than one brand a multiple it?

BRANDON YOUNG: Well, so, we’ve have one electronics brand and then we have a toy brand. And so, we usually…It’s just for different verticals. When you have a different niche you don’t want necessarily electronics brand to be, you know on a toy brand. Plus insulates, it helps with future growth. Like, we are thinking ahead, so we are already thinking about, you know, big box retailers and opportunities. So, we’ve got exclusivity on a couple of our products. We are working with our manufactures. We are doing, you know, ODM at this point. Originally we started with stuff straight out of the factory and just putting our stamp on it. And now we are starting to work with the factories to modify it, to make it ours and get exclusivity on different designs. And so the advantage would be…if we can show, let’s say best five for example that we’ve got one of the best selling products in out category and we’ve got great reviews, and we can prove that demand through Amazon, it makes it a lot easier for us to have that conversation with them about getting into their store. And so we are thinking ahead along those lines already.

DAVID ALADDIN: But…So, I am like in a similar situation. Like, I’ve had exporting retail reach out to me, but I’ve got this major issue, lost my products, or all of my products were labeled for Amazon, there are not labeled for UPC code. What do you guys…Like, what’s your plan there?

BRANDON YOUNG: Oh, so that’s a simple fix. You just register with the GS1 and then you get to your UPC on there and you create a unique GS1 UPC. You have your factory start putting that on there instead of your Amazon if it’s going to be for that and… You know, it’s really something. If there’s an order for best buy you have your factory, put the UPC. If it’s for Amazon, you have put your AMZ, right?

DAVID ALADDIN:I see. So, when you go big retail you create specific orders for that retailer. There are other issues too going with a big retailer. The requirements, the certifications that you need as well, you know? Have you had issues like getting two million dollar liability and stuff like that? Dude, these are things that have been coming up and I just don’t know how to navigate the wires!

BRANDON YOUNG: Yeah, I mean, there are probably thousands of people that want to sell you insurance that you know (inaudible) you got to listen to your podcast that might know somebody that want to sell you insurance. So, really, that’s a yellow pages or a Google issue. Don’t know if yellow pages exist anymore, but you can just Google sell me liability insurance.

DAVID ALADDIN: That’s so true! I guess there are a lot of things to do around the business and figuring out what to do and what your priority is the biggest issue. Okay, so, what about funding these external projects? With the big retail boxes they won’t pay you out for sixty days or whatever…

BRANDON YOUNG: So there are cash flow issues there obviously. So, with regards to cash flow issues, I mean, you have options for capitalization. And you know, we’ve been fortunate, you know, we do okay with other investments before we got into this and between my wife and I, we were able pretty much to self-capitalize everything. We’ve had some broker’s issues there because obviously any time you are expanding and growing, starting your own private label, your capital turnover time is a little bit longer. Then let’s say if someone’s doing typical retail arbitrage or wholesale… But usually go a little bit deeper on your inventory you have to give at least 30% in advance. So, you are looking at maybe a two months cycle under capital versus, you know, maybe a two to three weeks cycle on a whole sale account retail where you can just go pick something up, send it in and sold, right? So, some solutions that we know of, I mean… If you’ve got proven records, there are lenders out there that specialize in lending to Amazon sellers. I am trying… I can’t remember the name of hand, but I remember one that would help you with daily payouts. They just keep you… They take 1% of whatever they give you. And they’ll give you up to 80% of what your accounts receivable is at the time. So, that way, you don’t have to wait two weeks for your money from Amazon, that’s one solution. Another would be like a cabbage which would just be a lender.

DAVID ALADDIN: Those guys are like loan sharks by the way.

BRANDON YOUNG: Cabbage, yeah… Sometimes it’s expensive to grow and you have to kind of weight against what your opportunity is. The margins that we are seeing… I