Product Sales in a World of Niches

I’ve always said you can have your cake and eat it too. For me, building a dream brand means building a brand that can flex and grow when opportunity presents itself. One that’s defined enough to know who it is, but not so narrowly defined that it can’t move into a new product, a new category or a new place to sell.

And the opportunity today has never been better. Or more terrifying. Amazon Marketplace. Your own Shopify store. Retail. TikTok. Meta. Influencers. Paid search. AI. And only God knows what comes next. There have never been more ways to find a customer, launch a product or test an idea. But every one of those opportunities can pull the brand in a different direction.

So how do you hold a brand together while still taking advantage of all of it? How do you launch new products, reach new customers, move into new categories and new channels without confusing people, diluting what you’ve built or losing your own sanity?

I believe the answer starts with knowing what shouldn’t change and what is flexible.

Your Brand DNA doesn’t change because you’re talking to a retail buyer instead of an Amazon customer. Your values, position, point of view, personality and fundamental promise don’t get reinvented for every channel. But what you sell, how you sell it, what you lead with and how the brand behaves absolutely can.

Control Your Brand. Define Your World.

There was a time when building a brand was fairly straightforward. You made a product, found the customer and got it into every place you could. If you made a vacuum, you wanted to sell at a major retailer, a vacuum store (yes, there were vacuum stores), door-to-door, through your own brand store, or wherever people went to buy vacuums. You bought an ad. You demonstrated the product. You sold your chrome deluxe Sucks-O-Matic the hard way.

Then brands started to realize they could own more than a product. They could own a place in the customer’s life.

I saw a similar evolution firsthand during my years as Global Creative Director at O’Neill. Jack O’Neill started with a wetsuit he created in 1952. One product with one clear purpose: keep surfers warm in cold water. Niche was an understatement. From there came more surf products, more technical products and eventually products for other water sports. All of that growth made sense because it lived naturally in the O’Neill world.

But the bigger opportunity came when the brand began to understand that it wasn’t really defined by the wetsuit. It was defined by what the wetsuit allowed people to do. If O’Neill could keep you warm in cold water, why couldn’t that same idea extend to keeping you warm in the mountains? Suddenly snowboarding and skiing made sense. New products made sense. New customers and markets opened up. Eventually licensing created even more opportunities to extend the brand globally.

Part of my job was helping those partners understand that freedom didn’t mean putting the O’Neill name on anything that could sell. The opportunity was to make new products that still belonged to the brand. We were defining the O’Neill world, and that world gave us both the freedom to grow and the judgment to know when something didn’t belong.

That’s still one of the most valuable things a strong Brand DNA can do. It doesn’t trap a company inside the category where it started. It defines a larger territory the brand can credibly own, giving new products, new ideas and even new categories a common reason for being there.

Today, that opportunity has exploded. Brands have more ways to make products, reach customers and enter markets than we could have imagined then. But that freedom introduces another decision. Once you know a product belongs in your world, you still have to decide where it belongs in the selling world. What makes sense on Amazon may not make sense for a retail buyer. What works beautifully on your own site may struggle in a marketplace built around comparison. And just because a product belongs to the brand doesn’t mean it belongs in every channel.

So the question is no longer simply what else can we make. It’s what belongs in our world, where should we sell it, and what does the brand need to do when it gets there?

Never lost in the Amazon

Amazon, Etsy, Walmart. Insert your favorite online marketplace here. They all do one thing remarkably well: they bring the customers. People are already there, and more importantly, they’re usually there for a reason. Someone searching for a sunglass retainer, silicone hot pad or mineral sunscreen already knows they have a need. We don’t necessarily have to convince them to want the category. We have to convince them to choose us. That’s an enormous advantage, and sometimes I think brands forget what they’re getting in return for all those fees.

Yes, marketplaces take margin. So do retailers. They’re bringing the customer, providing the infrastructure and making it incredibly easy to search, compare, click and buy. Of course, they’ve also made it incredibly easy to compare your product with hundreds of others. Your $24.99 product is sitting next to one for $21.99, another for $18.99 and something suspiciously familiar for $12.47. Ratings, reviews, features, delivery and price are all sitting there side by side. That’s where Amazon can start to feel like a race to the bottom, and the natural reaction is to compete on price.

But that’s also where having a real brand becomes an advantage. A surprising number of products on marketplaces still behave like commodities. Their differentiation is a feature, a color, a quantity or a lower price. And products are relatively easy to copy. Someone can match your size, your feature, your color and probably beat your price. What’s harder to copy is the reason people prefer you. Your point of view, the experience you create, the other products you make and the place you’ve earned in the customer’s mind can give that individual product something the $12.47 version doesn’t automatically inherit.

But you also have to understand where you are. On your own website, you might have the luxury of telling the founder story, establishing your worldview and gradually leading someone toward a product. Amazon isn’t that conversation. Someone typed silicone hot pad into a search box and they’re looking at 30 rectangles. You have seconds to say: Yes, this is what you’re looking for. Here’s why this one is different. Here’s why it’s worth $24.99. Here’s why you can trust it. That doesn’t mean dumbing down the brand. It means translating the brand for the situation it’s in. Lead with the product. Make the difference obvious. Use photography to answer questions and establish value. Let reviews reduce risk. Once you’ve earned their attention, you can introduce more of the brand.

And Amazon can be an extraordinary testing ground. You can introduce a product without first convincing a national retailer to give it shelf space. You can see what people search for, what they click, what converts, what they complain about and what they wish somebody would make differently. A relatively simple product that might never carry an entire brand story can still be a great Amazon product. It can find customers, generate revenue, teach you something and potentially earn its way into a larger assortment somewhere else.

That’s why the question isn’t whether Amazon is good or bad for brands. It’s what job you want Amazon to do for yours. Not every product belongs there, and an Amazon bestseller doesn’t automatically belong at retail or need to become the hero of your DTC site. Each environment has a different job.

The mistake isn’t selling on Amazon. The mistake is going onto Amazon with a product and strategy designed for somewhere else, then wondering why the only lever left to pull is price.

You Own the Narrative, Not the Traffic

Your own website is one of the few places where you really get to control the experience. You decide what people see first, which products get the spotlight, how they’re presented, what stories get told and what someone should understand about your brand before they leave. You can talk directly to your customers, show them where the brand fits into their lives, learn from them and build a relationship that extends beyond a single transaction. This is your store. Your world. And that means you don’t have to put everything you make in the front window.

Amazon can be a great place to test a new product, try new things, sell a variation, experiment with a bundle or let a relatively simple product find its audience. Your own site can be more considered, more curated and more tailored to the story you want to tell. This is where you can show the best of the brand: the products that explain who you are, the relationships between them and the larger idea that makes all of it belong together. More isn’t necessarily better. If someone walks into your world and gets lost in it, owning the narrative hasn’t done you much good.

I’ve always thought of a brand website like owning your own retail store. Someone just walked through the front door. Some people know exactly what they came for. Years ago when I first started designing e-commerce, we called them the hunters. Help them find it. Don’t make them tour the museum first. Answer their questions, establish the value and make it easy to buy.

Then there are the gatherers. Maybe they bought one of your products on Amazon, saw you at retail, heard about you from a friend or clicked something interesting on Instagram. They’re looking around. Who are these people? What else do they make? Is this for me? That’s your opportunity to show them around, introduce another product and let them understand where the brand might fit into their life.

And that’s one of the real advantages of DTC. You’re not only selling the product in front of them. You’re building the opportunity for the next conversation. You can introduce new products, invite them back, learn what they’re interested in and hopefully turn one purchase into a longer relationship.

Of course, there’s a catch. You own the store, but you don’t own the traffic. Amazon already has millions of people wandering the aisles. With DTC, you may have to pay Google, Meta, TikTok, an influencer or someone else to get them through your front door. So while the margin may look better, you’re taking on the responsibility of finding the customer yourself.

That’s not a reason to choose one over the other. It’s a reason to understand what each is good at. Amazon can help a product find a customer. Your own website can help that customer discover the rest of your world.

Brick & Mortar Retail. Welcome to Someone Else’s World.

Brick-and-mortar retail is a whole different game. On Amazon, you’re trying to win the shopper. On your own website, you’re bringing that shopper into your world. In retail, you’re asking someone else to let your brand into theirs.

And that starts with the buyer.

When you finally get that meeting, you’re not in charge. At least you won’t think you are after the buyer gets done with you. This is not for the meek. Buyers don’t have a lot of time, and they’re usually trying to answer some pretty basic questions. What are you? What’s selling? Who’s your customer? Why will this work in my stores? What’s my margin? And perhaps most importantly, which of these products do you actually want me to buy? That last question is where merchandising enters the conversation.

Retail isn’t about dragging your entire catalog into another channel. It’s about curating the right assortment for that retailer, that customer and sometimes that particular part of the country. What belongs in a surf shop in Florida may be different from what belongs in an outdoor store in California or a resort store in Arizona. Same brand. Different assortment. And sometimes that thinking should start before the product is even developed. That’s the bigger opportunity. Once you understand the environments your brand wants to live in, product development can become more intentional. A certain size, color, bundle, package or price point may make perfect sense for retail and nowhere else. A retailer may even deserve something Amazon doesn’t have. The brand defines what belongs. Merchandising helps determine what goes where.

Of course, the math has to work too. A lot of brands coming out of DTC or marketplaces discover that lesson late. A simple traditional retail model might take a product that costs you $1, require you to sell it wholesale for around $2, and then have the retailer sell it for around $4. That’s the basic idea behind keystone pricing, although the real world gets more complicated quickly. Add sales reps, distributors, freight, promotions and markdowns and everybody needs room to make money. That means sometimes the retail problem is actually a product development problem. If the customer will only pay $30, the retailer needs enough margin at $30 and you can’t profitably make and sell it wholesale at the number that leaves behind, it may simply be the wrong product for that environment. You can change the configuration, change the economics or develop something better suited to the channel.

Then the product finally reaches the shelf, where merchandising becomes physical. How does it sit next to the other products? Can someone understand it from six feet away? Does the packaging earn the pickup? Does the assortment look like a collection or a garage sale? Does the display help tell the story? On DTC, packaging usually arrives after you’ve made the sale. In retail, packaging, merchandising and POP may have to make the sale.

Getting into retail isn’t simply about getting more distribution. It’s about understanding the environment well enough to put the right products into it, at the right price, presented in the right way.

One Brand. Different Jobs.

This is why we start with Brand DNA. Before deciding what belongs on Amazon, what gets presented to a retail buyer or what becomes the hero of your own site, you need to know what belongs to the brand in the first place.

At BXC, we believe brand strategy is part of the product development process. Define the brand early enough and it can help guide what you make, the product silos you build around, where those products belong, and how they’re priced, packaged, merchandised and communicated.

That’s what the BXC Brand Strategy Cheat Sheet is designed to start. Six strategic conversations that help define the foundation before you make all the decisions that come next.