Small Businesses Thriving on Amazon

Amazon is featuring Clip-n-Seals again this week on their homepage because the story has been updated with a video, and it’s part of their Success Stories series. The video was shot in Seattle and in Yakima, Washington at our factory. It’s about how we made an idea into reality and shipped it eventually to tens of thousands of Amazon’s customers.

Who knew extrusion could look so good.

JD runs our factory in Yakima.

This brought a big boost to our sales. More importantly and what’s key in the video is that there are people right here in America, like JD, who partner with entrepreneurs like me.

JD and I have worked together for a decade. He took our smallest, possible minimum order when other factories didn’t return our call. As the story goes, I have

… vivid memories of tweaking that 25th not-quite-right prototype and waking up in the middle of the night, filled with stress that his “entirely self-funded” venture might fail and drag his family down.

JD was there with suggestions on how we could make the 26th version better, and has ramped up with us to meet demand, as we expand with FBA, including internationally.

We're two small business, selling via a huge one, and there’s a locally-sourced aspect too. When people think about buy local, it’s artisan crafts, beers, and high-end foods, but not plastics or consumer products. So JD is in the video running a small-scale factory 24/7 to meet demand and talking about knowing exactly where his materials were sourced.

Considering sources, crafts and beer, JD’s extruders are smack dab in the middle of Yakima’s hop country. As a beer lover, it gives me even more reason to check a run in person and visit the Haas Innovation Center across the street…back when we first got started, so did Schooner Exact, and they used Clip-n-Seals to keep their hops fresh for those first, few batches.

From hops to chips, to coffee, and you name it, Clip-n-Seal is thriving because of all the uses Amazon’s customers find it…few of which we ever imagined (body bags were a bit creepy and Arctic samples one of the coolest, anything beer related is by far the best).

We had a lot of fun making the video last Summer with David Albright, a Seattle-based filmmaker. For how serious we are about making a simple bag clip, you can see JD and me goofing a bit on camera, between the sexy shots of the extrusion process.

Read more about small business, like ours, that are thriving on Amazon in the second edition of a free Kindle book, Transformations: Stories of Success from Authors, Innovators, and Small Businesses Thriving on Amazon. Also see the many other featured authors and innovators who work with Amazon like we do.

Last year, I shared the story of Clip-n-Seal, a product Textura Design (my company) brought to market about a decade ago, and how Amazon featuredit as a stocking stuffer during the 2014 holiday season.