How To Create A Great Product And Build A Bigger Brand From The Amazon FBA Millionaires Podcast With Jeff Allen

Amazon is a crowded market, but just because it is so doesn’t mean you can’t stand out. Sharing her expertise on that matter, Tracy Hazzard joins the Amazon FBA Millionaires Podcast with Jeff Allen to talk about some of the things you can do to build a brand and, moreover, help you create a new product. She takes us through the process of arriving at that product you want and then shares what a nine-figure acquisition looks like. Offering some caution on the side, Tracy also talks about the things to be wary of when being with big brands. Join Tracy in this great conversation with Jeff to learn how you can take on the retail world with a truly great product.

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It’s so good to check in with you. I enjoy doing this program, along with my bud. This program would not be what it is without him. He is in Northern California while I sit here in the Southland. His name is Mr. Will Moffett. Will, how are you?

I’m wonderful. Thanks so much. It’s a beautiful day. We have a great, awesome guest for you guys. I’m excited to be here again with Jeff.

I appreciate that, Will. Our guest is somebody who’s easy to get excited about because she and her husband are involved in helping people bring their ideas to life in terms of the products that they sell or helping them improve one that maybe they’re already selling. Tell us a little bit about who our guest is.

We have Tracy here with us, FBA Millionaires. She’s awesome. She’s done a bunch of cool things with Amazon sellers as far as designing all the way up to getting sellers or businesses in general into retail stores. They do a lot of cool things and it’s best if Tracy talked about all the different things that her company does and how she can help Amazon sellers. Tracy, how’s it going?

It’s going great. Thank you guys so much for having me.

Tracy Hazzard with her husband, Tom Hazzard, cofounded HazzDesign at HazzDesign.com. Will, props to you because you had a chance to meet Tracy at one of the events that you did. Tracy, talk about one busy lady with some of the things you’re involved in.

We are involved in way too many things, but it is partially because the business is exploding so that’s a good problem. It’s because there are so many great brands coming up in the world that we’re busier than ever. At HazzDesign, my partner Tom and I have been designing mass-market retail for big box stores, clubs, and office superstores. We’ve been doing that on and off for many years. I say on and off because sometimes we were in-house at companies, and sometimes we were out. I cut my teeth on Herman Miller in helping to build and launch the Aeron Chair if you’ve ever seen that iconic tech company chair with a mesh material. That’s where I started. My launching product world came from there.

That is my chair of choice here in my office. Tracy, I saw that on your website at HazzDesign.com and I thought, “You’ve got to be kidding me. That’s the chair I sit on. I’m in touch with greatness here.” This chair has changed my life because my butt doesn’t get hot on a summer day sitting in this chair. It’s fantastic.

That is why the designer designed it.

Tracy, you and her husband, you’ve been consulting with big companies and these are big brands that you’ve been working with. How did you get involved with consulting with independent Amazon sellers, and how do you help Amazon sellers?

You have to look at the industry shift over time. When we started years ago, there were only big brands because it was so costly to get into the marketplace. There wasn’t an Amazon when we started. Amazon came about in ’97-ish, and at that time, we were on our own doing something that was totally not us designing for others but doing our own product. We started an eCommerce store. We were what you would have called the early developer community like app developers now, but we were creating our accessories, and we were trying to sell them, what I wouldn’t have given to have had an Amazon to help me out through that process at that time.

We saw Amazon and watched its growth over the years and saw this brilliance in logistical savings because to build that part of your company is extremely expensive. We saw that happening under all these big brands’ noses. They were ignoring it, and they were discounting it. We thought, “There’s something here that these digital marketers have tapped into.” If we could shift that a little bit and make it something that American consumers want to buy now, we’ve got something amazing. We started to partner up with a couple of Amazon sellers.

We saw who would find me because I write articles, I’m on podcasts, it would happen that they would find me and ask if we would do business with them. They would assume that they were too small for us in terms of our fees and all of that. In reality, they technically were at the time, but I thought, “We like to learn here. Let’s do a couple of projects that seem fun and see what’s there. Let’s see if we can add value.” That’s how it got going. We added some tremendous value and helped a couple of companies get acquired. We realized that we were helping to grow bigger brands by applying the principles of what we did for the big brands but on a smaller scale.

Tracy, there are so many products out there to choose from for Amazon sellers of all stripes, no matter where they are in the world, and there are more and more of these companies that they can source from to get these products and sell them. We’ve seen several of these products online, that it seems there are a number of people sharing several slices of the pie. The product may look the same as in my store that the guy down the street is selling, but we’re making a lot of money. We’re able to get these products cheaply. We find them, private label them, slap our name on them, and we’re able to get great quantities at a great price. Yet I’m wondering, isn’t it expensive to build that better mousetrap when we can simply go to Alibaba or one of these other sourcing companies get our products, order them and sell them that way?

The reality is, it is a great option and you should do it but what you’re not thinking about is the bigger picture of your brand and your product line when you do that. When you’ve got something tracking, done that, and it’s working, you’ve got access to a great audience, and you’ve got a buying paste that’s working for you. At that point, what usually happens to you guys? Trolls come on your listing. You get other sellers on there, counterfeiters, and you get all of this. When you look at your investment in time, energy in marketing, and now your product’s life cycle is cut short, that’s where the Amazon seller and that digital marketing world is looking at it from a less big picture vision of building a bigger brand.

It’s right at that stage where that investment you might need to make an original product makes sense to have built-in, and now you’re doing what I call stacking S-curves. You built it and as it’s about to decline a little bit, you’ve got your next product that’s already come up and grown, and you’re outpacing the competition every single time. You’re keeping your consumers that you’ve worked so hard to attract even more attracted and interested in you. That’s how you’re going to maximize the investment you’ve made, but, at the same time, those that create original products, the inventors out there, I’m going to call them, the inventors of the world may have a better mousetrap. They may have a better idea, but they don’t have what you guys can do, attracting an audience and confirming that it’s right.

They spend all their money upfront and run out of it on the marketing side. I love the model of spending it all upfront to make sure and figure out that you’ve got marketing now you’ve got a revenue stream from that product that maybe it’s not that original, but it’s working. By the time you get your competition and bring in that original product, now you built a more valuable brand that’s not going to go anywhere and can’t be easily competed with.

Let me ask you a question. Let’s say my name is Tim and I am killing it with one product. I know you were saying that we need to be having the second product coming to keep us up to date and fresh. Let’s say Tim is spending $100,000 every two months on inventory because he has a product that’s killing it on Amazon and he has a great brand on Amazon. What should Tim do? Should Tim focus on building more products on Amazon?

Should he focus on leveraging that one product and building a Shopify store? Should he be focused on possibly pitching that to big brands? Should he consider selling it? There are so many options, and that’s what Amazon sellers are focused on. They’re focused on the money coming in from Amazon. They see the big picture of how their brand is killing it and how to leverage this time of killing it to a bigger picture.

There was this guy who was up on stage at the Prosper Show, where we both were. It was a panel discussion and he’s up there bragging about the fact that he has 10,000 SKUs or something. I asked around because I wasn’t sure, he didn’t state it and wouldn’t state it about how big his company was. I started asking around and some people said, “I know how big he is. I know how many millions. He’s under $10 million.” I started doing the math on the average life cycle and looking at his product line, and I go, “At the end of the day, his net profit margin is probably somewhere around $800 to $1,000 SKU when you look at having managed that many SKUs.”

You’ve got some great winners and some losers in there that’s down in your average. Most of the Amazon sellers’ groups, when we do the final analysis and we look at them, some of them are between 1% and 10% net profit margin. Some of them is gross profit margin. They haven’t even paid themselves. When we look at that, we go, “That’s not a viable and sustainable business.” How are we going to get it to that stage of doing that? We have to look at the line in terms of what our goal is.

If our goal is to make an extra pocket change every single month, great, that’s the model to go on because it’s a whole lot less work, investment, and risk. Go on that model of finding stuff that churns, keep doing that, and keep doing what Tim is doing. If your goal is to build a bigger brand and to get acquired, you’ve got to give them a reason to acquire you. You’ve got to give them a reason to come to you and not one of your other competitors because they’re not buying out a single product. They’re buying out a line. They’re buying out someone who has access to a particular market.

At that stage, Tim should look at it and say, “Do I have a market niche that’s going to be valuable? Can I bring other products even if I don’t do it yet? Can I bring other products, build my Shopify store around a brand messaging and around a community that is going to care?” We are in content to commerce world. That’s why you’re podcasting. That’s why all of this is going. The free stuff we give out in terms of content translates into more commerce and more business later.

From that perspective, if you have to talk all over the place, because you’ve got 10,000 SKUs and some of them are in pet, in juvenile, in housewares, they’re all over the place, you don’t have a clear picture of your consumer. Demographics don’t count. It’s psychographics that count. What does that consumer want? What do they like? What do they care about? What messaging can I bring them? What great content can I deliver to them, whether in video or audio or blog form? How can I get all of that to them, so they want to do more business with me or transact more commerce with me? That’s our goal.

When you find that, that’s what you grow. That’s the time where you, at some point, have to get to be the only game in town. I call it Me Only Territory. You have to get to be the only person who provides something special to them. Sometimes it can be a service. There are subscription services. I’ve got a great juvenile company with toys, and one of the things they do is they do these great games that you can play with the toys. What they deliver on their site is not a product. They deliver the product all through Amazon, but what they deliver through their site is a great add to utilizing the toys they’re selling. It makes for an audience that is engaged. Whatever it is to get them to buy more, to get them to want to spend more time with you, that’s what you do.

Create A Great Product: Amazon sellers are focused on the money coming in from Amazon, but they don’t see the big picture of how their brand is really killing it and how to leverage this time of killing to a bigger picture.

That makes total sense. Tracy, as far as dealing with clients and there are different types of Amazon clients out there, is there a checklist of attributes or requirements that you require or that you would like to see? Some type of stage that the Amazon seller is in before you will work with them given the client’s ideas and working with them to build their brand, which stage is it that you think would be best for you to work with them? If you say, “You have something or you may not have nothing, I can’t work with you yet?”

Tom and I hate to leave people behind. This has been a lifelong observation for me, but also the real world. Because we’re inventors, we have patents, and had our own business before, we know what it’s like to feel isolated and not get insider information. To me, that is a crime, and to allow those same people to be preyed upon by someone who’s selling a course in something that they only have six months of experience in have done once drives me absolutely insane.

At the same time, there’s only two of us and there’s only so much time in the day. We’ve had to get creative and figure out ways in which we can make sure that we don’t leave people behind them. That’s why I produce a ton of content. I write articles, and we do over 36 blog posts and podcasts a month through all of our channels to get this information out to people. I don’t want to leave anyone behind at any stage because you could be starting and on to something that could be amazing and the world needs but you’re going to take a bunch of wrong turns on your way. The longer it takes you to go that full path, the less chance of success you have.

If I can guide them on the fastest path to success, and that’s all that I give them, they follow it, and at some point, they go, “I’m ready for you,” great. I’ve done my job and I feel great about that added value I put into the world. If I, as a growing business, have these employees here, I want to keep them employed, grow this company, grow this brand, and get it sold, I can help them too. I try not to be restrictive about how I help people. I try to say that it’s more of a state of mind. Are you building something bigger? Are you coachable because this is a problem?

We have a lot of inventors who are close-minded. They’re all about their thing and don’t want to hear about how much they need to experience the marketing. They say, “My family and friends love my stuff. It’s so great.” That’s good but it’s not an indicator of whether or not someone is going to plunk down $1 for your thing. We need to find out as fast as possible in the process, do the dogs eat the dog food? Do women want to buy this? Do kids want to play with it? Whatever it might be, we’ve got to find where that transaction point will happen and they are going to do it.

The sooner we can do it before you spend a lot of time, money, and energy, the better off we are. Anyone who’s open to that model of it, I am open to working with. We have all kinds of different ways to work with people where you can consume the twelve people whom I refer to every single one of my clients to at some point in the process. You can consume content from them, and every single month, you can do a live Q&A with them.

We built that because you couldn’t spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to retain these people, but if you don’t ask them a question early on like, “If I’m designing my package, should I put the barcode on it? Should I put these things on it even though I’m not using one?” The answer might be, “Do you have a plan to be on the shelf? If you do, you only want to do this once because otherwise, you’re going to slow your time down, have to do it again, and it’s going to cost $100 extra to do it right.”

These are the kinds of questions and things that you don’t know the order to but these people do. I want to give you access to them. That’s what we built into our process and our services to be able to make that happen. From there, if you don’t know what you want to make, you don’t know what’s next for you. You think you’ve got a brand, but you’re not sure. That’s the time for strategy. I usually do those myself and if they’re big enough, Tom and I do them together. From there, it’s a matter of, “Do you want to do these products? Do you want to design them? Do you need them?” That’s the people we work with. We usually don’t come to someone who says, “I’ve got this gadget. Would you draw it out for me?” We don’t work with people like that.

For FBA Millionaires out there, it’s important to have a strategy. Let’s say I’m launching one product and that product is successful, so now I’m going into pets. I’ve created eight successful pet products through Amazon, where I have recurring sales and I built my website. It may be time to go to big box stores. The world is yours to create but if you have that strategy, especially that exit strategy, you might say after that, “I want to sell for eight figures.”

It’s getting you to nine to make significant money so valuable that you must get bought out. That’s what happens. I’m not going to say it’s easy because you all know out there that it’s not. Once you’ve tipped that million point, getting from $1 million to $10 million, you can do that through product line expansion if you’re smart about your choices and not going anywhere the wind blows. It’s not like, “I like that.” Don’t do that. If you’re strategic about it, you can get to $10 million but getting from $10 million, $50 million, to $100 million, that’s where the growth challenge happens but it’s also where you hit the big box, you hit the big brands where they notice you. You’re not going to sell to some little company that’s going to pay you barely a variable on your sales. You’re going to get a premium for your brand when you hit $100 million.

That’s where the rubber meets the road. Tracy, you have such a fresh approach and a fresh perspective. We’re so pleased to have you as our guest on this program.

Tracy, you’ve sparked my interest here because you’ve caught me thinking small. When I said eight figures, you replied to me, “No, nine figures,” and I love it. You’re making me up to my game and we all have to up our game. This is my question for you. What does a nine-figure acquisition look like? What does a business have to do to get acquired for nine figures? Is it something that we all should know?

This is what I was saying to you before. Going from $1 million to $10 million, you can pretty much do the same thing you’re doing. You have to be great at it. You have to refine it and you have to have a great core audience that you’re transacting with, so it’s a high-value audience that is doing more business with you. If you get that whole dialed in, and usually, you’re going to be diversified up to that point to your Shopify shop, you’re on Amazon, you’ve got a funnel going, maybe you’ve got subscription services going, so you’ve got other things in the mix there. You’ve diversified and done all the smart marketing things to do.

To get from $10 million to $100 million, your business has to get some significant systems in place. This is simple in the sense that there are hundreds and thousands of companies that have done this before you. This is not you need to reinvent everything. This is not the utilization of new technology in a way. It’s fairly straightforward and simple. You have to get systems in place for product management, to manage the whole development of something new from the point you get an idea, vetting that idea, and doing market research on that idea.

You have to systematize that and make it a process that you can rely on and use with indicators that you should move forward or you shouldn’t move forward. You want to run through that and feel that it’s a reliable indicator. What you don’t want to do is get caught up in the “I like it” and you push it through anyway. You want to treat it like a hard and fast go, no go, because you don’t have a lot of time to mess around with. You might be able to make something work, but it’s way better to table it at that stage and come back to it when your systems are in a better place. Maybe the market shifted, you see that there’s a bigger indicator, and you can recycle it, come back around and reevaluate it again.

My big thing about it is a lot of people get hung up on their products instead of treating them a little more loosely. They’re not your babies, not if you want to get to $100 million because you’re going to sell them so they’re not your babies. You’re going to sell them off. You have to think you don’t want to treat them callously either they need to be important to your audience but that’s where you’re gauging. Are they important to this audience I built? Do I have to shift all of my marketing, switch my messaging, and build a new market to grow here? Sometimes you do. We have helped companies who were a furniture company who did TV stands and things like that.

We helped them get into the office and chairs. It’s using the same materials and the same production side of things that none of that changed for them, so they didn’t reinvent everything, but it was a new marketplace. We were brought in to give them that expertise as quickly as possible. If you do have to reinvent, get yourself someone who knows what they’re doing. To go from that $10 million to $100 million, product development systems in place ways to quickly get and scale up your designs and your new products. Consistently get them through the evaluation processes along the way to say, “It’s good, or it’s not good. Let’s keep it. Let’s not keep it.”

The biggest mistake most people make is that they keep their SKUs and keep your inventory too long. Getting stuff out faster is one of the rules of a $100 million company, but the other rule of it is you must make a lot more samples than you think you will have to. You now have to shift your mindset of, “I’m a sampling and product development company because I’ve got to go through lots of ideas and bet them because I’ve got to hit on the ones that fit the formula of what I know I can sell.” It doesn’t mean you’ve taken it along, and you keep going with it. That’s why that is different.

The other part is you do have to have a logistics system or you’re building that in-house delivery. You’re shifting all of those things and components have to start communicating, and that’s the difference. Normally, you have one person who wears a ton of hats but now you have to get different departments, divisions, maybe even systems in place for how you’re delivering. You have systems that does warehousing and logistics, and product development. You’ve got to get them communicating together.

From a system standpoint, that’s where it gets complicated. This is something that you can model, bring people in who know what they’re doing and done it again and again. You want to bring someone who’s done it for a bigger brand, not someone who’s done it from an Amazon seller and happened to grow up because what happens is, they went up, got sold and they didn’t experience that integration pain, because what happens if you have to keep going.

Create A Great Product: A lot of people get hung up on their products instead of treating them a little more loosely. They’re not your babies, not if you want to get to a hundred million, because you’re going to sell them.

Quickly, to add on to that, what does a big brand say a pet brand and they see you coming. What makes them say, “We have to take them?” Is it that they’re taking Amazon sales, taking publicity, or taking share off shelves?

It’s none of those. The big brands are isolated and egotistical. There’s no question about it. They are in their Ivory Towers. They have big corporations and certainly don’t want to admit that some litter seller is beating them out. They would never admit that internally as an organization. That’s not how they look at you, but there is a practical side to many brands. The practical side is, “I need more things that my big buyer at big box or mass market wants.” Their whole job is geared around that.

Think about it this way. I can sell one of my office chairs at Costco. It sells for about $20 million a year. Granted, it’s not mine. I say that that way. We designed it but it’s not mine. It belongs to the brand that I designed it for, but their chair does about $20 million at mass-market clubs. The older version of it is sold on Amazon, it’d be lucky to do $400,000 a year. To them, it’s chump change. They don’t see that as to why they would buy a brand that only does $400,000. It means nothing to them. That’s not going to hit them.

However, if your brand is transacting, it’s such a great pace, and you’re in the place where that Costco buyer or that mass-market retail buyer is paying attention, and that’s where you’re getting publicity, they’re going to sit up and go, “Why aren’t you doing something that’s innovative?” They now have to scramble to do it. It’s way easier for them to go, “Let’s buy them, bring it in-house, and that’s it.” The whole thing about people in the big brands knocking you off, there are too many legal systems in place for them to do it on purpose. Sometimes it happens because you all are thinking the same things at the same time because the market trends are there. It’s not that they have special access, or you have special access.

There’s no garnering the market on innovative thinking. It happens to everybody, and it can happen simultaneously because market indicators are there, but they’re not out there looking to steal your idea. They would rather buy it. It’s faster because you already have a market share, you’ve already got your things going. If you’re doing everything right, it’s a whole lot faster for them to do that, bring you in, and present you as a part of their brand to the buyer. They’ll be ready in less than six months. That’s way faster than they can move on their product development because remember, they have systems and processes in place. You’re a little more agile.

Tracy, this is eye-opening stuff. It’s huge that we’re here talking with you about this and I know that some of these concepts and ideas and the questions we’re asking are probably a little bit more down the road in terms of how we’re looking. We’re looking at our future. We want to be big and we want to be able to have that nine-figure organization. We should all keep our eyes on the prize that we want to build a business that we can sell. Ideally, that’s what we would all like to do so that way we can enjoy the fruits of all of our labors somewhere down the line.

Let’s suppose that we’re starting. We’re talking from that little guy or little gal’s perspective, and we want to create our own new product. One of those product lines that have caught fire in the last few years or so are diffusers. Everybody knows what these things are, and there are millions of them but we want to create our diffuser and something we’re passionate about. How do we get started? What questions should we ask in order for a company like HazzDesign to help us design and build that great diffuser that everybody is going to want?

We have a mantra here, “Hope is not a plan.” If you’re going through this like, “I hope I’m going to make a big brand. I’m hoping it’s going to be fantastic. I’m hoping someone’s going to want to acquire me.” It doesn’t work like that. You have to plan that in. It’s got to be embedded into everything you do every reason you choose a product, and every time you look at a product and go, “I’ve got to add something extra to this that is going to make it me only and make me acquirable. How am I going to do that?” These are questions that you have to have to ask.

It doesn’t always work that every time I look at a product, I go, “There’s a good path there.” Sometimes there’s not. Sometimes you shouldn’t do something. The difference is, Amazon sellers have come out of a world of analytics. You come out of this analysis of, do all the indicators are right that I could rank on this item? Do I think all the indicators are right that there’s interest in it and it’s in a growth mode? Are Google AdWords tracking? You’re looking at it and you have a lot of data but what you don’t have is a bigger picture of what’s out on the market and how it works outside of Amazon. That’s the difference in how we evaluate and look at something because we’re always looking at it.

If you’re going to spend the time and money to make something original, it better works at the mass market because you need it to last that long to recoup your investment. That’s how we’re always looking at it. Is it added value? Most people go into a startup. Thinking about a new product and they go in what they call the MVP, Minimum Viable Product. You’ve heard of this before. It’s a soft word term. A minimum viable product, that’s what they want to make.

Your minimum viable product is the existing product you bought on Alibaba and put your logo on. That’s minimum viable, so what we need to do is move to maximum valuable product and it has to be maximum value with the audience you intend to grow and with the audience that you know that will be there, if and when you get to nine figures. They’re going to be there because they’re also selling at the mass market or they’re also buying for the mass market. You want to make sure that it’s valuable for them, and it’s going to carry through so it can’t miss being on the shelf someday. They’re going to demand it and they’re going to want it.

Looking at that, that’s how we look at a product. We look at it, and we go, “Is this on growth trends, or are we in a short life cycle on a product?” It can be that it’s a short life cycle. We can see because we study what’s in the stores. We study what’s going in and out. When things aren’t transacting in stores, they will not come back to it even if it was before its time. Buyers will not get burned. That’s totally great. It won’t get back in until it’s killed in an eCommerce somewhere, and they can’t disregard it anymore, or a new buyer comes in and they were totally naive to the history of it. That’s how it happens.

You can’t sell them something that they already sold that they failed on. You’ve got to look at that, too. You’ve got to know what went out, what didn’t do well, and what got closed out. Having that view of what’s in the stores is different. This is where we, the US consumers, have an advantage over the factory directs from anywhere in the world. Why? Because we can walk into stores. We can survey them. We can use tools that are out on the marketplace with actual shoppers. My favorite tool and I cited it all the time, Field Agent. I love Field Agent because they make people be in the store in the region you care about. If you care about the Southwest, they will make sure that their demographic is standing there in the store geo-located, so you do know they are from there and you’re not getting some random people who joined a survey.

Tracy, let me jump in. We’ve got a little bit of time left here on the show. Everything you’re talking about here is important but sometimes, I am a little bit too close to my products or the products that I like. I know why I like those products. I know why I buy something that somebody else doesn’t, and I keep going back to that product again and again. For those of us Amazon sellers who are looking to get a leg up and better understand what truly does make a great product and one that we should have in our own stores with product design. What are the elements of a likable brand that is something that I can take and keep in my head for the future that I can refer to? What things pop up that stand out to you, Tom, and the people you work with that make brands truly things that we like and need to have?

That’s the multimillion-dollar question always all the time. It’s different every single time. It’s deciding whether or not you should do something. The number one criterion for us is, “Does it transact with women?” Women buyers control 86% of the consumer market.

They certainly do in my household.

Same here.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s automotive. There isn’t a single category that’s immune to that statistic. There are a few things. Services are different but women buyers control the majority of the marketplace. When you look at that, if you do not have in your store over 70% women, if that’s not your consumer base, then you are not as profitable or valuable as you should be. That’s the first thing. Is that going to transact there? Is it already transacting there? Can I do more with the products that are doing well with women? That’s the criteria there.

That’s our number one place where we add a lot of value because there are honestly few women designers in this world. If you’ve ever been to any of your factories that are producing things in China or in other places. In years that Tom and I have been going there, we’ve never seen a female designer in any one of those factories. It’s a huge advantage to tap into something that is going to work with women and that women want.

Create A Great Product: If you’re going to spend time and money to make something original, it better work at the mass market because you need it to last long to recoup your investment.

That right there is an easy play in terms of judgment call about whether or not you should move forward on something or grow up in an area of your program. That’s it, but on the design side of things, we want something that is self-explanatory, and that’s the thing. If I have to explain how it works, it will never make it to the mass market. No one is there at Best Buy to sell stuff. No one is the bit there at Target helping you. If they do, they don’t even know what to say. They barely know where things are. You’ve been in the stores. You know what it’s like.

If it doesn’t sell itself off the shelf, if it requires you to do a fancy video on a funnel to get it to sell, it’s probably not a growth brand idea. That’s where great design comes in, in terms of making sure that it’s tapping into something that is new and innovative, but not something that’s so new that I don’t know how to use it, and I’m afraid to buy it. If I have to learn how to do something, it’s going to take me a lot longer to decide to buy it from you. Anything that we can do that has one foot in innovation, and one foot in what I know now.

Think of it if you’re developing a Shopify shop. Shopify is great because the unit user interface isn’t reinvented every time. I know how to shop when I’m in your store. They didn’t make it difficult for me. That’s the same thing you want to do on the product design side of things. You’re thinking about making it easy for the consumer to comprehend. Those are the basic things. Everything else is up to the brand messaging, the audience you’re talking to, making sure that it resonates with them, and checking it. There’s always a check process in what we do. Just because you like it because I like it doesn’t mean it’s going to sell.

This is amazing and we’ve had a lot of value come from you, Tracy. I’ve learned a lot, and I’m sure Jeff learned a lot. The FMA Millionaires out there learned a lot to take their business to that nine-figure level and that’s what we’re shooting for. I would like to say thank you. If you could share, how can FBA Millionaires engage with you or reach out to you and Tom? If they would like to collaborate or get your services, how can they reach you?

You can reach us on our website HazzDesign. We also have a podcast out there called Product Launch Hazzards. We have a free one and a premium one. The free one has over 50 episodes that talk in deep dive on many of these details and introduce you to some of those experts I told you about. It’s amazing how hearing what someone else has to say can reinforce the vision that you have. All of them are accessible at ProductLaunchHazzards.com. You can access them. You can ask them questions. That’s exactly how you can reach me, and you can book a time with me. I love to talk to people about their business brands, their growth plans, and where they’re going. Don’t be afraid. I also have a coupon offer for your members. It’s FBAM 18. If they join as members, it’s $100 off.

That is awesome.

It’s good, Tracy. That’s terrific. We hope that you’ll be willing to join us again at some point and maybe even bring Tom. I know he’s busy at this point in time and cannot join us, but maybe we can have you both on the program the next time. Thanks so much for joining us on our program.

Thank you both. I enjoyed it.

Thanks so much, Tracy. You’re awesome.

That’s going to put the wraps on another edition of FBA Millionaires. Once again, our thanks to Tracy Hazzard. She and her husband, Tom, are owners of HazzDesign. Do check it out at HazzDesign.com. Check out FBAMillionaires.com to join the FBA Millionaire’s Club. Make sure that in addition to doing that, if you’re able to hop on over to iTunes, if you’re not already aware, our show does show up there. Give us a rating and let us know what we’re doing. Let us know how much you enjoyed the show or what it is that you’d like us to do, maybe a better job of so we can help you take that next giant step in your FBA Millionaires career that is on your way to becoming the FBA Millionaire that we’d love you to be. From Will Moffett in Northern California and I’m Jeff Allen here in Southern California, we’re looking forward to talking to you again on our next edition of FBA Millionaires. Until then, let’s kill it.

Important Links:

• Tracy Hazzard
• Field Agent
• HazzDesign
• Product Launch Hazzards
• FBAMillionaires.com

Watch the episode here:

FBA Millionaires Podcast
Jeff Allen