Why We’re Taking Boob Food Too Off Amazon

Alright so after a lot of thought we’re going to do something super rebellious for a modern business. After several years of selling Boob Food Too on Amazon, we’ve decided to stop.

It probably sounds like a strange business decision. Amazon is huge, everybody shops there, and conventional wisdom says that if you have a product that sells on Amazon, you should sell as much of it there as possible. Especially given that 99.9% of our reviews are 5 stars. But when I look at our numbers, I don't think Amazon actually grew the Boob Food Too business very much. We’ve been in business for almost 20 years. It seems like it mostly gave people who were already going to buy it another place to buy it.

Our overall sales have stayed surprisingly consistent. The uptick we’ve seen is consistent with the organic growth we’ve always had since starting our small business. More customers simply started buying through Amazon instead of directly from us.

So the pie didn't get much bigger. Amazon just started taking a bigger slice.

And that slice is expensive. Once you add up Amazon's fees, fulfillment, advertising and everything else, they can eat roughly a third of our profit on a sale. For a small business, that's a lot of money to hand over for what is essentially another checkout button.

There are other reasons, too. Amazon turns almost everything into a commodity. Boob Food Too is a product we developed ourselves, from an unusual plant that we've been growing and working with for years. I'd rather build the story and the brand around that than have it sitting in a grid of generalized lactation products competing on price, reviews and advertising.

I believe we’ve had such consistent success because we’ve built relationships with our customers ourselves. When you buy directly from Elk Haven Herbals, we can explain the product, answer questions, offer better bundles and subscriptions, hear your feedback, and put more of your purchase back into the business.

So this isn't really about hating Amazon. Amazon is incredibly convenient, and we're grateful for the customers who have bought Boob Food Too there.

It's just that we've decided we'd rather build our own business than keep paying to rent space in somebody else's.

Boob Food Too isn't going away. It's just going to stay at home.

Same product. Same weird little herb. Same people making it.

Just a little less Bezos.

All the best,

Aaron