September 2022 Brand Report – $714,775

Welcome to the September 2022 edition of the Brand Report! Each month, we’ll break down our monthly revenue so you can see what’s working and what’s not.

We’ll give you aggregated numbers across the eight brands we own or have significant equity in. In our exclusive Secret Sauce Brand Report, you’ll get our numbers broken down brand by brand. We’ll also give you a 60-minute class each month detailing one particular thing we’re working on right now that you can use to start and grow your own business.

Our next class is on October 19, where we'll show you how to create the highest-converting Amazon landing pages possible. We'll show you how we use DataDive to optimize our listings, the little tricks we do to increase our CTR, and a lot more. 

Get the Secret Sauce for your brand.

 
Our revenue for September 2022 was $714,775, which is significantly lower than August's revenue of $847,000. September generally marks the beginning of pretty significant month-over-month decreases until the holidays, and October's is likely to be down by at least 10% to 20%. 

What We Worked on This Month

• Preparing for our Montreal photo shoot. I've been chronicling a bit of the rebrand we've been doing for one of my brands. For this project, I'm also staging a fairly big photoshoot (for photos + video) in Montreal later in October. The prep for recording is always at least half of the work, with storyboarding and everything else involved. For Secret Sauce members, I should have some examples of the final work by the November update.
• Listing Optimization with DataDive. We spent a bunch of time in September working on using a newish tool, DataDive, which works in conjunction with Helium 10 and gives a bunch more in-depth feedback and listing-optimization advice. So far, the results have been incredibly encouraging, and we're seeing significant increases in our conversion rates. 

Two Wins This Month

• Production on two new products completed in time for Black Friday? I mention below how we've had a collection of products basically stalled in production. We used a sourcing company for these products and have been a bit disappointed. On the opposite end of the spectrum, we've been working with a factory directly to have two bags developed for a brand we're working on, and things couldn't have gone smoother. It took the factory only a couple of weeks to produce fantastic “golden samples” and mass production has just been completed, a little over 2 months after starting. We're hoping to have some of these air shipped in and available for sale for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
• Tactical.com traffic continues to grow. Our traffic and overall domain rating for Tactical.com continues to grow month-over-month, and it's currently well eclipsing 10,000 unique visits a month. A lot of this gain can be attributed to a series of authoritative guides we've published which have gained us a ton of backlinks.
   

Two Fails for This Month

• Products stuck in development for 6+ months. We have been developing products for one of our newest brands since February, and there's been little to no progress in the last 2 to 3 months. In fact, things have arguably taken a step backward. One of our products includes pretty unique packaging, and the boxes we're using completely flunked our third-party inspection. We're likely going to embark on a bit of a tense back-and-forth with the factory to get it rectified. 
• Country of origin labeling mishap. We committed a rookie mistake, and a shipment of items failed to have a country of origin markings on them. Of course, this ended up getting inspected by CBP (Customs and Border Patrol). This was a bit of a comedy of errors along all points of the road to result in the ever-so-important “Made in China” markings not being included—the thousands of dollars spent to get them labeled wasn't so comedic though.