Meet the $100m Queen of Amazon
Amazon sellers, unsurprisingly, lean heavily towards a demographic of “tech bros.”
However, the founder and CEO of one of the largest brands on Amazon, Baleaf, bucks that trend. Dubbed “The Queen of Ecommerce,” Xu Muxuan has built one of the largest brands on Amazon, doing well over $100 million a year on Amazon.com alone.
Here's the story of Muxuan and how a saxophone major went on to create one of the largest D2C apparel brands in America.
Baleaf: The “Amazon Lululemon”
Baleaf is a sports apparel brand in the ultra-competitive space of ‘athleisure.' It is often considered “The Lululemon of Amazon” and was founded by Xu Muxuan (徐慕瑄, pronounced Shu Moo-shu-an) in 2014.
By EcomCrew's estimates, Baleaf is the #85 largest third-party seller on Amazon and does nearly $100 million annually in sales on Amazon U.S. alone. It has also picked up many accolades in China, including being awarded the best employer in “international e-commerce.”
From Taobao Seller to Amazon Seller
Muxuan graduated from university in 1997 with a degree in, of all things, saxophone. After touring with a theater troupe, she chased her dream of becoming a female entrepreneur. She said in an interview, “If I wanted to become a female entrepreneur at the age of 35, this path would obviously not work. So I resolutely gave up my major and took another path.” She added that, looking back, she might not have taken this career path had she known how competitive Amazon and other platforms would become: “If there were as much competition on the platform then as there is now, I might not have given up my original major.”
Like many of Amazon's largest third-party Chinese sellers, Muxuan got her start on Taobao from 2011 to 2014 as a domestic seller. She later recognized international e-commerce as “a fast-growing industry with infinite prospects” and entered the U.S. market, specifically Amazon.
Raising Outside Capital
As Amazon sellers, we often like to think of our competition as small, bootstrapped businesses, but this is increasingly not the case as more Amazon-dominant brands raise outside funding.
Western investment in e-commerce brands surged around the time of COVID, and the same trend occurred in China.
In 2021, Muxuan raised 100 million RMB ($14 million USD) in Series A funding, led by the CICC Cultural Consumer Fund under CICC Capital and followed by Blue Lake Capital. While Baleaf's success is impressive, it is not an entirely bootstrapped story.
Women Make Up the Majority of Internet Entrepreneurs in China
Perhaps as a byproduct of China's communist past under Mao and the one-child policy, female entrepreneurship is strong in China. A 2015 estimate found that 55% of internet businesses were started by women, and in 2023, a staggering 74% of internationally-focused businesses were started by women in China. In North America, that number is closer to just 35%.
With many estimates suggesting that over 60% of third-party sellers on Amazon are based in China, one thing is clear: Amazon is dominated by ambitious Chinese entrepreneurs, male or female.
