Josh Levine is Co-founder and Managing Partner of Color More Lines, a boutique e-commerce agency helping brands grow faster on Amazon and Walmart. Color More Lines is a performance-based agency that delivers true white glove service. In the last two years alone, during the pandemic, they helped eight brands go from zero to 100,000 dollars a month within 12 months of working together.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- Josh Levine talks about how Color More Lines delivers white glove service
- How to fix cash flow for e-commerce business
- Common inventory forecasting mistakes brands make
- What to look for in a 3PL
- The challenge of the supplement category
- Off-Amazon funnels that help you sell more on Amazon
- Why you should consider diversification to Walmart
- The performance-based agency, what it is, and how it works
- 80/20 principles for new product creation
- Low-hanging fruits to grow your e-commerce brand
- Josh’s lessons from working with Microsoft and Disney
In this episode…
Own an e-commerce brand? One of the many problems you’ll likely deal with is other brands profiting off your Amazon marketing. Not to mention inventory management and the pain of losing your first-page Amazon spot because your forecasting was way off the mark and your product ran out of stock.
If you’re dealing with any of those problems, you want to pay attention to this episode, as Josh Levine talks about clearing all the roadblocks in your Amazon account. You’ll also learn about how your marketing and branding outside Amazon helps you sell more on Amazon and how Amazon is subsidizing your marketing spend on other platforms. Ready to find out more?
Listen to this Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast with Dr. Jeremy Weisz featuring Josh Levine, Co-founder and Managing Partner of Color More Lines. They discuss low-hanging fruits to grow your e-commerce brand, why you should consider diversifying to Walmart, common inventory forecasting mistakes you should avoid, and lots more.
Resources mentioned in this episode
Special Mentions:
Related Episode(s):
- “How To Start From Scratch With a Food Product Business with Peter Rahal Founder of RxBar”
- “Growing Your Business and Serving Your Community with Cameron Healy of The Healy Foundation”
- “Negotiation Tactics From FBI Agent Christopher Voss, Founder of Black Swan Ltd”
Sponsor for this episode…
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Episode Transcript
Intro 0:02
Welcome to the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast where we feature top founders and entrepreneurs and their journey. Now let’s get started with the show.
Jeremy Weisz 0:12
Dr. Jeremy Weiss here Founder of InspiredInsider.com. Also, this will be on the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different, I have Josh Levine of ColorMoreLines.com. I’ll introduce Josh formally in a second. Josh, I always like to point out other episodes, people should check out of the podcast, some of my favorite episodes. And you know, I love to have the people and brands I most admire. I had the founder of RX bars on the podcast, which was a great episode. The founder of Kettle Chips was on the episode. I had one of my favorite books, Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss, that was a great episode. So check that out, and more great episodes on InspiredInsider.com and Rising Entrepreneurs. This episode is brought to you by Rise25. And what we do is we help businesses give to and connect their dream 100 relationships and how do we do that? We help you run your podcast. You know, like I was saying, Josh, the number one thing for me in my life is relationships. So I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships. So I found no better way over the past decade to profile the people and companies I most admire in this planet and feature them and so other people can discover them and and I can learn from them as well. So if you thought about podcasting, you should, you can go to rise25.com Email us, my business partner and I ha’ve been both doing it for over a decade at this point. So we’re happy to answer any questions that you have. I am excited. We have Joshua Levine, he’s Co-founder and Managing Partner of Color More Lines. They’re a boutique e-commerce agency helping brands grow faster on Amazon and Walmart. And in the last two years alone, during the pandemic, where some people were sheltering and you know, struggling, they actually helped eight brands go from zero to $100,000 a month, within 12 months of working together. They’re a true white glove service. And I know people throw that term around. So we’ll talk about what white glove service actually means. And they’re also performance based. And I want to give a big thank you to Justin Crane, and Ben Lettered, because this interview would not be happening without those two people. So thank you both. And, Josh, thanks for joining me.
Josh Levine 2:26
Thank you so much. And thank you to Justin and Ben as well, those guys are rock stars.
Jeremy Weisz 2:31
You know, I wanted to start with – just give people an overview a little bit about what you do that Color More Lines?
Josh Levine 2:38
Sure. No, that’s a fair question. Thank you. So we are a white glove boutique agency. And what does that actually mean? What that means is that we’re to partner with the company in terms of running their e-commerce component of their business. And look, you know, advertising agencies are a dime a dozen out there, right? You can actually hire somebody to your advertising. The danger of that if you think about it’s like flying a helicopter, right? If the company is controlling the main blade, right? And an ad agency is doing the rotor, if the main blade and the rotor are out of sync, guess what happens? It crashes, right? So it’s really important. I mean, we’re single throat to choke, we do literally everything, white glove meaning, inventory management, logistics, financial dashboarding, forecasting, prices management, Creative Market Intelligence, reverse engineering, competitors, understanding points of parity, points of differentiation, yes, advertising, one of literally 20 things that we do working with brands.
Jeremy Weisz 3:36
I want to go deep a little bit because people throw white glove service around and you know, what it sounds like for you as you do things that probably other companies don’t want to do? Because it’s probably tough to do. And it’s not easy to do. What are some of those components that even made you think, I don’t know if we should even do this is not easy, right? What are some of those pieces that you do for the company that you really, you know, go deep with?
Josh Levine 4:05
No, that’s a great question. And what’s that show on Discovery called Dirty Jobs or something like that? Are they like, really roll up their sleeves and get dirty? I mean, that’s what we do. And some of it, frankly, is not fun. Why do we do those components of it? Because we’re performance based, and the better our clients do, the better we do. And if those things aren’t handled, guess what? Clients can’t make money and we can’t make money. We if we wanted to be a PPC only advertising agency, that’d be easy. We can do that all day long. But the plane won’t fly. And I’ll give you an example. Crisis management, technical term pain in the ass. If you have engaging issues if you have listing issues, if you have hijackers, if you have illegal resellers sending out cease and desist letters getting dirty, kicking people off have listings that don’t belong there based on your Amazon brand registry and the fact that you know, this is your brand you should own it. Why should somebody be able to hop on your listing and take your sales All that has to be done to clear the road in order to be able to do advertising, right. So that’s a down and dirty thing we do. I can tell you of at least three or four companies that came to us that had over 100 Illegal resellers on their listing. Imagine your brand, Jeremy and you should be generating 100 grand a month, and $95,000 a month is going to illegal resellers. What does that mean? on Amazon? You know, there’s the yellow Buy Now box. Well, if there’s illegal resellers, the yellow box turns gray. And it says see other buying options. So now, you click on Jeremy’s product, right? And you don’t get to buy now you get a gray box, which then shows you four or five people you can buy from including Jeremy, the manufacturer, now you’ve got maybe a 20% chance of getting the sale versus you owning it. Right. And you know, that’s the down and dirty and negative of Amazon, there’s amazing things. But there’s things you got to patrol. And that’s one example of things that we patrol and clean up for clients, right? I would say another one. That is down and dirty. People don’t want to roll up their sleeves and do his inventory management. Right? When we think about clients, and we think about them growing, we think about a flywheel that moves. And the first thing in the flywheel is availability. If your products aren’t available and in stock, and you can’t forecast properly, you go out of stock. If you go out of stock, it’s the kiss of death on Amazon, why you get direct, right, and we have an expression. And if we work super hard getting people to page one, we have an expression, which is, you know, where’s the best place to bury a dead body on amazon.com? Papa page two why nobody’s looking? Right? When’s the last time you went to page two or page three or page 20? To look for a product? Well, Amazon, frankly doesn’t care about you and doesn’t care about us. They want to make money themselves, right? So if you’re not in stock, they’re just going to take you off the hard work. We’ve done bubbling you up to the number three link, you’re not going to be on page 30. Right? Because you’re not available. So inventory management is down and dirty, right? Are we in your warehouse? And are we a 3PL No. But managing that putting the intelligence layer on top of that, giving clients a dashboard where they can understand the days on hand and the fulfillment quantities. And what’s needed to ship in, is invaluable. Because then entrepreneurs, all they need to do literally is send a label and things arrive on time and they don’t go out of stock.
Jeremy Weisz 7:28
That’s a huge thing, what you just talked about there, and we can unravel it a little bit. Because inventory management, it’s the non sexy thing that allows ecommerce companies to function and that kind of goes into cash flow. So I’d love for you to talk about how you think about cash flow?