The holiday season is fast approaching, and for MAX’IS Creations, that means gearing up for their busiest time of year. The family-run business, founded on an 8-year-old’s creative idea, is projecting to sell 2,500 of their unique basketball-hoop mugs per day on peak shopping days this December - a feat they say would be impossible without the power of Amazon’s small business support.
“Max will do most of his sales in between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and he could not sell thousands of products a day without Amazon,” said Jen Ash, the mother behind MAX’IS Creations, who, along with her husband Ron, doesn’t take a salary, but oversees the day-to-day operations. Last year, the business did $650,000 in sales with Amazon, 60% over the holiday period alone. And they did it all from their kitchen table.
The Boston-based business started when Jen Ash’s son, Max, was just eight-years-old. It was in his second-grade art class at the Carroll School in Lincoln, Massachusetts, a school for kids with dyslexia and other language-based learning differences when Max had the idea to add a basketball hoop to a mug, perfect for tossing marshmallows into hot cocoa. Max, who credits his dyslexic thinking and language-based learning differences for his ingenuity, brought the creative concept to life with the support of his parents.
After getting a 3D designer involved, filing a patent, and starting to sell the mugs, word quickly spread. Major retailers like Uncommon Goods and Nordstrom soon placed orders, and the family business began to take off.
But it was their decision to start selling in the Amazon store a few years ago that really propelled MAX’IS Creations to new heights. Once they opened their store in 2016, they went from a few hundred mugs a month to hundreds a day, during the holiday season. “Amazon’s incredible for small businesses,” said Jen Ash. “There’s absolutely no other way a family like ours could do the level of sales that we are doing without the support and programs that Amazon offers.”
Max credits Amazon’s powerful search algorithms and advertising platform, with getting MAX’IS Creations in front of millions of shoppers. And with Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), Max can focus on product development while Amazon handles warehousing, shipping, and customer service on the 20,000 to 30,000 units a year they sell.
“Amazon basically handles the customer interaction, the marketing, the fulfillment and then there’s the advertising,” Jen Ash explained. “Millions of people know about our product that would not have known about our product, because of Amazon.”
This holiday season, MAX’IS Creations is projecting to go from selling dozens of mugs a day up to 2,500 mugs per day at the peak of the shopping rush - a 25X increase that Jen Ash says would simply be impossible to achieve without the support of Amazon.
Jen and her husband are both employed full-time, making MAX’IS Creations a “side-hustle” the family supports on nights, weekends and holidays. Max, now 20-years-old, is a student at Swarthmore College, studying astronomy and engineering in case his dream of becoming a professional golfer falls through. Still the “Chief Creator” behind all of MAX’IS Creations’ product ideas, Max credits Amazon and most importantly, his mom with giving him the freedom to go to school and still fulfill a dream of being an entrepreneur.
“I’m so grateful to my mom and my dad for all the hard work they put into running this business. They’re the ones who helped me turn my creative ideas into real products,” said Max Ash. “Without our store in Amazon, there’s no way we could have built this into the million-dollar business it is today.”