In 2011, Chris Jones closed a failing retail shop on Main Street in Twin Falls, Idaho, and did something that would change the trajectory of both his business and his town. The shop had been selling handmade beauty products scented with essential oils, and when it folded, Jones was left with a surplus of bulk oils and nowhere to sell them. He and his wife had long talked about wanting to do more good in the world. They just needed the means to do it. He bottled the oils under a new name, listed them in Amazon’s store “just to see what would happen,” he said. Within three months, Plant Therapy had generated more sales than the retail shop had produced in an entire year.
Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) was central to that early momentum. Jones had no warehouse infrastructure, no logistics operation, and no established customer base. What he had was a product and access to the same shipping network used by brands many times his size, at a price that beat anything he could have built on his own. “The cost to get a product from the warehouse to the customer is actually cheaper through Amazon’s Fulfillment by Amazon program than it is for us to do it ourselves,” Jones said. “And it’s faster and the customers trust it more.” In rural southern Idaho, more than 200 miles from Boise and well outside any major distribution corridor, that combination changed what was possible.
First-year revenue reached $1.4 million. By year three, Plant Therapy had crossed $8 million. Through its Planting Kindness initiative, the company has donated more than $6 million to charitable causes since its founding — and that number has kept climbing alongside the business.
Plant Therapy now employs 85 people in Twin Falls, and the company’s commitment to its community runs through how it treats the people inside it as much as the causes it funds externally. Employees receive 16 hours of paid volunteer time each year and charitable donation matching, and causes are often nominated by team members themselves. The giving is concentrated close to home, with donations going to suicide prevention programs, women’s and homeless shelters, and food security work in the Twin Falls area. In 2025 alone, that giving reached approximately $450,000. When a disruption to federal nutrition benefits created acute food insecurity in the region, Plant Therapy responded with direct grocery donations and community matching that amplified the impact further.
“Our entire Plant Therapy mission has been to positively impact as many lives as possible, and Amazon 100% powers that mission,” said Jones. “It’s a one-to-one relationship between what we sell in the Amazon store and what we are able to give back. That’s the flywheel in action—the faster it spins, the more lives we touch, the more money flows back into our community.”
Sustaining that flywheel increasingly depends on tools that help a lean team move faster and make smarter decisions. Plant Therapy’s Amazon Manager Danya Ramirez relies on Amazon’s AI-powered chatbot, Seller Assistant, which was designed to help sellers find information, access insights, and manage their business more efficiently in the Amazon store. She uses it to run monthly performance reporting, track which products are gaining or losing impressions, and surface answers to policy and inventory questions without pulling her team away from higher-priority work. “It saves that front-end legwork,” she said, “and that over time saves us money and helps us reach more customers.”
Product Opportunity Explorer serves a different purpose. When Plant Therapy is developing a new product or troubleshooting one that isn’t performing, Ramirez uses it to read customer demand signals, trending search terms, and competitor positioning. After spotting strong search volume around castor oil through the tool, Plant Therapy launched a castor oil roll-on that sold through quickly. “We hit that trend perfectly while it was going,” Ramirez said.
The team is also using Amazon’s Creative Studio, which they use to develop and evaluate video and graphic concepts before committing their creative team to final production. “We can do a rough draft, throw it up, see if it’s going to work, and then take it to our creative team for the final product,” she said, describing how the tool lets new ideas get tested without slowing anyone down.
The AI tools, Ramirez said, help her team stay focused on what matters. “Anything we can get done with AI to make sure our efforts are going toward bigger impact projects is really important to us.” For Plant Therapy, every efficiency gained through the Seller Assistant, every trend spotted through the Product Opportunity Explorer, every concept tested in Creative Studio frees up bandwidth for the work Jones and Ramirez care about most.