When Anne Tariani was living in Karachi, Pakistan, in the mid-1980s, she had terrible feet and a simple fix. A terracotta foot scrubber, fired from Indus River Valley clay and sold in piles outside a ceramic shop, worked better than anything she’d found back home. She started bringing them back as gifts for friends and family. The response was immediate. In 1990, she and her husband Kumy moved to Omaha, set up in her mother’s garage, and Gilden Tree was born.
For its first decade, the business was strictly wholesale, growing through spa trade shows and word of mouth into a national network of salons, spas, and podiatry offices. Then, in 2003, Gilden Tree began selling in Amazon’s store. Over the two decades since, as Amazon’s seller tools have expanded, Gilden Tree has grown right alongside them — trying, as Anne puts it, virtually everything Amazon offers.
“The importance of Amazon in our growth can’t be understated,” said Anne. “I don’t know where we would be if we hadn’t partnered with Amazon. It came at a really good time. The changes in Amazon over that timeframe, which is a long timeframe, allowed us to adapt gradually.”
Selling in Amazon’s store connected Gilden Tree directly to its customers in a way wholesale never had. Anne and Kumy said they learned immediately what people loved, what they wanted more of, and what needed work. The audience they found was bigger than anything they’d reached before, and it kept growing. When 2020 arrived and salons closed, customers turned to at-home self-care and discovered Gilden Tree’s foot scrubber in enormous numbers. That same year, they started using Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) outsourcing the picking, packing and storage of their products to Amazon.
“That’s when the real growth happened. We experienced a double growth year over year,” said Laura Posh, who manages Amazon operations for Gilden Tree. “The reviews came in, people were loving it, and it was extremely rewarding to make a product that could make people happy during that timeframe.”
Gilden Tree’s bestselling terracotta foot scrubber, hand-formed from Indus River Clay, alongside the company’s newest product line of shower steamers made with 100% essential oils and manufactured locally in Nebraska.
That customer connection honed in 2020, is central to how Gilden Tree operates today. Based on their Amazon customer feedback, they’ve grown their product line from 1 SKU to more than 110, and in the process, developed what they call the “DNA of Gilden Tree products.” As Anne described, each product from creams to towels “need to be authentic. They need to be effective. They need to meet a specific need, and they need to be the best that we can make them be without sacrificing quality.”
When a new product launches, the Amazon Vine program puts it in front of a trusted group of reviewers who give honest, detailed feedback that helps future customers make informed decisions. “They’re not paid for anything,” Posh said. “They just test out the product and let anyone coming to the page know exactly what they think.” To reach new customers beyond organic search, Gilden Tree uses Creator Connections, which links them to Amazon influencers who already have storefronts and audiences on the platform. “It was really hard for us to find people that were also influencing on Amazon,” Posh said. “Creator Connections was exactly what we were looking for.”
Every order that leaves Gilden Tree’s Omaha warehouse is handled by a member of the company’s team.
“Our partnership with Amazon has allowed us to do much more than we would have been able to do without them. Number one being product expansion,” said Posh. Gilden Tree wouldn’t have expanded towel colors, or types, including bathmats, hand towels or shower steamers, if their Amazon customers hadn’t asked for them. They also wouldn’t have thought to start selling in Japan, Canada or Mexico, if Amazon, they said, hadn’t showed them the demand and made the process easier.
“Here at Gilden Tree, we may be only in Omaha, Nebraska,” Posh said. “But we’re able to do really big things.”
Those big things also includes their giveback programs directed at their local Omaha community. Gilden Tree donates towels to the Furniture Project, which furnishes homes for families starting over, and to the Nebraska Humane Society, which tucks a waffle weave towel into each cardboard cat carrier when an animal is adopted.