He solved a simple kitchen problem. With Amazon, it became a $10M business

Scott Fleming didn’t set out to create a best-selling product when he made his first StoveShelf prototype. The Wisconsin woodworker simply wanted more storage space in the kitchen, so he glued a couple of magnets to a piece of wood and snapped it onto his stove’s backsplash. The idea was such a simple fix to an obvious problem that he was sure someone else must have invented it.

“I was so nervous to even start looking around online, because I was like, ‘Oh, I’m sure somebody else has come up with this.’ But I didn’t find anything out there,” he said. This gave him the green light he needed to get started. “I immediately registered the StoveShelf domain.”

He refined the model, swapping wood for metal on the advice of his dad, launched a website and created 50 units ready to ship. But despite his big dreams, Fleming sold little beyond a few units to friends and family.

“I just thought with word of mouth, these things were going to start flying off the shelf, and that just really wasn’t the case,” he said.

He realized the problem wasn’t the product, it was visibility. In 2017, he opened an Amazon storefront in the hopes of getting the StoveShelf in front of a wider audience. He used tools like IP Accelerator to secure a trademark and Brand Registry to protect against copycats—critical for a first-to-market product. He noted that while it’s often up to individual sellers to chase counterfeiters with cease and desists, Amazon’s programs made the process much easier.

“Typically, you’re responsible for enforcing your patent and all the fees that come with that,” he said. “With Brand Registry, when you see someone infringing on your IP, you just flag it and Amazon takes a look and gets the listing removed if that’s what’s happening.”

Fleming started seeing sales almost immediately after launching his Amazon store. Within a year, he’d sold $50,000 worth of units. Over the next few years, he used A+ Content to enhance his brand store and improve his listings by adding high-quality photos and videos.

“Our listings were initially very crude. The main photo was something I’d photoshopped,” he said. “But then we started using A+ Content to upload these beautiful photos and embed videos and our sales just got better and better.”

By 2020, he was seeing $3 million a year in sales, growth that translated into glowing Amazon reviews. He soon experienced the word of mouth he’d been craving.

“All of a sudden we were going viral, and getting picked up by random influencers and publications like CNN,” he said.

Initially, Fleming filled orders himself, but this started to become untenable as the business grew. Handling daily UPS shipments, loading 400 units at a time onto trucks and fielding related customer service requests ate up more and more of his time. So he started using Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) to store, pick, pack and ship products.

“Fulfillment by Amazon was a game changer. I went from having to answer all these questions every day to answering none,” he said. “The immediate result of FBA was that it opened up all this bandwidth for me to spend time with my kids, my wife and just broaden my horizons about what else was possible.”

For Fleming, that broadening led to buying and renovating an old antique store in Merton, Wisconsin with his wife, turning it into a community hub with hiking trails, a sauna in the winter and ice cream in the summer. The shop, called Folklore Mercantile, is part of a family effort to revitalize a downtown that has fallen on hard times. It’s a passion project that he says wouldn’t have been possible without the Amazon seller tools that streamlined his business operations.

“With Amazon, I have a ton of horsepower and a big operation behind me, so I don’t need to worry about a lot of parts of running the business,” he said. “If I never started selling the StoveShelf in the Amazon store—if I didn’t make that decision—I would not have the life I have today.”