North Carolina

Former U.S. Army Blackhawk helicopter pilot Chris Videau launched Sheets Laundry Club with his wife Mooresville, N.C., selling eco-friendly laundry detergent sheets online. By leveraging Amazon’s seller tools, including Fulfillment by Amazon for rapid delivery, Subscribe and Save for predictable revenue, and Brand Registry to eliminate counterfeits, Videau scaled the business from a four-person operation to a thriving company with 60,000 subscribers. Amazon now represents 60 percent of monthly sales, enabling the company to open a U.S. manufacturing facility in North Carolina,and expand to military bases and1,800 retail locations worldwide. Beyond business growth, Sheets Laundry Club created “Loads for Life,” providing free laundry services to homeless communities and disaster victims.

In 2003, when six-year-old Elijah Morey asked his father if he could be the youngest person to eat the hottest pepper in the world, his dad let him start with a banana pepper from the backyard garden. Morey never imagined that, 21 years later, his obsession would become Elijah’s Xtreme Ghost Pepper Sauce, the number-one product in its category in the Amazon store within 18 months of launching.

This sauce, and the eight products that followed, have become so popular in the Amazon store that Elijah’s Xtreme will exceed $1 million in sales this year alone.

“We’re going to be the biggest hot sauce brand in the world. We have not come this far without becoming the number-one brand—and my benchmark for being number-one is being number-one in the Amazon store.”