Sarah Fox was working at a scuba shop in Guam when she realized she could not find a single product designed to prevent hair from tangling in the water. She was in the ocean multiple times a week, then back in the shower with a bottle of conditioner and a detangling brush, trying to undo the damage. Detangling brushes, detangling sprays, and detangling conditioners were all designed to fix tangles after they happened. Fox designed one focused on prevention instead.
“I tried everything, every hairstyle, every product on the market, and just nothing was working,” Fox said. “So I came up with what is now the design of the Rip Tie and started making them for all of my friends in the scuba community.”
The Rip Tie uses two loops and a braided middle section to keep hair smooth, streamlined, and moving in one direction so it cannot tangle.
The Rip Tie is an elastic hair tie with two loops and a braided section that wraps down the length of a ponytail, keeping hair smooth and together, tangle-free. What started as a solution for scuba divers quickly expanded to horseback riders, motorcycle riders, skydivers, Jeep drivers, and convertible owners.
“It turns out that there’s so much more than the ocean that tangles long hair,” Fox said.
Fox started Rip Tie with a $2,000 commission check from her last job and built the business while earning a master’s degree at San Diego State University. She joined an on-campus incubator that connected her with mentors and expert guidance on intellectual property, product development, and marketing. Within two years she went from 10 to 20 sales a month to nearly $500,000 in revenue, and today the company has done over $5 million in lifetime sales.
How Amazon’s tools help Fox create ads, protect her brand, and build customer trust
By 2025, Fox had built Rip Tie into a profitable brand selling through her own website. She added the Amazon store as another sales channel and started using a suite of tools that changed how she runs her day-to-day operations.
The first problem she solved was advertising. Fox had a library of content from social media shoots, all of it vertical. Creative Studio is Amazon’s AI-powered creative suite that helps sellers produce professional advertising assets. It can generate lifestyle images from a single product photo, convert vertical content into horizontal ad formats, and transform still images into video.
Through Amazon Brand Registry, Sarah Fox maintains consistent branding across A+ content, her brand store, and product images in the Amazon store.
“You can take a photo or a vertical video from your phone and make it into an Amazon ad,” Fox said. “You don’t have to have a budget for a whole video shoot. You don’t have to re-shoot things that already exist.”
With ads running, Fox needed a way to identify which listings were underperforming and why. She started using Seller Assistant, an AI-powered business partner that provides tailored insights and recommendations based on a seller’s specific business data. She asked it to pull her top and bottom performing SKUs, and the results surprised her.
“The ones it sent me back for my bottom performers were not necessarily SKUs I expected to be low performing,” Fox recalled. “So I went and took a look at the listings and I found mistakes that I wouldn’t have identified so quickly without Seller Assistant.”
Having AI built directly into Seller Central means she gets accurate answers about her own business in real time.
“Amazon’s AI tools really help take over some of the more tedious or time-consuming or expensive tasks. What they do is free up your time to focus on growing the business,” she said.
Fox also enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry, a free program that helps sellers protect and grow their brands. Brand Registry gave her tools to detect and report suspected intellectual property infringement, access to brand-exclusive services like A+ Content for enhancing product detail pages with rich text and image carousels, and key metrics to understand how customers search for and purchase her products.
With her brand protected and her listings optimized, Fox turned to building credibility with new customers. She enrolled every new product in Amazon Vine, which invites the most trusted reviewers in the Amazon store to post opinions about new products. Fox can send out 30 products and receive 30 honest reviews in return.
Sarah Fox wears the Rip Tie, showing how the braided section wraps down the length of the hair to keep it smooth, streamlined, and moving in one direction.
“Reviews on Amazon are so important to have on every product. Without a review, customers are not going to trust your brand,” Fox said.
Reviews also became her most reliable source of product intelligence. Nearly every innovation Rip Tie has made came directly from customer feedback. People request colors, different sizes, and new products entirely. Fox contacts reviewers directly when possible to understand what would work better for their hair type, then uses that information to develop new styles.
“Almost every product innovation that we’ve had has come from reviews,” she said. “The review section is great to get feedback on your product.”
Growing the business and staying rooted in San Diego
Fox uses Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) to store, pick, pack, and ship orders while also handling customer service and returns. That frees her up to focus on product development, content creation, and the strategic decisions that drive growth. She currently sells in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, with over 400% growth from her first year in the Amazon store to her second.
But Fox sees the current footprint as just the beginning. She is looking at Amazon’s international selling tools to bring Rip Tie to new countries, reaching customers she cannot access from her website alone.
“Looking into the future, I definitely see the opportunity to grow internationally with Amazon,” Fox said. “People are surfing, horseback riding, using motorcycles, playing sports all over the world. And that’s a whole audience that is completely untapped.”