When he was eight, Felipe Vasconcelos launched his first business: selling kites to neighborhood kids in his native Brazil. When he moved to Queens, NY at age 12, he set up a book stall with paperbacks he’d get for free from house sales. By the time he graduated from the University of Rochester with an MBA, he saved enough money from paid internships to buy his first business, a beauty brand that he doubled in valuation before he sold it two years later.
“In every major period of my life—high school, college, moving to the U.S.—I’ve always had a business,” recalled Vasconcelos.
In 2018, a business broker introduced Vasconcelos to Kapuluan, a coconut oil-based beauty brand with a unique mission; for every sale, it planted a coconut tree in the Philippines to help replenish some of the 30 million trees that were wiped out from Typhoon Haiyan in 2013. To date, the company has planted one million trees.
“When I buy a business, it has to be congruent with my values,” said Vasconcelos. “When I saw Kapuluan, which had beautiful branding and a beautiful message, I knew it was something I wanted to scale.”
When he bought Kapuluan a year later, the brand had a single product—coconut oil—packaged four ways, which it sold exclusively in its Amazon storefront. Vasconcelos knew that to grow the business, he needed to expand its product line. He started by mining Amazon customer reviews for ideas.
“We learned from our very many, very vocal, very active Amazon customers, who were using Kapuluan to make different home concoctions for their hair and skin. We wrote an entire book of recipes with their help,” he said.
Today, Kapuluan sells over 40 products, with new items being added every few months. One tool that Vasconcelos said has been indispensable in researching what products to launch is Amazon Product Opportunity Explorer, which analyzes the search habits and user behavior of Amazon customers to help sellers identify gaps in the market.
After a product launches, Vasconcelos uses the Amazon Vine program to test customer sentiment and make improvements. Customer reviews from the Vine network also form an important part of Vasconcelos’ marketing strategy.
“You can have a great product, but if people don’t know about your business, they will not buy it,” he said. “On Amazon, there are all these different tools available to us to make sure we are getting our products, existing and new, in front of people.”
To further expand Kapuluan’s reach, Vasconcelos uses Amazon Creator Connections, which connects sellers to a network of influencers and content creators who promote brands across their social feeds. He also uses Amazon to market research each product by A/B testing everything from product titles and images to Amazon A+ Content like videos and lifestyle images.
“Data is the most important thing when you’re growing a business, period. If you’re not using data, you’re guessing,” said Vasconcelos. “We’ve used all the different data points you can find on Amazon to create new products, improve our advertising and grow our sales.”
It’s a strategy that has proven successful, leading Kapuluan to double its Amazon sales year-over-year. In the coming years, Vasconcelos wants to build Kapuluan into a household name, the type carried in every major retailer and found in almost every home across the country. But no matter how big the brand becomes, he said Amazon is always going to be one of the company’s most important channels:
“Amazon is where we were born, and we’re never going to forget where we came from,” he said.