Tiffany Gil had 90 seconds to pitch a padded sock on Prime Video’s “Buy It Now.” The panel included Ring founder Jamie Siminoff and Gwyneth Paltrow. She won her episode for most innovative product, took home $20,000, and launched Shezza in the Amazon store that same year.
“I like that people trust it so much,” Gil said of selling in the Amazon store. “If I just buy something off of a random website, I might not trust it. I think that makes it really easy for people to just click, click, click, buy.”
Tiffany Gil won $20,000 on Prime Video’s “Buy It Now” show and launched her padded sock company Shezza in the Amazon store that same year.
The product itself was a decade in the making. Gil invented it at 14 after a pair of boots left her with blisters so bad she could barely walk. She cut neoprene from a wetsuit, stitched it onto the back of a sock, and wore it for years before realizing it was a business. At San Diego State University, the school’s Zahn Innovation Platform helped her secure roughly $10,000 in funding. By the time she appeared on the show, Shezza had already done almost a half a million dollars in its first full year of sales.
Amazon’s AI tools are the power behind a 16-person operation
Gil runs Shezza with small team, based in San Diego. Amazon now accounts for roughly 40 percent of her revenue, a share she expects to grow as she puts more marketing dollars behind the channel.
Gil uses Fulfillment by Amazon, which stores her inventory, picks, packs, and ships orders, and handles customer service and returns on her behalf. The operational questions that used to mean digging through help articles now go to Amazon’s AI-powered Seller Assistant, a generative AI tool built into Seller Central that her team uses daily to analyze account data.
“Instead of having to look and search for articles, we just say, ‘Hey, AI, what does this mean and why is this happening?’” Gil said. “It generates a really good response that is easy to understand.”
Gil runs Shezza with small team, based from San Diego. Amazon now accounts for roughly 40 percent of her revenue, a share she expects to grow as she puts more marketing dollars behind the channel.
More than 230,000 sellers now use the AI-powered Seller Assistant monthly, accepting its suggested actions over 90% of the time, according to Amazon’s 2025 Small Business Empowerment Report.
Gil also pulls sales and keyword data from Amazon’s analytics tools and applies it across her other channels, to guide marketing and product decisions. “Especially with keywords and what people are mostly finding us from searching for,” she said. “We spread that across other channels as well.”
A San Diego company selling nationwide without leaving home
The infrastructure Amazon provides is what lets a 28-year-old run a company approaching $1 million in annual sales without a warehouse, without an analytics team, and without an agency. “We don’t have to pay a bunch of money to a big agency,” Gil said. “We have free help within Amazon, which I love.”
Gil sees blisters as a global problem, not a niche one. She pictures the brand in shoe stores worldwide, and possibly acquired by a major footwear brand that could scale it further. Her advice to other entrepreneurs: stay small, keep testing, and don’t wait until everything is perfect.
Asked whether she’d recommend Amazon to other entrepreneurs, Gil didn’t hesitate. “You’ve got to get on there,” she said. “There’s a lot of support when it comes to small businesses in the Amazon store. They make everything so much easier.”