Dustin James noticed a pattern in his gastroenterology practice around 2009. Patients kept coming in with digestive issues, nausea, nervous stomach, irritable bowel syndrome, asking for natural solutions instead of prescription medications with significant side effects. He’d recommend incorporating ginger and peppermint into their diets, but they kept returning with the same question: which products should they buy?
“There really isn’t anything out there that’s designed for this purpose,” he explained.
He brought the idea home to his wife Helen, a dermatologist. After their kids went to bed, they stayed up researching ginger compounds and experimenting with flavors. Helen led recipe development. Dustin handled the science and ingredient sourcing. In 2009 they launched Tummy Drops — a four-ingredient organic lozenge built on what the medical literature supported.
They started advertising their lozenges in St. Louis, landing Whole Foods and local grocery chains before joining Amazon in 2010. From two SKUs, a ginger lozenge and a peppermint lozenge, they now carry over 25, including lollipop versions developed for children undergoing chemotherapy.
They credit Amazon tools with solving their two biggest problems early on: fulfillment and visibility, allowing them to focus on developing new products, growing their business to more than $3.8 million in annual sales, with consistent 20% year-over-year growth.
“The biggest problem that Fulfillment by Amazon helps us with is just the sheer amount of human power that would be required to send that many orders that quickly to customers,” Dustin said.
As orders grew early on, the couple couldn’t keep up manually. Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) let them ship entire pallets of product to Amazon fulfillment centers rather than boxing individual orders themselves. With FBA, Amazon takes on storage, packing, shipping, customer service, and returns on their behalf.
“Fulfillment by Amazon allows us to spend more time with the family and the people in our lives,” Helen said.
For a small company without a marketing budget or sales team, reaching new customers was its own challenge. Traditional advertising gave them nothing measurable. Dustin spent $40,000 on television with no way to trace a single sale. Amazon Ads, he said,offered the first real correlation he’d seen between spend and results. Then Creator Connections changed things further.
The program, accessible through Amazon’s advertising portal, connects sellers with content creators who post video reviews directly on product listings. Sellers fund a commission on sales through creator links — no upfront fee. A dashboard shows in real time which videos are driving orders.
“Once we started Creator Connections, you could see the uptick in sales,” he said. “For the amount of capital investment that goes into it, it’s fantastic. It’s real time. You start it and you see your numbers.”
Before Creator Connections, Tummy Drops had no video content. What the program gave them was something they couldn’t have produced themselves: authentic customer stories. Families heading to amusement parks needing a way to quell upset stomachs. A grandmother explaining how she keeps them in her purse on planes.
“With video, it’s a little easier to tell a story quickly,” Dustin said. “Someone’s like, ‘Yeah, I got these because we’re going to this amusement park. My kids thought the flavors were amazing. They didn’t puke on the roller coaster. Success.’”
Amazon is now TummyDrops fastest growing sales channel. The growth, they said, has allowed them to hire two employees, and the fulfillment and advertising support means they can both still practice medicine, part-time.
“Being able to help people really makes us happy,” Helen said, “and it’s one of the reasons why we stick around to keep doing this.”