Thereasa Black had a product people loved and a business that wasn’t giving her the returns she needed.
She rented a space at a commercial kitchen in Chantilly, Virginia, and was selling date-sweetened chocolate bars at farmers markets. The bars had just a handful of ingredients—cocoa powder, cocoa butter, and dates, with zero added sugar. Customers were telling her they loved her product. Getting into grocery stores felt like the next best step, and she did it. But the model was hard to scale. Pricing had to account for layers of margin before a chocolate bar ever reached a shelf. She had limited visibility into what was working and no easy way to course-correct when something wasn’t.
Black was a single mother running a bootstrapped business, and she needed a channel that could grow with her. With no partners and no one to call for advice, she went to a Veteran EDGE conference to learn. Amazon was there, meeting with veteran entrepreneurs and hosting discussions on how to use Amazon Ads to grow. A fellow veteran who was thriving in Amazon’s store told her she was leaving money on the table. “He said, ‘It’s worth it. You’re not just putting money in, it actually comes back to you tenfold.’” She went home and started simply by investing $10 a day into Amazon Ads.
Amazon lets you track everything you are doing and shows you how you are growing over time. You cannot see how a small tweak changes something in a grocery store. With Amazon, I can.
The impact was dramatic. Sales climbed 3,000% in a matter of months. “Amazon gave me the data I needed to make the right decisions to grow my business,” she said. Amazon handed her a full picture of what her customers are looking for and what they are willing to spend—visibility she had never had before. She used gen-AI powered A+ Content to tell Bon AppéSweet’s story the way a shelf never could, explaining the ingredients, the mission, the woman behind the bars, and built a brand page that converted browsers into buyers. She discovered that customers were searching for flavors she hadn’t even listed yet, so she added them. She ran A/B tests on keywords and watched her rankings climb. Every improvement moved the needle, and for the first time, she could see exactly why.
In 2026, Bon AppéSweet surpassed $1 million in annual sales, less than three years after Black first put $10 a day into Amazon Ads.
Black uses Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA). It allows her to send products directly to Amazon, where they pick, pack, and ship orders, as well as handle customer service and returns. In the Amazon store, she sets her pricing with full visibility into fees and fulfillment costs, earning stronger per-unit margins than she does on other sales channels.
Now, as she looks to scale further, Amazon’s AI seller tools are helping her level up the business. Creative Studio is giving Black a new kind of creative partner. The AI-powered tool generates professional-quality lifestyle images, product renderings, and video assets from a single photograph in minutes. Black had always done her own design work in Photoshop, and Creative Studio expands what she can produce without expanding her budget. “The AI generator creates images that would have normally taken me hours to just get close to the same quality,” she said. “With the new tools, I don’t have to do it all alone anymore.” With a few clicks, the canvas experience in Seller Central generates a personalized visual workspace that adapts in real time, bringing together her sales data, customer behavior, and Amazon’s broader intelligence to surface insights and recommended actions tailored to her business. Through prompts, she can work directly with Seller Assistant to analyze performance trends, explore growth opportunities, and plan her next move. She can see which product characteristics buyers are searching for most and use that intelligence to make smarter decisions about where she spends.
I work smarter within the canvas experience, making sure every ad I run is more targeted, more relevant, and working harder for me.
She sees it as a genuine partnership. “I truly believe Amazon wants to see sellers succeed,” she said. “So they give you all the tools that you need in order to do that.” That’s what made it different from every retail relationship she’d had before. With Amazon, she knew exactly what she was working with. The fees were visible. The costs were consistent. The data was hers. “I feel like I have the most control. It’s predictable. You know exactly how much it’s going to cost, and it’s the same every time.”
That control and predictability allowed her to build something bigger than a business. Bon AppéSweet now employs seven people in Leonardtown, Maryland, nearly all of them mothers and most of them single mothers. When a child is sick, they stay home. When school runs a two-hour delay, they come in late. “I understand what it is to have children and need flexibility,” Black said. “It’s nice to be able to do that for people.”
Bon AppéSweet now employs seven people in Leonardtown, Maryland, nearly all of them mothers and most of them single mothers.
Black spent years as a surface warfare officer in the U.S. Navy before leaving active duty to pursue law. She earned her degree from law school while pregnant and raising her daughter. She had just passed the bar and was ready to start her career when the reserves called: she was being deployed overseas for a year, leaving behind a two-year-old daughter. That time away changed her entire outlook.
“I knew if I came home and worked as an attorney, I’d be working 80-hour weeks,” Black said. “I would get 30 minutes with her in the morning, 30 minutes at night. I couldn’t do it.” So in 2018, while she was overseas, she started planning a different future, pitching business ideas to fellow servicemembers every night at dinner until she found the one. She came home with a promise to both her daughter and herself that she would find a career that allowed her to be the mom she wanted. Bon AppéSweet was that promise realized.
I make more per chocolate bar in the Amazon store than anywhere else.
In 2026, Bon AppéSweet surpassed $1 million in annual sales, less than three years after Black first put $10 a day into Amazon Ads. Her five-year goal is $10 million, and Amazon is the engine she’s counting on to get there. Because of the flexibility gained by being an entrepreneur, Black is able to pick her daughter up from school every afternoon. When the school hosts an event, Black can volunteer. The kids in her daughter’s class all know her name. They have family movie night every Friday and Momma-daughter day every Sunday. She said she’s able to wear 3 hats; Mom, CEO, Boss, and Amazon helps her do that.
“Bon AppéSweet is a beacon for every mom, every single parent, every woman, every Black woman, every veteran that dreams can come true,” Black said. “Don’t let anybody else write your story for you. It’s your story to write.”