In a warehouse nestled among the rural farmland of Temple, Texas, the air smells of rose petals, patchouli and vanilla, and a small group of workers are filling pretty containers with powders, oils and liquids. Just outside, a tractor with a forklift is making its way down the dirt and gravel road to meet a large delivery of supplies packed in an 18-wheeler too big to drive onto the farm property.
The operation is Herb & Root, which sells hand-crafted powders, perfumes and fragrances in the Amazon store. While the business hums, Herb & Root founder Julia Kahlig-Garuba looks closely at her AI-driven Seller Central dashboard of sales figures, inventory levels, and consumer trends. As one of the first fragrance brands in the Amazon store in 2017, she has embraced many of the new seller tools launched over the last eight years. She’s now an early adopter of Amazon’s AI.
For example, the Brand Analytics in the dashboard help her see what consumers are searching for in the Amazon store so she can adjust inventory and innovate new products. When trends shifted from rose scents to vanilla recently, she adjusted the production line.
Kahlig-Garuba also uses Amazon’s content tool, A+ Content, to quickly adjust her 25+ product descriptions based on the top trending keywords. This helps with discoverability of Herb & Root’s product pages.
She also adjusts her ads in the Amazon store based on AI-driven recommendations for search terms and bid amounts, further driving eyeballs to her product pages.
“It’s actually saved me a lot of time because usually I would use a third-party tool to do that,” she explained. “I don’t have to go through each individual campaign and look at the data and change things manually.”
Her Amazon sales have grown annually by 50% since launching in the Amazon store. She’s hoping overall sales reach $2 million this year, with Amazon representing about 60%. “We’ve used all of the Amazon tools that have been offered to us,” said Kahlig-Garuba. “If Amazon is offering a tool, it’s to drive sales. And so we’ve seen a lot of success with the tools they’ve offered.”
The inspiration for Herb & Root started after Kahlig-Garuba, a former lawyer in New York City, took a backpacking trip through North Africa. She bought a few fragrances in a large Moroccan market and became fascinated with the history of scents. She was inspired after her return to New York City to mix her own fragrances for friends and family.
“I started researching more about the history of fragrance and was just really enamored with how people have been using fragrance since the beginning of time,” she explained.
After moving from New York City to her home state of Texas with her husband, she decided not to take the bar exam and instead pursued the fragrance business. Working as a waitress at night, she created soaps, perfumes and oil blends by day in her Austin apartment, and fulfilled orders coming in from her website and Etsy and Shopify stores. She also sold products at farmers markets on the weekends.
Then, at the urging of a friend, she started selling products in the Amazon store when few beauty brands were there. “It was a good time to be a beauty brand on Amazon because it seemed like people were starting to search in 2016 and 2017 for beauty brands,” she recalled.
Competition was growing and her strategy was to get as many product reviews as possible, including reviews from her pre-Amazon customers. As reviews increased, she dialed up her ads with Amazon to gain more visibility.
As orders ramped up, she turned to Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) to help with storage, picking, packing, fulfillment, and customer service. FBA allows sellers to provide their customers with fast, premium shipping at a cost that is 70% less than similar premium shipping options from other carriers.
FBA was also critical after Herb & Root appeared on Oprah’s Favorite Things and on a popular daytime TV talk show, both bringing in a slew of orders. To keep up, Kahlig-Garuba tapped into Multi-Channel Fulfillment, which allows sellers to use Amazon’s fulfillment network to ship orders from sales channels outside of Amazon.
“It was thousands of orders, and we didn’t have capacity to do that, so we were able to use Amazon’s fulfillment services and warehouses to fulfill those orders quickly,” Kahlig-Garuba explained.
The increase in orders also meant having to move production from their Austin garage to somewhere bigger just three years after launching in the Amazon store.
That’s when her parents offered to build a warehouse on their large property in Temple, an hour and a half south of Austin, to package the products and manage inventory. But dad was reluctant to build a driveway big enough for 18-wheelers picking up orders or delivering ingredients, which come from as far away as Turkey and India. So now when a shipment comes in, they drive a tractor with a forklift out to the main road and meet the truck to get their large deliveries.
Aside from her parents running the warehouse, the family-run business also includes her husband, who helps with digital marketing. Her children offer opinions on fragrances and have even been responsible for naming some products. Her parents have also hired community retirees to work in the warehouse.
Looking ahead, Herb & Root is expanding both their product line and global reach. The company is launching a new blurring powder next year that combines makeup with body care, evolving their signature powder concept.
Additionally, Herb & Root is preparing for international expansion into the UK and Germany, leveraging Amazon’s fulfillment services to enter European markets for the first time.
“Amazon’s data shows a high demand for some of our products in these marketplaces, so it almost feels like a no-brainer to expand,” she explained. “It’s just a matter of just making it available, so we’re moving in that direction.”