Eight Figures and Growing: From Digital Shelf to Physical Retail

About Kaffe

Robert Gomez had already been selling online for years when he launched Kaffe Products in mid-2019. He had a finance degree, an MBA from Georgia Tech, and a senior finance manager role at Microsoft. He also had a failed first attempt at Amazon (selling phone cases in college got his account banned) and a stalled notebooks brand that plateaued at six figures. 

What he kept seeing through his own research and conversations with other sellers was that home and kitchen categories scaled faster than the niche he was in. Coffee made sense. He drank it, understood it, and spotted an angle most brands were missing. 

The big legacy players (KitchenAid, Cuisinart) made coffee grinders, sure, but they were also known for refrigerators and stoves. Nobody owned the full coffee-making experience as a brand. Robert saw that whitespace and decided to fill it. 

The challenge was doing it while still employed full-time. Robert ran Kaffe as a side business with a growing team of nearly 15 employees before he finally left Microsoft in early 2023. He needed tools that could give his small team the same competitive intelligence a much larger operation would have, without requiring more headcount to get it. 

Building the Amazon Engine

Robert’s first order was 3,000 coffee grinders. Before they even arrived in the US, he cold-messaged a TJ Maxx buyer on LinkedIn and sold 2,000 units. The product was technically on a retail shelf before it had an Amazon listing. 

That instinct for multichannel thinking defined the brand from the start. But Amazon was still the engine. It was where the data lived, where the reviews accumulated, and where retail buyers went to evaluate whether a brand was worth stocking. 

Robert started using Helium 10 early in the Kaffe journey, and it quickly became part of the team’s daily workflow. The Chrome extension was the first thing. Keyword research came next. Then competitive monitoring, market tracking, and review automation layered in as the brand grew. 

One early insight from keyword research changed how Robert thought about his audience entirely. He discovered that a significant number of shoppers on Amazon.com were searching in Spanish, including terms like “molino de cafe” (coffee grinder in Spanish). That was a keyword he never would have found manually, and it opened up targeting he hadn’t considered. The brand name itself, Kaffe (the German and Scandinavian spelling of coffee), already resonated across languages. 

How Helium 10 Powered Growth

Kaffe didn’t use Helium 10 for one product launch and move on. The platform became embedded in how the team operates week to week, across keyword tracking, competitive intelligence, catalog decisions, and employee onboarding. 

Keyword Research

Guided catalog expansion decisions and identified non-obvious search terms (like Spanish-language keywords on Amazon.com). The team uses it whenever launching new products and to inform ad strategy on an ongoing basis.

Keyword Rank Tracking & Historical Trends

Weekly monitoring across hundreds of keywords. Before Helium 10, Robert’s team counted organic rankings by hand, one keyword at a time. Now they filter by keyword size and apply different strategies to head terms vs. long-tail.

Market Tracker

Used across multiple teams to define and monitor competitive markets at a granular level (blade grinders, manual grinders, burr grinders), not just broad categories. The team watches this daily.

Chrome Extension

The daily workhorse. Used for competitive analysis, browsing product data, and quick checks while researching. Robert calls it the tool the team uses the most.

Alerts

Early warning system for competitive threats and what products are winning or losing the buy box. When a new competitor enters the market and starts pushing hard on reviews or keywords, the team knows immediately and can respond before the competitor gains traction.

Profit Tracking

Connected to track margins across channels, giving the team visibility into real profitability versus just top-line revenue.

Freedom Ticket (eCommerce Training)

Robert used the course modules to onboard new employees. Amazon hires got the Amazon modules. Logistics hires got the logistics modules. It cut training time and gave new team members a shared baseline.

“Helium 10 saves us tons of hours a week. We used to analyze keyword ranking by hand, open up an incognito browser and count: 1, 2, 3, 4… okay, that one was an ad. That’s just one keyword, and there’s hundreds.” 

Robert Gomez 

Results

Kaffe grew from a couple hundred thousand dollars in its first half-year to an eight-figure business by 2024. Amazon accounted for 35 to 40 percent of total revenue at its peak, with mid-seven figures coming from that channel alone. The rest came from Walmart stores (now over 50 percent of revenue), DTC, and a constellation of online channels including Target.com, Macy’s.com, Home Depot.com, TikTok Shop, and Fair.com. 

Efficiency equivalent to two full-time employees saved through Helium 10’s solutions, with room for further gains 

Double-digit revenue gap avoided: Robert estimates the business would lose a double-digit percentage of revenue without the keyword and competitive insights Helium 10 provides. 

Grew from six figures to mid-seven figures on Amazon while using Helium 10 to guide catalog expansion and competitive strategy.

“The Chrome extension is something I still use daily. The whole Helium 1 suite is always open on my tabs.”

Looking Ahead

Kaffe is pushing deeper into physical retail and TikTok Shop with a focused strategy built around higher-margin products that perform well on video. And the brand is expanding into consumables which tap into Kaffe’s existing customer base of over a million buyers. 

Through it all, Helium 10 remains the daily operating system for the Amazon side of the business, the channel that built the credibility, the reviews, and the data that opened every door that followed. 

“I don’t see how somebody could run their brand nowadays without using some sort of tool. Helium 10 covers A to Z.”