Naoki Matcha’s path to #1 on Amazon

About

Naoki Matcha is a Singapore-based brand that sources and sells premium Japanese matcha from Japan’s top tea-growing regions, including Kyoto, Kagoshima, and Fukuoka. Founded in 2016 by childhood friends Sam and Sing, the brand offers matcha across multiple quality tiers and formats, serving home drinkers, culinary users, and specialty cafes primarily in the US.

The team of roughly 20 people spans Singapore and Japan, where a dedicated procurement team manages supplier relationships and supply chain operations. Naoki sells on Amazon US, Amazon UK, Shopee Singapore, and its own website, with Amazon US as the primary channel

Watch their video interview here.

The Challenge

Sam and Sing did not start with matcha. They started with a glass teapot sourced from Alibaba in 2016, which sold briefly before the reality of generic products set in: easy to copy, thin margins, no staying power.

When they went looking for a category with real barriers to entry, matcha kept coming back. The problem was that quality Japanese matcha is not accessible through a quick supplier search. Getting it right meant:

• Cold-emailing Japanese tea farms and flying to Japan to meet suppliers in person
• Navigating language and cultural barriers in every product conversation
• Working within tea harvest cycles, not ad spend cycles, for any product change
• Starting with a 10-kilogram first order and accepting that growth would be slow

Their first full year of sales totaled between $10,000 and $15,000. Both founders kept their day jobs and built Naoki on the side for years before the business had real legs.

The Solution

Sam and Sing discovered Helium 10 early in the brand’s life and have used it across three distinct areas of the business.

Keyword Research: Building Smarter Campaigns and a Better Product Line

Rather than bidding blindly on obvious keywords, they used Helium 10’s keyword research to reverse-engineer what was already converting for top competitors, then built PPC campaigns around those patterns.

“We were trying to gain market share, so we were looking at what the top sellers were doing, looking for search terms, and working that back into our PPC campaigns, trying to be a bit more strategic.”

Search data also shaped which SKUs to build. Customers were searching for matcha in ways that pointed directly to product gaps:

• Specific quantities: bulk bags, 100g, larger formats for daily drinkers
• Specific use cases: ceremonial grade, matcha for lattes, culinary matcha
• Specific price tiers signaling different quality expectations

Those signals drove product development decisions, not just ad strategy, before any inventory investment was made.

Search Query Performance: Proving That Off-Amazon Spend Works

As the brand grew, Naoki invested in Meta advertising and upper-funnel channels alongside Amazon PPC. The attribution problem: Meta and Amazon do not share data, so you cannot directly prove a social campaign drove Amazon sales. Search Query Performance gave them a proxy metric that worked.

Previously, tracking branded search growth meant manually downloading Brand Analytics reports and reconciling them by hand. Helium 10 centralizes and automates that analysis, freeing up significant team time and making hold-out testing practical.

“With this new feature, it looked very promising. We tried it and realized it’s going to save the team quite a lot of time.”

For a lean team running campaigns across multiple channels and markets, automating this reporting compounds fast. It also gives teams a defensible, data-backed way to justify upper-funnel spend internally.

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   Listing Analysis: Turning Competitor Reviews Into Product Intelligence

In the early years, Naoki used Helium 10’s listing analysis to study competitor reviews at scale. For a brand where taste is the primary purchase driver, review data became the evidence they brought to Japanese suppliers when requesting product adjustments. Explaining to a factory that American customers prefer a different taste profile than Japanese consumers required data, not just opinion. Listing analysis provided it.

The Results

2025 was Naoki Matcha’s biggest year. The brand reached eight figures in annual revenue, held the number one spot for matcha on Amazon US, and estimated that more than 800,000 people used their product during the year.

Key Results:

• ~800K customers in 2025
• 20-23% Subscribe & Save rate
• #1 matcha on Amazon US

A 20 to 23 percent Subscribe and Save rate gives the team confidence to invest in customer acquisition, knowing a meaningful share of first-time buyers become long-term subscribers. When a global matcha supply shortage hit in late 2024 and lasted through 2025, strong supplier relationships kept 90% of their SKUs in stock while competitors ran out. They held pricing through most of the shortage and emerged with their bestseller ranking intact.

“Helium 10 is a software that can take you from your first sale to eight figures.”