#743 – From Childhood Friends To An 8-Figure Amazon Matcha Brand

What does it look like when two childhood friends turn a side hustle into an eight-figure global brand? In this episode, Bradley Sutton sits down with Samuel Loo and Singchuen Chiam, the co-founders of Naoki Matcha, to unpack how they went from selling generic glass teapots to building one of the most recognizable matcha brands on Amazon. Their story starts in Singapore, stretches into Japan’s tea-producing regions, and becomes a masterclass in patience, product-market fit, and long-term brand building.

Sam and Sing did not stumble into success overnight. Their first products were fragile, generic, and easy to copy, forcing them to rethink the kind of business they really wanted to build. That search led them to matcha, a category with higher barriers to entry and far greater complexity than a typical private-label product. Instead of sourcing from a marketplace and calling it a day, they had to knock on digital doors, travel to Japan, build supplier relationships, refine taste profiles, and learn how to create a product customers would come back for again and again. Their growth was slow at first, but their commitment to quality and feedback gave them a durable edge.

As the brand grew, so did its sophistication. They expanded from Amazon into other marketplaces, built teams across Singapore and Japan, invested heavily in in-house creative, and began thinking beyond Amazon PPC into upper-funnel channels like Meta, DSPs, and TikTok. They also shared how Naoki Matcha navigated the recent matcha shortage without major price hikes, using strong supplier relationships and careful supply chain planning to stay in stock while competitors struggled. It is a reminder that real brand power is not just built through ads and listings, but through trust, consistency, and operational depth.

This episode is a powerful example of what can happen when founders play the long game. Sam and Sing did not chase shortcuts. They built slowly, learned deeply, and stayed obsessed with product quality as they scaled into an eight-figure business. For sellers who want to move beyond quick wins and build something that lasts, this conversation shows that the biggest advantage is not speed. It is discipline, vision, and the willingness to keep improving long after the first sale.

In episode 743 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Sam, and Sing discuss:

• 00:00 – Introduction
• 01:05 – Meet The Founders Of Naoki Matcha
• 03:25 – Their First Amazon Product Before Matcha
• 04:28 – Why They Chose Matcha As The Long-Term Play
• 07:18 – Slow Early Growth And The Mindset That Kept Them Going
• 08:40 – Finding Japanese Suppliers Through “Digital Door Knocking”
• 10:23 – Expanding From Amazon USA To Other Marketplaces
• 12:30 – Why TikTok And Brand.com Are The Next Growth Channels
• 14:42 – The In-House Creative Strategy Behind The Brand
• 16:31 – How They Navigated The Matcha Supply Shortage
• 21:20 – Upper Funnel Marketing And Growing Branded Search
• 35:04 – Supply Chain Control, Factory Relationships, And Future Growth

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Imagine going from childhood, elementary school friends to building together an eight figure matcha empire. Today, we are going to talk to two people who did just that. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free organic conversation about serious strategies or serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world.

Bradley Sutton:

And this is a little bit different, because usually the next thing I say after my intro is, and I’m in this part of the world today, but what we did today, we actually have somebody coming from the other side of the world here to the Helium 10 headquarters here in Irvine, California. And we’ve got who are affectionately known as the matcha bros almost. But I’m going to go ahead and let them introduce themselves. Not the first time they’ve been on the show, but it might be the first time you’re hearing from them. So let’s hear from you guys.

Sam:

Hi, my name is Sam, and I’m one of the co-founders of Naoki Matcha. So we are a matcha brand that offers matcha from different regions of Japan to people all over the world, but mostly the US. So we are from Singapore. And yeah, first time in the Helium 10 studios here in Irvine.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome.

Singchuen:

Hi. So I’m the co-founder of Naoki Matcha as well. And I’ve been working with Sam for a very long time. So Naoki Matcha has been growing throughout the years and more recently with the increased demand of matcha. We think that there’s a lot of room to grow.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. Awesome. Now, they kind of humbly introduced themselves, but they’ve basically built a matcha empire that’s spanned worldwide almost. And it’s really great to have them here on the show. But I want to go back, if you guys don’t recognize from their accent, from Singapore, is that where both of you were born and raised?

Sam:

Yeah, we were born and raised in Singapore.

Bradley Sutton:

And what did you guys go to university for?

Sam:

Oh, so I went to university for law.

Bradley Sutton:

For law?

Sam:

Yeah. And I practiced as a lawyer for like a couple of years. And then, yeah, I mean, Amazon and e-commerce was always like a side hustle that I tried to do in my last year of college. And I continued it while I was practicing law for two years. And then after that, that was COVID. And then that was then I realized that, hey, this little business that we started has gotten some legs and I think it’s time to make a choice. And so we chose this.

Singchuen:

And what did you study? So I studied business in Singapore. And after that, I went to work in a Southeast Asian e-commerce giant known as Lazada.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, yeah. That’s big in Philippines.

Singchuen:

It is. For, I think, about half a decade or so. And during this time, I was building Naoki Matcha along with Sam.

Bradley Sutton:

OK. How did you two meet?

Sam:

Oh, we met like in primary school. So when we were like 10, right?

Singchuen:

Yeah.

Sam:

Yeah, 10. And then..

Singchuen:

It’s been a long time.

Sam:

Yeah. So we were in like the same schools. And then after that, we kind of like parted ways for a little bit. Then we reconnected in university.

Bradley Sutton:

Did one of you steal the other’s girlfriend or something? We even parted ways here. You had a falling out or just kind of drifted apart, you mean?

Singchuen:

No, we just went to different high schools.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, OK, OK, OK. Yeah. Not that I know of. So around what was the matcha? What you guys your first venture on Amazon and e-commerce on your own? Or was there other things that you were doing before then?

Sam:

I first heard about Amazon selling on Amazon in like 2015. And then I told Singh about it. And then we’re like, hey, let’s try something. Right. So the very first product that we sold was this like teapot made of glass. And this was from China in 2016. OK, so we’re just like it’s literally like you just type in glass teapot in Chinese into Alibaba 1688 and then you get that product. We’ll buy it and then we’ll just send it to the US and then it’s sold.

Sam:

So that we did that for like nearly a year. And then that was like, you know, the first that first sale was like, this is like a huge dopamine hit. So then we’re like, oh, this is so exciting. So we tried to continue to grow that. But along the way, then we realized that, you know, it’s not so easy because it’s kind of like a generic product. And then it’s very easy to copy and it’s just not not sustainable. Yeah. So so we over the next few months, we wound that down. And then we started looking for more products to sell.

Singchuen:

And I’ve always liked green tea and had some experience in matcha. So we decided to try doing that, knowing full well the difficulties of communicating with the Japanese on getting good Japanese matcha. And we knew that that would take some time. So we took a shot and took the time to learn about a category over time.

Bradley Sutton:

What year was this?

Sam:

This is like late 2016, I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Late 2016. OK, so early on.

Sam:

Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, fast forward to 2025 last year. Was that your biggest year of sales? Like, are you guys growing or was like maybe, you know, during the pandemic a little bit higher or what was your biggest year?

Sam:

So last year was the biggest year.

Bradley Sutton:

OK. And, you know, I’m looking at anybody can see helium 10 numbers and the numbers that Amazon shows. It looks like you’re a pretty strong eight figure brand. Is that an accurate assessment?

Sam:

Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. Awesome. Your first year, what did you guys do in 2016? How much?

Singchuen:

I think we did about. For the entire year, about ten to fifteen thousand dollars only.

Bradley Sutton:

Wow. So it was it was a slow, slow ramp up there.

Singchuen:

It took some time to get to the traction of where we are at today.

Bradley Sutton:

OK. Now you had said you liked matcha and green tea yourself. Was that the main thing? Like what were some of the or some of the things that didn’t make a cut where I’m sure you guys were having these conversations like, hey, what? We’re not going to be in the glass teapot business forever. What should we get into? What were some of the other things that you guys were considering? And how did you just land on the matcha idea?

Sam:

If I remember correctly, we were trying different home and kitchen stuff. Yes. So, you know, random stuff, right. From like cutlery to like, I think, you know, like drinkware. There’s cups of different sizes, different materials. And even, I think, what else is there?

Singchuen:

Well, we did those double wall glass cups, which was seen to be high value. The problem was that the things kept breaking and it was quite a challenge because no matter how much we tried to pad the packaging, it still found a way to get broken along the way.

Sam:

So so after all these all these attempts, then we were thinking like, OK, what is what is kind of like safe and high barrier to entry? And then we’ll try it. But we’ll do it. We’ll do it. Right. And hopefully that kind of is more lasting. Right. Yeah. We narrowed down on grocery.

Bradley Sutton:

OK.

Sam:

And then we’re looking at like, you know, grocery is like pretty low margin. Right. But we’re looking at coffee, tea, and then we’re talking. And then Sing was like, just randomly mentioned matcha. So I went to look it up online. And then I saw, hey, this is an interesting category and product. And it was like small enough for us to try. And that’s what we did.

Bradley Sutton:

OK, excellent. Excellent. Now, in that first year, as you guys were really slow, you know, ramping up. And obviously that wasn’t, you know, replacing any day jobs at that time. What made you stick with like where did you get worried at a point like, oh, man, this is not growing as fast as we thought. But obviously you didn’t give up. So talk a little bit about your mindset during those early days.

Singchuen:

To be fair, I think Sam and I are of the same mind with regards to this. We knew that we wanted to have our very own thing going. But we were kind of patient about it. So if things did not take off as fast as needed, we would have been perfectly OK with it as well. So what we really focused on the first few years was ensuring that our product was well received by the market and any feedback was taken extremely seriously.

Singchuen:

And during that time, it would take quite a bit of effort to explain to the Japanese factories that we were in contact with to get them to understand that these characteristics or these taste profiles need to be edited.

Singchuen:

And because matcha is an agri product, it kind of takes time for new cycles of tea leaves to come in, to be tweaked. And yeah, being patient helped, but definitely getting product feedback and changing the taste was was a very important part of our growth.

Bradley Sutton:

OK. Now, like you said, the first product was easy. Hey, 1688.com, Alibaba, just look for whatever, stick a label on it. You can’t find good quality matcha on 1688 or Alibaba. So what was your process of finding a supplier? I’m assuming it was from Japan from the from the beginning that you did that. So again, a little bit of a barrier of entry, not just like, let me look on a website and buy something. Walk me through that process a little bit.

Sam:

Oh, it was like an absolute grind. So we’ll just like search on Google, like Japanese matcha wholesale and all that kind of like search queries. Right. And what we did after that was we just emailed everyone and asked like, hey, you know, we’re starting this thing. Do you have any matcha to sell us? And yeah, you know, we just did it the hard way.

Bradley Sutton:

OK.

Sam:

We call it like digital door knocking.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah.

Sam:

Yeah. And then so so a handful of them replied. And and we found some time to take some time off and go to Japan to visit them. And then, yeah, that was how it got going. The first I think lot that we just bought that we bought was just like 10 kilos. So 20 pounds, I guess. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

OK. Now, right now we’ll show for people watching on YouTube, some of your beautiful packaging and stuff that you have on your on your products. Was that how it always was? Like even in the beginning, you had really nice packaging and branded and stuff. Or did you start off kind of more generic or.

Sam:

Right. I think it is like 80 percent similar.

Bradley Sutton:

OK.

Sam:

Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

So that’s important. You know, I kind of figured that would be the answer. But I think the the lesson here is when you guys are starting off, don’t skimp on packaging. Hey, let me just stick something in a brown bag just to start. You know, like you want to have that good brand impression from the beginning, from the get go. What marketplaces are you did you start with? I assume it’s Amazon USA. And then over the last almost 10 years now, where have you guys expanded to?

Sam:

Yeah, we we started on Amazon USA and then we tried briefly Amazon Singapore when they launched but didn’t really work out. And then we went on to the popular e-commerce marketplaces in Singapore. That’s like Shopee, Lazada. And then we tried Amazon UK.

Bradley Sutton:

OK.

Sam:

And then as we were adding more marketplaces, we kind of found, I guess I want to call it like a little bit of product market fit in the US. And that’s when the growth really took off. And so after that, we were really focused on the US marketplace and just, you know, growing market share and climbing the bestseller ranks.

Bradley Sutton:

OK. Do you have your own website, too?

Sam:

Yes, we do.

Bradley Sutton:

When did you start that?

Sam:

So the website, we started from the beginning, but it was more like a like a signpost to say, like, hey, we’re here. you want to buy on Amazon. But the website was always like not the priority until maybe like last year. So last year was the year where we managed to become the bestsellers on Amazon. And then you can’t go higher than that. Right.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Yeah.

Sam:

So so then the next thing we decided to do was go and start to get some sales on the website.

Bradley Sutton:

So now out of all the marketplaces, I would assume goes without saying Amazon USA would be number one. What’s two, three and four would you say for you guys? OK. Two, I think is Shopee Singapore.

Bradley Sutton:

Wow. Really?

Sam:

Yeah, really.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s amazing. So I would assume you’re the number one matcha in Singapore, Shopee as well.

Sam:

They don’t they don’t have bestseller. Yeah, but you’ve got to be like, if you do some digging, then you can make it.

Bradley Sutton:

It’s such a small, you know, number of consumers there. The fact that you could do that kind of volume to make it number two. OK. And then three and four?

Sam:

Three and four is probably the website in the US. And then four is UK.

Bradley Sutton:

OK. Interesting. Interesting. Now, what is on your roadmap for future marketplaces that you plan to launch on?

Sam:

So in terms of future marketplaces, I think TikTok is looking very interesting.

Bradley Sutton:

OK.

Sam:

TikTok in the US especially. And Singapore, we’re trying it. But yeah, it’s small, small market. That is the mean. And of course, I think we still have a long way to go for our own brand.com. So, yeah, I think the work continues for brand.com as well as exploring TikTok.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. Awesome. When do you guys remember discovering Helium 10? Around what year?

Sam:

Oh, OK. So this is like way back. I think this is when Many Coats was still doing AM/PM podcasts, right? So that the taglines are still stuck in my brain somehow.

Bradley Sutton:

How cool is that?

Sam:

Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, that was the first time. Then at that point in time, I think Cerebro was a new product feature. And that was actually very helpful as we were expanding our SKUs on Amazon US, like different matcha SKUs.

Bradley Sutton:

So how would you use Cerebro in those days for a new product launch?

Sam:

If I recall correctly, it’s like the reverse Ace and Suge, right? Because we are trying to gain market share. So we’re looking at what the top sellers are doing, looking for search terms and then, you know, working that back into our PPC campaigns and trying to be a bit more strategic about how we are running the PPC and all that.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Now, you guys, you know, as you got bigger and your team kind of like taking over things more than then, I think you actually went away from Helium 10 and then recently came back. What are some of the new features of Helium 10 that brought you back?

Sam:

So I think the biggest and most attractive new feature for us was the Search Query Performance. So, I mean, where we are at now, I think brand search is something that we’re paying very close attention to. And previously, without this feature, what you had to do was go on to Brand Analytics, basically go in like every so often and download the search report to reconcile them manually. So right now, I think with this new feature, it looks it looks very promising. So we tried it and then we realized that, yeah, I think this is going to save the team quite a lot of time.

Bradley Sutton:

We can talk all day probably about Helium 10 strategies, but what about non-Helium 10 strategies, just general things that you guys are passionate about, something that you feel you guys are doing a little bit unique that’s also contributed to your growth?

Sam:

Right. So I think something interesting is that, you know, now we’re active on Instagram and we run meta ads, obviously. To this day, most, like I would say, 95% of the content that we produce as a brand is all done in-house.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting.

Sam:

Yeah. And, you know, even with AI and AI-generated content and all that, I do feel strongly that there still is a role for production talent and strong creatives done by humans in like a brand studio, because that’s the way you can have the most control.

Bradley Sutton:

Do you guys have your own brand studio there in Singapore?

Sam:

Yeah, we do. Like a tiny little one, but it works.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Talk to me a little bit about your makeup, you know, like some people who are just starting, they might aspire to be an eight-figure brand, but like obviously you guys run the company, but you’re not just two people anymore. What kind of positions do you have on staff? You know, like who’s part-time, what’s full-time, et cetera?

Sam:

So we have a team of about 20 people split between Singapore and Japan. And in Japan, the team there is focused on procurement and supply chain stuff, which is what Sing is in charge of. Andd for myself, I head up like, you know, all the product designs and marketing and growth stuff. So in Singapore, that’s where most of them are. You have a social media team as well as a media buying, small media buying capability there. And then you also have just, you know, e-commerce data people and stuff like that.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. Interesting. Let’s talk a little bit about the supply chain side. I heard, you know, this is kind of funny. I didn’t know about this, but there was even a supply chain shortage of matcha recently. Like how did you manage that. What exactly happened and how did it affect your business?

Singchuen:

So I think beginning around the end of 2024, there were some news articles coming out showing that matcha was getting limited in supply. And if you were to visit the Kyoto tea houses at that point in time, you would find that you would not be able to buy much of any matcha there at all.

Bradley Sutton:

Wow.

Singchuen:

So it turned out that because of the increased demand for the whole of 2024, people were either stockpiling matcha or…

Bradley Sutton:

That’s just a funny thing, like people thinking about, you know, stockpiling toilet paper and stuff during COVID, but people were stockpiling matcha because of the shortage.

Singchuen:

And there were some bad actors that decided to even resell some of the matchas. So the Japanese tea houses did not like that. And what they did was they limited sales to ensure that the buyers were real matcha drinkers. And that shortage continued lasting all the way until around 2025 in September. And the reason is because the new crop of matcha green tea leaves come at around April, May and June. And once it’s harvested, it takes time for it to be processed and delivered to the market. So during this shortage period, because Sam and I were quite focused on supply chain, and that was one of the key focus for us growing as a business, we thought that we would be immune from that problem. It turned out that when other people went out of stock, they would come and buy from other brands who had enough supply. So we were constantly going to our suppliers and asking them whether there was just a little bit more, which I’m sure many other brands were doing.

Singchuen:

But because of our strong relationship with our Japanese factories, it turned out that most of our SKUs were in stock, like 90% of the time. The ones that really went out of stock for a couple of months at least were the high-end matcha, which was what was experienced by all the Japanese teahouses in Japan as well.

Bradley Sutton:

Did you guys raise prices at all during this time? Because I’m assuming your cost went up.

Singchuen:

So I think I’ll let Sam talk a little bit more. But for pricing, we were quite adamant on not raising our prices. And if you recall, in 2025, that’s when the tariff situation happened. And that hurt everyone, right? So we had to make a decision on whether we wanted to raise our prices or not. We chose not to raise our prices for most of 2025. And when we did, it was only by a small amount to show that it’s clear that it’s for cost reasons.

Bradley Sutton:

What about your competitors during that time?

Sam:

So on Amazon, I would say not everyone increased price. And if they did, then just buy back a little. But what we saw on the D2C world was that people were really increasing their prices. They were just increasing it without too much concern. So that was interesting.

Bradley Sutton:

What was the culmination of it? Like now things have settled. Are you guys, because of the decisions you made, and keeping that brand loyalty and maybe not raising prices, did that have a good long-term effect? Do you think that helped you gain market share even more since everybody else was raising prices and doing things like that?

Sam:

I think, surprisingly, people are quite brand loyal. But just that, I think our customers, they want this quality at this price, right? So we want to make sure that we honour that and we try to keep the prices as stable as we can. So I don’t think there was much switching around. I think it’s more like when you’re, I mean, switching around when you see higher prices. Of course, some brands, they’re going to increase their prices by like 50%, right? And then you’re going to do some of that. But I don’t think they necessarily just go to a cheaper place. They just shop around or maybe they just stop drinking matcha.

Sam:

For us, I think we’re very clear that we have a customer base and we just want to keep them happy. And if more people come from other brands because they’re looking for something else, we don’t really want to be the one that looks cheaper. We want to win them on our merits.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Makes sense. Makes sense. You guys had said in the past, you’ve been focused a lot on upper funnel marketing. What forms of that are you guys doing? What effects has it had?

Sam:

Okay. So this one is interesting because we see a rise in branded search on Amazon, branded search queries. So the question that we asked ourselves and my team asked themselves is, what motivates this increase in branded search? So we’ve been looking at a variety of sources for upper funnel. One of them, of course, so for a while, I think we were trying out Amazon DSP and one of the products that they’re trying to sell is like an upper funnel solution, right? And videos on, is it Spark TV?

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Prime TV. And then there’s another, there’s another one. I forgot. It starts with a U or something like that. Another free one. Yeah.

Sam:

So they have that and they have, I mean, Amazon DSP has inventory everywhere. And then of course, meta ads, Instagram. And the latest one that we’re gonna explore is TikTok because TikTok has its own checkout as well as like a huge upper funnel. I mean, it’s videos, right?

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Yeah.

Sam:

Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. And what’s the early returns that you’re seeing on it? Like how has that changed either profitability? Was there a temporary time where profitability went down because now all of a sudden all this new budget is going to that, but has it had good long-term effects?

Sam:

I think, yeah. So at least on the meta side, we do kind of see, I mean, meta and Amazon don’t talk to each other, so we can’t really prove it officially, right? But we do see some kind of correlation between the meta spend and brand searches on Amazon. So we do know that there’s some kind of lift and that’s where we are. So I think if, when we spoke maybe like two, three years back we’ll be like, you know, 99% Amazon PPC, right? But that split of course is changing and we’ll continue to, I guess, swing more in favor of like non-Amazon PPC over time.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Interesting. Okay. What’s the future hold for Naoki Matcha?

Sam:

I think we just wanna be like one of the lot, right now, bestseller on Amazon, but there are other marketplaces that we’re not known at all. And Matcha is a very niche category. So I think for us, we are very confident in Matcha as a category. We see it as, I think more and more people are choosing it as an alternative to coffee. So even if, you know, Matcha just takes over like just 5% of coffee’s market, right? That is huge.

And that’s the trajectory that we’re going in. So we wanna be in a position to, on the supply side especially, to make sure that we are able to supply that demand when the time comes and as it comes along naturally. And whether it’s gonna be mostly online or maybe in retail or maybe in food service, we wanna be there to do that.

Bradley Sutton:

I was just in Japan a couple of weeks ago and I was doing a baseball card show actually and it’s in the Asakusa area, which is right near the Sensoji Temple. And there’s this bunch of market stalls there. And I don’t know if you guys have ever been there, but there’s like, that must be like a Matcha hotspot because there are places there where you can get Matcha beer, you know, Matcha ice cream, Matcha like stuff that I cannot imagine.

Bradley Sutton:

What are some use cases? You know, like Matcha beer is not exactly a common thing, but people who are buying your product, you know, millions and millions of dollars, your product, they’re not just pouring into drinks. What are some other use cases of Matcha?

Sam:

I think mostly it’s still drinks. Some people like it, like the flavor. So they make desserts out of it, like, you know, cakes, ice creams, smoothies, things like that. But mostly it’s still drinks. And it’s very much like a morning ritual type of thing or something that they make in the office. So in Singapore, it’s very surprising because like our friends who work will tell us like, hey, I saw your product in my office pantry. And then like, yeah. And then some of my colleagues like make Matcha drinks like after lunch, you know, and that replaces their post-lunch coffee. And that’s always like, oh, okay. I don’t know what to say, right? But it’s interesting.

Bradley Sutton:

I love it. Yeah, that’s one of the best feelings of being an Amazon brand owner is in sometimes just stopping and thinking like how many people are using your product just around the world and see like going to somebody’s house and then seeing it there at somebody’s office. It’s such a cool feeling.

Sam:

Yeah. My team did like a little estimation last year and for 2025, I think, we calculated that at more than 800,000 people.

Bradley Sutton:

Wow. Yeah. So by definition, just like one in, you know, whatever, you know, 20 households in America or something like that have Naoki Matcha in it. Amazing. Yeah, it’s amazing. Speaking of that, how big of a role does like subscribe and save play? Like, have you guys ever looked at the numbers of how many people are just put on replenishment, your product?

Sam:

Yeah. Subscribe and save is actually quite a big deal for us. I wanna say like, so it fluctuates, right? And last year there was a bit of patchy data, but generally you have like 20 to 23% subscribe and save.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay.

Sam:

Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Wow. And so that allows you to maybe spend a little bit more on some of your advertising knowing that, all right, maybe you lose money on that first sale, but hey, you make it back over time. Yeah, exactly. How would you describe Helium 10 to somebody who doesn’t know about us? I’m gonna hire you for the day or to be a Helium 10 marketing manager.

Sam:

Okay. I would say that Helium 10 is a software that can take you from your first sale to eight figures.

Bradley Sutton:

Ooh, I like that little catchphrase right there. Very nice.

Singchuen:

That’s pretty accurate, I would say.

Bradley Sutton:

You’ve mentioned using Search Query Performance, you’ve used it on your own and then obviously you’ve used it with Helium 10. How are you leveraging just that data point in general?You know, like obviously you wouldn’t even care about it with Helium 10 if you didn’t find value in the data point. So how does that help your brand make more money?

Sam:

So I think it’s important for us to be able to say, because Meta and Amazon don’t speak to each other, right? So you’re relying on a lot of like proxy metrics to determine whether there’s any link.And one of the things that we find is helpful is to just look at, you know, is there an increase in branded search? And if there’s an increase, then you can kind of do like a, what do you call it? Holdout test and all that kind of stuff, right? Yeah. Okay. So that’s been helpful.

Bradley Sutton:

How do you decide when you launch a new product? I mean, you’re all matcha, that’s your brand.I mean, you and I were talking about, I was like, I wish you guys would do some Naoki Ube because I’m a big Ube fan. Maybe that’s the future, but like, how do you decide, you know, you don’t just have one SKU, you have multiple SKUs. How have you decided to launch that product and how can Helium 10 play a role to like, you know, do some research before you decide, hey, let’s go ahead and invest in this new line of products?

Sam:

Well, if Helium 10 can find a way to do like any kind of post-purchase survey, but that’s difficult, right? But that would be like, that would be awesome.

Bradley Sutton:

But before, I’m talking about before then, like how do you even get to decide what the new product is? You know, like different pack sizes or a different flavor or a different style. Like, how do you decide?

Sam:

I think last time we were looking at the search terms and you know, I mean, for size people would search like, oh, you know, bulk bags, 100 grams, three ounce, whatever it is, right? And that’s kind of how we looked at it. And also I think you get a lot of search terms where you say match up for something, right? And then that’s where you kind of have a, that’s the initial tell that gives you the signal that, okay, I need to get much of like different price ranges and quality so that I can serve these different customers in different segments.

Bradley Sutton:

Search Query Performance tools, Cerebro, what are some other Helium 10 tools that you guys have used?

Sam:

So I also tried the Listing Analyzer last time. How would you use that one? So I think it really is just to see like, you know, look out in the early days when you’re trying to get a sense of what the customer is looking for, right? Then you can see like, you know, the review is good or bad. You can see whether there’s anything that you want to optimize, you know, because you’re still trying to play catch up. So you’ll need to look at like competitors yourself and from there optimize all these things further, right? So that’s helpful.

Bradley Sutton:

How are you looking at competitors? Like what kind of things are you looking at? Their creatives, their keywords, obviously you mentioned, you know, with Cerebro and things like that, but what kind of competitor activity affects what you guys do at Naoki?

Sam:

Like today? Yes. I would say that it’s about, so for us now, I think it’s really about like the quality of the product. So of course, you know, keyword, velocity, search terms and all that, those are important for like the online side of things, right? But for us, it’s really important to kind of get a sense of like where that product quality is at, because that is something that we can actually directly change based on our supply chain, right?

Bradley Sutton:

So you buy your competitors’ products? All the time. Okay, wow, okay. And what’s been, I mean, you don’t have to mention any names, but like, well, what was something you learned? Like, was it a taste of something that they had or a pack size or just something in their packaging that really inspired you?

Sam:

Usually it’s taste, yeah. Because that’s something that you can work on the supply end to kind of freak around, right?

Bradley Sutton:

How do you do that though? Like, do you send the sample to your factory and say, hey, how did they get this to taste like this? Or what? I wish it was that simple.

Singchuen:

Yeah, because this was the initial phase of our business, right? Which is like around 2016 and 2020, where we were tweaking the taste. I mean, during that time, we would try to mix matcha powders on our own, just to check out how the taste would be like.

Bradley Sutton:

I could see you guys in your apartment, I could see you with your lab coats on and doing some kind of experiments. Okay.

Singchuen:

Exactly, right? But the main issue is that just because you taste, like A plus B, right, would logically be something, it’s not the case. It’s just completely different. So you have to actually go to someone who knows tea really well for you to get the taste changes that you are like. So for example, if a customer would prefer something a little bit more, like more grassy or more roasty, that is something that the Japanese factories can work with. It does come at certain kind of compromises as well, whether it is price or another taste- Texture, right?

Singchuen:

Texture, as well as another taste characteristic. And those are all decisions that we have to make. So what we tend to do is that we buy our competitors’ products to see what kind of taste it’s like in our eyes. And then we got to explain that to our Japanese factories that this is something that is getting more and more traction. And sometimes they will look at us and say, why, because this is not a taste that the Japanese like.

Bradley Sutton:

Exactly, yeah. So- It’s very different though. The Japanese matcha, like what’s popular there compared to America.

Singchuen:

Exactly. So that does take several weeks to explain. And after that, it takes several months for them to get the correct tea leaves and go through the entire sampling process.

Bradley Sutton:

How do you manage your communication? Like you guys, do you speak Japanese?

Singchuen:

I do speak a little bit of Japanese, enough to impress, but not enough to- A little bit, a little bit of Japanese.

Bradley Sutton:

But then, so like, is that something like, that’s why you also have the Japan team, like they can speak English well, and then they’re obviously Japanese, so then there can be like a translation going on there or?

Singchuen:

Exactly. There are a lot of technical terms that, for tea that we probably would not have a good way of translating on our own or whether through Google, right? So it’s best to get someone who’s native to really get the point across.

Bradley Sutton:

Going back to Cerebro, I think some newer sellers, they can understand that this is almost not a something that saves time, you know, but it’s literally humanly impossible, like to be able to see all of the keywords that your competitor is ranking for or advertising on. It’s not even something you can just pay, hey, let me get an army of 15 VAs who are gonna be doing that. Explain the benefit of that, you know, like how does that, you know, eventually probably like, if you don’t use a reverse agent tool like Cerebro, you know, like through advertising, of course you’ll be able to discover keywords, but is there a way to kind of like put a monetary value on time savings or being able to start from day one with those right keywords?

Sam:

Yeah, definitely, right? Because I mean, if you’re just gonna go in blind without any prior research, maybe you’re just going to run ads on all the keywords that you think are relevant, right? But if it’s a competitive category, then what you find is that you may need to bid super high on those like big keywords, right? And when you do that, maybe your product is new, your brand is new, you’re not gonna be as efficient on the conversion and you’re probably gonna pay a lot of money for like those learnings, right? Whereas you could always just shortcut that process by going to Cerebro and then you get an indication of like how much this is gonna cost me, right? And then when you see that, then you’re like, okay, maybe not today. I’ll go for like lower hanging fruit first. And then only later then when I have a more established brand and product, then I go after these bigger keywords.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, yeah, awesome. So now that this whole supply chain issue happened and maybe it’s leveled off or it’s better now, but now you guys know that, hey, this can happen at any time. How has that changed the way you guys operate? Like, are you guys keeping like safety stock at all or how has that affected your business?

Sam:

So one of the big things that we’ve been doing is we’re trying to insert ourselves earlier into the goal a little bit like upstream. So we are getting like facilities to store the raw materials, as well as contract out like the processing, like grinding the leaves into powder and then the storage of that powder and packaging, right? We’re taking most of that, trying to gradually take that in-house so that we have more control over the final quality. And also that allows us to get raw material from more places rather than just, you know, the handful that we already do.

Bradley Sutton:

When you say in-house, like you actually have your own facility now in Japan or you just control it or what?

Sam:

We’re working on it. Interesting, yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s gonna be cool. I mean, I go to Japan like every other month. Now, in the future, I’ll be able to just go there and there’ll be a Naobi matcha building right there or something.

Sam:

Countryside maybe.

Bradley Sutton:

Is there places in Japan that’s like, hey, known for the matcha or like where?

Sam:

Yeah, definitely. So Kyoto Prefecture, Uji is like the birthplace of matcha, right? And so Kyoto is very big on matcha and down in the South, Kagoshima, that’s like the southernmost city in Japan. They’re a very big farming prefecture and they are very heavily focused on tea. And a little bit up North, Fukuoka, they also have a very strong tradition in matcha.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. I think, you know, something that’s important, regardless if you manufacture Japan, China, and that you guys have done well is making sure to have good relationships with the factory. You know, of course, gone are the old days of like you guys did in 2016. Hey, let’s just go find this teapot factory on Alibaba. Never talk to the owner directly, never visit their factory. You could have been fine, but nowadays it’s really important. What’s your advice for people, regardless if they’re, maybe they do find their product on Alibaba originally, but talk about the importance of having that relationship with your factories. What’s the benefits of that and what are some ways that people can do that maybe without physically being able to visit the factory in China?

Singchuen:

Last I heard, because of the demand surge, a lot of the Japanese factories and tea houses are turning away people who are interested to buy for their own sale. But if you do manage to get a Japanese tea company who is interested to work with you, then the right way is to recognize that the Japanese factories have a certain way of doing things and it will probably be different from how you’re experiencing a distributorship relationship in the US. So the right way is to sort of trust that they have your interest in mind and to work through the issues slowly.

Singchuen:

So a good example would be during the shortage, if you wanted like 10,000 units and they only managed to produce like 2000, the right way is to ask them how they can get to the 8,000 and to help them by introducing new relationships that you have had with other people in Japan and to solve the problem together. The wrong way would be to hold them to the contract, which is what I guess most people would do and to sort of like threaten them because what the Japanese would do is they would tend to close up. And when working with you in the future, they would be even more conservative with the volumes that you request for. So next time if you ask for like another 10,000 units, they would say, I can only make 5,000 for you and they would be very adamant about it because they like to manage the expectations of their buyers very strongly. So work closely with them, be patient with them and recognize that trust goes a long way on both sides of the aisle.

Bradley Sutton:

So, you know, I’m not gonna, obviously I’m a big Helium 10 fan, but you don’t need necessarily Helium 10 to have success. You know, like, hey, there’s plenty of brands out there who have never used Helium 10, they have success. And even you guys, you know, you had one away from Helium 10, it’s not like your company died or anything. But like, what would you tell people who they’ve already achieved some kind of success? Maybe they’re a seven figure, maybe they’re eight figure and they didn’t use Helium 10. How can Helium 10 still help them? Because now you guys came back to Helium 10 and you could see the growth or potential that can be. What would you say to those people? Hey, you’ve already achieved success, but this is why you still might be able to need a company like Helium 10.

Sam:

I think what I would say is that Helium 10 is a company that always tries to give new features and they’re always trying to bring more value to the subscribers, right? So yeah, it may not work for you at this point in time, but you shouldn’t write it off completely because, and you should continue to kind of learn what they’re doing as we did, right? Because there could be new features that are going to be applicable to you. So you should always kind of keep them in your radar.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome. All right, guys, congrats on all the success going from childhood elementary school friends to Naoki Macha Empire. 2027, guys, my goal is I want to see on Amazon Naoki Ube. All right, that’s like my thing. I’ll even invest in that. We’ll do it together because I’m very passionate about Ube and I want you guys to conquer that next. But thank you guys for coming on here and flying all the way from Singapore for this and look forward to seeing future success for Naoki Macha. Thank you very much.

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