#740 – From Face Masks To 7-Figure Fashion Brand Success

Shan Shan Fu joins Bradley in New York to share how she went from working in tech to building an e-commerce brand from scratch. She started selling stylish face masks on Amazon and Etsy during the pandemic, quickly gaining traction as demand surged. That early success gave her the confidence to pursue entrepreneurship full-time and showed her what was possible when she combined market timing with fast execution.

When the face mask boom faded, Shanshan had to reinvent the business. She pivoted into women’s clothing accessories, especially tights and stockings, and used a volume-based launch strategy to find winning products. Instead of betting everything on one item, she launched multiple products at once, knowing only a percentage would succeed. That approach helped her grow Millennials in Motion into a high six-figure brand that is now on track for seven figures.

Throughout the episode, Shan Shan explains how Helium 10 became central to her growth. She used Helium 10 tools like Cerebro, Keyword Tracker, Search Query Analyzer, Profits, and Ads to research products, track rankings, monitor profitability, and automate PPC decisions across more than 100 SKUs. She also shares how she manages a highly seasonal catalog, controls cash flow, and makes launch decisions with lean budgets.

Another major theme is speed through AI. Shan Shan talks about using AI tools like Nano Banana to improve listing images and boost click-through rates, while also using ChatGPT to help create optimized listings at scale. Her story is a strong example of how sellers can adapt when markets change, use data to reduce risk, and build a real brand by staying flexible and moving quickly!

In episode 740 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Shan Shan discuss:

• 00:00 – Introduction
• 02:38 – Why She Started Selling During The Pandemic
• 03:01 – Launching Face Masks On Amazon And Etsy
• 06:06 – Pivoting Into Women’s Tights And Accessories
• 07:35 – Discovering Helium 10 And Researching New Products
• 09:11 – Why She Kept Her Day Job At First
• 10:35 – The Biggest Challenges In The Pivot To A New Product
• 12:16 – Revenue Growth And Marketplace Expansion
• 15:04 – Managing A Seasonal Brand On Amazon
• 16:12 – Finding Winning Products And Variations With Data
• 22:42 – Launching 33 Products In One Month With AI
• 30:41 – The Goal To Hit $1 Million And Beyond

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today, we talked to a seller who was crushing it during the pandemic selling face masks. But then when that market disappeared, she had to completely switch into women’s stockings and now has built a million-dollar brand. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think. Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that has a completely BS-free, organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. I have flown today here to New York. This is Manhattan, right? And right here where Shan Shan lives. For those of you who have been listening to the podcast for a while, you have maybe seen her on the podcast before. But as you guys know, this year, we have a kind of like a refreshed Serious Sellers Podcast. We’re treating everybody as if it was their first time and trying to like go back because we know we have a lot of new listeners here. Shan Shan, thank you for inviting me to your home here. And it’s great to be here where I used to live. I don’t know if you knew I used to live in Brooklyn across the way many years ago.

Shan Shan:

Oh, cool. Welcome to the Upper West Side.

Bradley Sutton:

There we go. Where were you born and raised originally?

Shan Shan:

China. I was born in China.

Bradley Sutton:

What part?

Shan Shan:

In Nanjing.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, there’s some factories. I forgot what’s the specialty over there. But I know I remember a factory doing something over there.

Shan Shan:

Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay.

Shan Shan:

I think they’re bigger than New York.

Bradley Sutton:

What age did you come here to the States?

Shan Shan:

I moved when I was six to Albuquerque. And then I moved to Queens. So, I am actually a New Yorker.

Bradley Sutton:

Albuquerque to Queens. I love Albuquerque. The Mexican food there. How long do you live in Albuquerque?

Shan Shan:

About a year or two. Not very long. Then I lived in Queens for a year or two. And then I became Canadian.

Bradley Sutton:

Then you became Canadian. Yeah. Albuquerque to New York to Canada. And where did you go to university in?

Shan Shan:

Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.

Bradley Sutton:

In Vancouver. Okay. So what was your major there?

Shan Shan:

It was business.

Bradley Sutton:

Business?

Shan Shan:

Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. 

Shan Shan:

It’s business.

Bradley Sutton:

And I remember from before, you had gotten kind of like into the corporate world, right? And you had like a pretty good job from what I remember.

Shan Shan:

I had a great job in tech. And I learned a lot. But I always had a feeling that I should be one, an entrepreneur and two, in e-commerce.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. What year were you like, did the itch become so bad you had to scratch it to get into e-commerce?

Shan Shan:

It was 2020 during the pandemic. I feel like I had a lot of friends that started side hustles during that time. And everybody was stuck at home. And I was just watching YouTube videos on passive income and just getting obsessed with passive income. And I knew that starting an e-commerce business would be the fastest way to get there.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. All right. And what was your very first product you launched?

Shan Shan:

The very first product I launched was face masks.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, is this Amazon we’re talking about?

Shan Shan:

Amazon yeah. And I started on Etsy. They were not blocking face masks. But on Amazon, they were. So, I had to call it like face covers, bandanas. But they were so in demand that Amazon pushed me to the first page right away. And then I just got addicted to the dopamine of seeing your sales every day and launching new products and seeing if they would succeed. So then from there, I started launching clothing accessories. So now I have about 100 different clothing accessory products.

Bradley Sutton:

Now or then?

Shan Shan:

Now.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay.

Shan Shan:

Now, yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

But when you first started the face mask, what was it like? What was it like? K2, K9, N9, something like that? Or was it more like stylish face mask or what kind?

Shan Shan:

Stylish, yeah. Because if you had medical masks, you would have to get them certified compliance lines. But I didn’t have to because I just said that they were fashion masks.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. And at your peak during the pandemic, how many masks were you moving like a day?

Shan Shan:

On my peak, I was probably doing… Well, I just started, so I didn’t have any history. So it was about $20,000 a month.

Bradley Sutton:

$20,000? Dollars. Okay.

Shan Shan:

Dollars, yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

And these were cheaper ones, like $10 things or $20 or something like that?

Shan Shan:

Exactly.

Bradley Sutton:

So that’s still a number of… We’re talking thousands or more than 1,000 units a month.

Shan Shan:

Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. All right. That’s pretty good. Describe the feeling. I think this is what I like to talk to entrepreneurs who start their own brand. When you’ve moved a few thousand units over a few months and then you just… Did you have a moment where you’re sitting there and you’re like, there’s like 5,000 people or more walking around with something I created or having something like… Did you ever have that kind of moment?

Shan Shan:

You know, it doesn’t hit you very quickly because I just thought I was just kind of playing a video game at home. But then every once in a while, a friend of mine will send me pics and be like, oh my God, check it out. This influencer is wearing Millennials in Motion products and they tagged you. And it’d be someone I had no idea who they were and I was like, oh my gosh, this is actually a real brand. I’m building something real and not just a video game.

Bradley Sutton:

I love that. I remember my first moment of that was when I was doing phone cases way back when and then I was standing in line at the post office and everybody who stands in line is on their phone. I’m like, my God, that’s one of our phone cases right there. This is crazy. But we were doing thousands of those phone cases a month. But it’s a cool feeling for those of you who haven’t started a brand. That’s one of the perks of as opposed to either… You are probably happy with your salary when you’re working in the corporate world, but you don’t have that kind of feeling of ownership of I accomplished something. So that’s really cool. Was it still during the pandemic that you started doing clothing as well or was it just masks during the pandemic?

Shan Shan:

Right near the end of 2020, I knew that face masks weren’t going to last forever. So I had to figure out something that was sustainable and I decided to do women’s clothing because that’s what I knew. I’m the subject matter expert on women’s clothing. Now, in hindsight, clothing is one of the toughest categories. So, it might be different now that I know more, but you always start with what you knew. And luckily for me, I kind of did the volume game.

So, I launched like 30 products at one time and the 80-20 rule, 20% of them succeeded. So I had success right away and I feel like a lot of new sellers get discouraged because they launch like four products and none of them succeed. And then they don’t keep doing it because they didn’t see success.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, in those days, were you… I remember the last time we talked or the first time we talked, actually, you were talking about dually listing like on Etsy and then Amazon. Did you start that with the clothing or were you still at this when you’re new on Amazon or when you were new with the clothing, were you strictly Amazon?

Shan Shan:

I was doing that both Amazon and Etsy and they really helped each other because I got data from both Etsy and Amazon and they would actually corroborate each other. But now I just sell on Amazon and Walmart.

Bradley Sutton:

At what point did you discover Helium 10?

Shan Shan:

Helium 10 was just kind of the industry known top tool. It was everywhere. And so I just thought, okay, well, I need more data about Amazon. So let’s just check it out. It was also reasonably priced because these tools, they add up. And then I just got hooked. It was just really easy. And the gateway drug was Keyword Tracker and Cerebro because once I saw those, I just couldn’t un-use them. Like once you start using it, you can’t un-use it.

Bradley Sutton:

I still remember how we discovered you was you were on this CNBC or MSNBC TV show called Make It and it was on YouTube. And then my boss, Zoe, she likes that show and they did a special on you and you were talking about your Millennials in Motion brand and then you were breaking down your cost of business. Oh, I spend this much on shipping and I have this subscription. And you’re like, oh, and then I spend this much on Helium 10 a month. And she was like, oh my God, there’s a Helium 10 user on this TV show. And then I forgot, I don’t know how I found you. I slid into one of your DMs or something. So I was like, hey, this is Bradley from Helium 10. I’d love to connect. And we’ve been friends for now like four or five years since then. So that’s pretty cool. Now, at what point, when you got into the e-commerce, did you, I don’t remember, did you in full stop with your day job and just go all in or were you kind of like moonlighting in the beginning?

Shan Shan:

Moonlighting. And I think that everybody should try to do that because it’s going to be slow in the first year, right? You’re waiting for inventory. You’re waiting for shipping. You’re making mistakes. So it won’t take eight hours of your day. But then eventually, if you really, really are serious, you do kind of have to go full time if you want to grow it into seven digits or more business.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. At what point did you make that leap?

Shan Shan:

About six months in, I was doing at least 20K or more per month and it kept going up. So then I just felt confident. I felt like, okay, this could be a real career.

Bradley Sutton:

What was your profit at that? I assume by 20K, you mean the gross sales?

Shan Shan:

Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

What were you being able to take away from that?

Shan Shan:

This will never happen again, maybe in the history of time. But right now, everyone, if you get 20% on Amazon, you’re like ecstatic. I think I had probably 50 to 60% profit.

Bradley Sutton:

Because of the face mask and how much demand there was?

Shan Shan:

Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Were you even like air shipping in those days because you had so much profit and you couldn’t keep in stock or were you still just sea shipping everything?

Shan Shan:

Oh yeah. I didn’t shop half, but yeah, I could air ship but still get that profit.

Bradley Sutton:

Wow. I assume that, yeah, everybody’s like batting you right now. They’re saying, oh man, we don’t know about those days. Okay. Now, when you were transitioning from face mask to clothing, what were some obstacles? Because face mask is just one use. It’s like you don’t wear it and they’re like, oh, I don’t like the way this fits or I changed my mind. So I’m assuming returns was a big difference. What were some of the other differences making that transition?

Shan Shan:

Yeah, exactly. You nailed it. There was no returns with face masks. So that was nice. I think the biggest is just that there wasn’t as much demand. With face masks, everybody in the world needed one.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah.

Shan Shan:

But not everyone needs cool tights. So I was playing with a smaller market. I also bootstrapped everything. So I funded my own PPC, which means that I would only spend maybe $50 per launch to try to figure out if this was a winner or a loser. So I was using tiny, tiny budgets to get the same amount of data that my colleagues and my peers were using thousands and tens of thousands of dollars to do.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. What, over time, is your number one sell? What product?

Shan Shan:

Probably one of the tights. So just one of the pattern tights. I have some cool ones that look like thigh-high socks, for example. That one did really well consistently. And just a few of the pattern tights.

Bradley Sutton:

Which year was your top in sales? Was it last year, 2025? Or was it during the pandemic? Was it 2024?

Shan Shan:

Last year. And then this year will be this year. So every year, it grows about 50%.

Bradley Sutton:

So what did you hit in gross sales across all your platforms last year?

Shan Shan:

Last year, it was around $500,000, $600,000. Okay.

Bradley Sutton:

And what’s the breakdown between Amazon USA versus your other marketplaces, percentage-wise, roughly?

Shan Shan:

It’s about 90% Amazon USA. And then 10% Amazon Canada.

Bradley Sutton:

Do you store inventory there? Or are you doing that North American thing where you just ship from America to Canada?

Shan Shan:

Mostly remote fulfillment, but a little bit of inventory stored in Canada. I also do Amazon UK, where that’s dying. And I also do Walmart. And I used to do Etsy as well.

Bradley Sutton:

No TikTok shop yet?

Shan Shan:

I think I have about 10 sales from TikTok shop.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay.

Shan Shan:

As we speak.

Bradley Sutton:

We’ll have to get you wrapped up on there, get some samples. I think the Millennials in Motion brand is kind of a TikTok-able brand. The price point is a little bit low for TikTok shop, but some of those stuff could go viral at very least. Maybe there’s not much profit on TikTok, but I think it could potentially drive more sales to your Amazon listings. Going back to Helium 10. Now, what was… I assume the moment you started on Amazon, you weren’t using Helium 10 right off the bat. So when you started using it, what were some of the differences? You mentioned using Cerebro and Keyword Tracker, but for somebody who doesn’t, they’re like, Cerebro, is that an X-Man? Or what even is that? So how did it change your business when you started using Helium 10?

Shan Shan:

Well, the biggest change in the business is that it allowed me to launch new products. It allowed me to find another category besides face masks because it’s scary to launch a product not knowing if I’ll succeed. And the only way to get the data that you need was on Helium 10. So I would spend hours and hours on Helium 10 looking at the keyword demand, the supply, the Magnet IQ, I looked at that too, to find the next products. And that determined what tights patterns I got, for example. And what is the number one biggest factor of my growth every year? It is launching new products, which means that the number one tool that helped me launch more products was Helium 10.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting, interesting. Do your products have a long-life cycle? Or the number one tights you have now, I think the heart tights are one of your top ones, right? Is that going to die? Has that been your main product for years? Is this very cyclical? How does your business work?

Shan Shan:

The challenge with my business is it’s super seasonal. The heart tights really do well on Valentine’s Day and then it tanks. And when it tanks, it loses ranking. You don’t know where it loses ranking. The other big month I have is October for Halloween because a lot of the tights are Halloween tights. And then November it tanks. So it’s always like going up, tanking. And that creates a lot of challenges with my brand. And then there are tights that just kind of fade out a little bit, like the one I was telling you about, the one that look like thigh high socks. They’ve kind of been fading over the years and I just can’t quite figure out why. I’m trying to diagnose it.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. So when you look in Helium 10 for product opportunity, you mentioned the IQ score, which is just this number where it shows, hey, is there a high relative number of searches versus the number of products that show up in the search results? What are some other things that you look for in Helium 10 that means, hey, this could be a potential product for me?

Shan Shan:

So I love to look at what the competitor is doing. So for example, if there is a certain product that I want to launch, I Cerebro the competitors, the keywords, and I look at, first of all, how many keywords there are. If they have like 20 keywords that are all number one, and then 100 that are in the top 10, that’s good.That means there’s a lot of different ways to search and find that product. But then there’s some products that are eye-catching, but then you look at the cerebral and there’s just like a small handful of top 10 keywords that direct traffic. And those are the ones that worry me. I also like to look at, I have the crawl extension that I can check x-ray and I find out the child ASIN. So very specifically, which child is the winner in the parent ASIN. And that has helped a lot because then I don’t buy the wrong, then I see like, what’s the best color? What’s the best size? I don’t buy the wrong design. I see exactly which one’s selling.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, that’s a good one. Because when you are selling clothing or things with a lot of variations, be it design or color or size, you’re like, if you don’t have this data, you don’t know which one sells the most from your first order from the factory, you’ve got to order 100, 100, 100, 100, 100 or something like that. But really the sales is going to be 300, 100, 20, 30. And then now you’re just stuck. You either run out because you don’t have enough or you’re stuck with all this extra inventory. But looking at the sales is good. I remember as a newer seller, you for years were like on the platinum plan. You were okay with that. Now, when you upgraded to the Diamond plan, I remember the first time you saw it, you were kind of blown away by some of those features. What were your favorite features once you upgraded to the Diamond that you didn’t have when you’re a Platinum?

Shan Shan:

I think the AI was very interesting. And it was right when AI was getting really hot. I also really liked the Search Query Analyzer, just because one of the things that determines whether a product is a winner or a loser is how it converts compared to the competitor. And yeah, there’s data if you really dig into it. But I would avoid doing it on Amazon because it was just so tedious.

Bradley Sutton:

To download all those Excel files.

Shan Shan:

Yeah. So I just, you know, I just guessed. I was like, okay, well, if this is their ranking, then maybe they are better than me or not better than me. So I wanted everything nicely recapped for me. And so Search Query Analyzer was really helpful with that because it just told me exactly how I stacked.

Bradley Sutton:

I think we were all shocked that Amazon a few years ago provided that data for Amazon sellers. Exactly what sales are driving your keywords and what do you have a better click-through rate than competitors and stuff. But that just by itself is just data.

So what are you actually doing with this data that you’re pulling from Search Query Analyzer

Shan Shan:

So for example, if a competitor product is really doing well conversion-wise, but mine isn’t, then I look at their pictures. And now thanks to AI and Nano Banana, which I love, you can pretty much beat anyone’s listing with images. You can just, you know, if they have a cool infographic, you can try to get a better one. You can create photo shoots just using Nano Banana. So it’s just a really fun time right now because now there’s really no limits. All you need to know is what you need to do. Once you know what you need to do, you can get it done.

Bradley Sutton:

You were managing before your advertising just with like spreadsheets or on Seller Central. What was some of the differences when you started using Helium 10 Ads that, you know, what was the main advantage? Just the visibility of data? Was it the time savings, the rules? What did you like most about Helium 10 Ads?

Shan Shan:

The problem I have is I have over a hundred products and it’s just me. So managing PPC on a daily basis for 100 products is near impossible to be on top of everything. So, you know, I really like the rules, just being able to do things like negate if you get more than seven clicks and no sales, things like that, which I know I will 100% negate if I saw it, but I may not see it because I don’t check every campaign and every product has dozens of campaigns. So it’s really a great way to just kind of have another employee.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Now some, you know, some Helium 10 tools maybe you only use when you’re looking for a new product, like maybe the Black Box or something like that. You’re like, hey, I’m looking for a new product and maybe you only do that once a month or something. What are some of the Helium 10 tools that are kind of like your daily or every other day? Like this is part of your cadence. You have to be in it. Which ones would you say?

Shan Shan:

It’s going to be Cerebro, Keyword Tracker. And that was actually a big requirement that I had that made me move to Diamond because I have over a hundred products. So I need to track a lot of keywords. And I actually use Profits too because that’s the only visible I have to whether or not the products are actually profitable. I like how Profits, you could check their return rate. And then I could just quickly see, okay, these products have insane return rate. I need to kill it or I need to fix it.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, you’re not selling on Etsy anymore. I remember when you were, that played a role in like your launch, like being able to get data even before you were on Amazon. So now that you don’t have that, what is your launch strategy? Like how many products are you launching a month? And you mentioned, hey, some are going to work and some are not, like, obviously you’re not investing a thousand units for everything because if 80% fail, you’re stuck with thousands and thousands of units. So talk to me about what your process is for launching new products as far as how many it is and what’s the steps that you’re taking and what’s the data that you’re looking at to decide if you want to keep going.

Shan Shan:

I look at, so this month I launched 33 products.

Bradley Sutton:

In one month?

Shan Shan:

In one month, thanks to AI. Normally you wouldn’t be able to do that in one month, but I would look at how quickly it crawls up the keyword ranking. Then I would look at how high it crawls up. Does it get to the top 10? That’s usually a really good sign. I would look at, yeah, I would look at, you know, how the PPC is doing, the average ROAS. That is very helpful.

Bradley Sutton:

Well, do you have a target for that?

Shan Shan:

If it’s 2.0, that’s great. That’s probably a winner. If it’s 1.0, that might be okay because if all the other stats are still healthy, then, you know, ROAS goes down over time. So that’s still good. If it’s less than one, then I get a little bit hesitant to launch more unless, you know, unless it crawled up the rankings in Keyword Tracker so quickly that it would be silly not to buy some more. But yeah, so I would look at how many keywords it started ranking for, how quickly it crawled up. Does it keep its position? So one thing I’ve noticed is that sometimes I’ll blast PPC ads and it will shoot up the ranking. And then the moment I turn off PPC ads, it loses the ranking. I don’t like that. Some people can make that work. I prefer if it kind of just was sticky and it stuck there. So that’s the other thing.

Bradley Sutton:

Managing so many SKUs, a lot of inventory. I imagine sometimes, you know, cash flow might be an issue. How do you keep control of your cash flow? Like, do you have good terms with your suppliers? You know, like 100 SKUs and each of these have who knows how many units. How are you managing that?

Shan Shan:

So cash flow, I do have about 90 days, 60, 90 days. So that’s helpful. But it’s really just, I just did not pay myself. I just put everything that I earned back in the business into buying inventory. I also, the benefit I have is that I’m seasonal product. That’s one of the only benefits of the seasonal product is that you really just buy once a year. And then you get a big chunk of change in November. So then when you borrow money because it’s seasonal, you only have to borrow money for like three months. So that’s kind of nice. But yeah, cash flow, I use Profits. So Profits tell me that, you know, if I can expect 18%, then I know going forward, that’s how much will ultimately land in my bank. After Amazon takes its fees, after I pay advertising, after storage costs, everything.

Bradley Sutton:

Now to be able to have the kind of success you do, you know, which is not typical, right? It takes hard work. It’s definitely, it definitely, it can be done. What are some of the unique strategies that you do? I mean, a lot of the stuff you said is important. Like, hey, keep your ROIs down. But I think that everybody should, I hope, understand, you know, things like that. Hey, keep your cash flow steady. You know, these are things you understand. What are some of the under the radar stuff, whether it’s on Amazon, whether it’s the way you present your brand off of Amazon, whether it’s an advertising thing, whether it’s a Helium 10 thing or not. What do you think that you’re doing that maybe not everybody is doing out there?

Shan Shan:

I think two things. One is I use PickFu. It is a platform where you can pull Amazon subscribers, private subscribers.

Bradley Sutton:

It’s called Helium 10 Audience and Helium 10. I’ve used PickFu since before we had Helium 10.

Shan Shan:

Oh, yeah, I love it too. And yeah, I just use it to, I ask questions like, if there were these two main images, which one would you more likely click on? I also will upload a whole set, like six pictures versus another six pictures and say, which set of pictures would you more likely buy from? I also use it for product discovery. So I would ask of these 10 products, which one would you buy?

Bradley Sutton:

Are you choosing it like a certain demographic too when you pull them? Like say, hey, I need females from this age to this age or something.

Shan Shan:

Yeah, I always pick females and I always pick Amazon subscribers, but that’s it. I don’t try to limit it too much, but it’s pretty accurate. And then the second thing is really just adopting AI quickly has been very helpful, specifically Nano Banana. It has been a game changer. There are some products that were going to die and I saved it by changing the main image on Nano Banana.

Bradley Sutton:

Did that increase like your click-through rate or conversion rate or what was the biggest factors that that changed?

Shan Shan:

I think when you change the main image, mostly the biggest thing is the click-through rate. But then you get a better click-through rate, you move up the rankings, right? Conversion rate might be more just usualistic, six set of pictures. But for some weird reason, there were just some images that were not beating competitors. So I couldn’t get the rankings. And then when I switched to a different picture, suddenly got way more rankings and it was just black and white. And it used to take forever because I would set up a photo shoot in order to get another picture. But now with Nano Banana, I can get another picture in a minute.

Bradley Sutton:

So walk through that process. I think you were just showing me a picture that you did, I think with AI and that you just took from your home. Are you taking pictures of real models or yourself and then editing it in Nano Banana? Walk through your process a little bit there.

Shan Shan:

So I thought the best process was do a photo shoot yourself with the product, then upload the images on Nano Banana and then ask them to change something. So, I would say change the light pose, improve the lighting, improve the coloring. You could even improve the size of the woman. So things like that made it really easy to adjust images quickly. But I would start with the first photo shoot just so you have a good input so that the input creates a good output.

Bradley Sutton:

I like it. I like it. Anything else unique that you’ve done either now or in the past that you’d like to share with the audience?

Shan Shan:

So I do use ChatGPT a lot. What I do is instead of writing out the listings and bullet descriptions and titles myself, what I do is I just give them a list. I go on Cerebro or Search Query Analyzer and I pull out the best keywords to target.Then I would say, hey, ChatGPT, create a listing with five bullet points that integrates all 20 of these keywords. And then they will actually write something quite decent. Now you won’t have to tweak it. And I’ve noticed the more keywords you force them to add, the worse the copy gets. But it’s not bad. And that has also helped me with 33 launches because with that many launches, you just don’t have time to write out every single description and bullet yourself.

Bradley Sutton:

Yep. And as of you didn’t know this because this just got updated last week or this week, actually, while we’re recording this. But now we have actually integrated ChatGPT 5.1 into our Helium 10 Listing Builder. So exactly what you just said where, hey, you’ve got all your keywords and Cerebro and Insert Query Performance, etc. You actually put it into Listing Builder and then our ChatGPT AI will create that listing right there and even optimize it for Rufus. So she was ahead of the curve. She was doing basically now what everybody could do in Helium 10. So that’s definitely something that can save you time in the future. What’s your goals for the brand? Do you have a certain number you’re trying to get to? Do you want to exit this brand eventually and retire and live in beaches of Maldives? What are you trying to do with Millennials in Motion?

Shan Shan:

I want to double every year, at least 50% every year, which I’ve been on track of. So this year, I’m hopefully going to hit a million and then an extra two million and a four million and just keep going. And then eventually, I would probably exit if the right opportunity came up.

And then who knows what I’ll do. Maybe I’ll start a podcast, but it’ll be a different category. It’ll be something maybe like human psychology or something like that.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, well, I hope that you consider me for a guest out there. I’ve had you online for a little bit. I’ve done that before where people have come on my podcast, they start their own and it goes full circle. I like it. There might be other brands out there in your boat who are successful. You know, like, hey, you’re doing high six figures. It’s your main income. And maybe they haven’t used Helium 10. And so they might wonder, well, I’m obviously successful already. Like, what can Helium 10 do for me? Like, what would you tell them? How would you describe Helium 10 to them? And why, even though they’ve achieved a measure of success without it, like why they would need it?

Shan Shan:

Yeah, I would describe it like this. The Amazon is the game. And Helium 10 is the guide. And you can play the video game without a guide. But you might make a lot of mistakes. You might die.

Bradley Sutton:

A little dramatic there. Good analogy, good analogy.

Shan Shan:

You get three lives. But with a guide, it’s just so much easier.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah.

Shan Shan:

You know what to do, what not to do, when to start spending more money, when to stop spending money.

Bradley Sutton:

The cheats, you know, like the little moves that you do in a video game to like… Do you ever play Super Mario Brothers?

Shan Shan:

Yeah, exactly. Where you get infinite money or something.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Those hidden doors and stuff like that. Yeah, I like this analogy. Let’s use this in the future for Helium 10. I love it. All right. Well, you know, Shan Shan, it’s great to see all the success. You know, like I remember when you were just doing, you know, like just getting into like the stockings and stuff like that. You were mainly doing masks and that was going way down. So I was a little bit worried. I was like, oh man, what’s going to happen with our business now? To see you reinvented yourself. I see some of your SKUs are selling like even more than a thousand units a month. And I remember I saw, I think on LinkedIn, did you even have your very first six figure a month recently? Yeah, so it’s really great to see all the success. And a lot of people, they have products that I like to try and say, oh yeah, you know, like I was in Dubai and they had some Dubai chocolate and somebody had a water bottle. But unfortunately, Shan Shan, your products, I am not going to model or try on, but how about this? How about making some product for men in the future?

Shan Shan:

Yeah, I’ve actually started.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, you have? What do you have?

Shan Shan:

I have some belts, some men’s belts. We’ll see how it does.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay.

Shan Shan:

It’s brand new.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. I will be the Nano Banana model for your belts. Just to send them over. I actually need belts. I’ve been losing some weight lately. And so like before I never needed belts.

So now I actually do. So I’m going to hit you up and I’ll leave a review. Everybody check her product out. Millennials in Motion, support it. She grew up from zero. And it’s a great example of what you can do with the right tools, you know, like Helium 10, the right drive, the smarts and the ability to start your own business. And I hope Shan Shan’s story will inspire you. Thanks a lot, Shan Shan.

Shan Shan:

Thanks, Bradley.

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