Amify, the Arlington-based company that advises brands that sell products on Amazon, has expanded its senior management team to keep up with a surge in new clients as it prepares to hit a new sales record.
Christine McCambridge joins Amify as senior vice president of delivery to oversee customer experience, after 16 years of boosting product sales for brands such as Energizer, Conagra and Mars Petcare through e-commerce platforms. Drew Hall, the company's new vice president of sales, previously built and led sales teams at companies such as Austin ad-tech company Pointroll and a Cincinnati startup called Ahalogy. Steve Peele II, the new vice president of marketing, previously led marketing initiatives at several tech companies, including Nexient, which was acquired by NTT Data in June.
The company now employs 90, a product of previous venture capital infusions coupled with a surge in new clients who have been forced by the coronavirus pandemic to explore selling their products on Amazon.com Inc.'s (NASDAQ: AMZN) platform for the first time, said Ethan McAfee, its CEO and founder.
“While many brands have an Amazon strategy, most brands don’t,” McAfee said, adding that businesses in this situation who woke up to the overnight push to online sales had two options: hiring employees for internal work, or outsourcing a business like Amify to help.
Due to that surge, Amify expects to hit a milestone: the value of goods sold for its clients on Amazon will hit an annual run rate of $200 million by the end of the year. That double what the company projected in May, and dwarfs sales from two years ago, when founder and CEO Ethan McAfee was still bootstrapping the company and managing $10 million in e-commerce sales for its clients.
“[The pandemic] turned out obviously to be a huge benefit for e-commerce,” he said. “Amify has really benefited from that growth.”
McAfee founded the company in 2010 out of his townhouse in Arlington, selling pickleball paddles on Amazon. The company's headquarters is in Crystal City, less than a mile away from the future site of Amazon’s second headquarters, and it also has an office in Cincinnati.
Before Covid hit the U.S., McAfee said, e-commerce only occupied 15% of total retail sales. The coronavirus pandemic shifted shoppers away from physical stores — which resulted in e-commerce jumping to 25% of the retail market share. Now, it’s settled to 21%, as more brick-and-mortar stores are reopening, but within the last year, brands have accepted that selling directly to consumers online — especially through Amazon’s platform — isn’t going away, McAfee said.
The holiday season is a much more significant lift this year, even though more consumers are willing to shop in-person with Covid-19 vaccines widely available. Amify saw a 400% jump in year-over-year growth on Cyber Monday because of the sheer number of retail brands the company has partnered with in the last year, McAfee said.
Complicating matters, however, is the backlog of ships waiting to check in with orders from overseas, contributing to supply chain delays. This is especially true for Amify’s clients that make products in China, where shipping costs are up 500% from a year ago, McAfee said.
“There’s a lot more out-of-stock product this year than last year,” McAfee said. “Shipping is a fairly large portion of a cost for a brand, which either means that they need to increase the prices for their product or make less money. We’re seeing that really impacting a lot of the brands that we work with.”
But McAfee said he is hopeful the constraints will slow down — and is confident that Amazon’s delivery processes will outlast the current supply chain issues.
Moving forward, Amify’s leadership will focus on growing its brand portfolio and branching out from Amazon's U.S. ecosystem, including helping brands with their own websites, as well as selling on other platforms such as Walmart.com and Amazon's international arms.
