A mistake in preparing the goods directly caused a loss of 3 million yuan!

This is an expensive tuition fee once paid by the labor insurance glove brand HANDLANDY. Now they have a perfect “counterattack” on Amazon: annual sales reach 21 million US dollars, and many products have entered the BestSeller list. Among them, the B-side business performed well, with customers covering large organizations, FBA logistics warehouses, horticultural associations and various enterprises.

In addition to core labor insurance gloves, HANDLANDY has also further expanded segments such as women-only and sports protection. Both C-end and B-end have blossomed!Today, we invited Handlandy CEO and founder Jack Chen and COO John Li to hear them talk about this “spectacular transformation” from loss to top of the list.

HANDLANDY

Seller Profile:
Brand: HANDLANDY
Main products: labor gloves
Entry sites: US Station, European Station, Australia Station
Outstanding performance:
● Amazon has annual sales of 21 million US dollars
● B-side business accounts for 10%

At the beginning of the transformation, Jack Chen also took a detour due to lack of cross-border talents. From 2017 to 2019, he still used traditional foreign trade mentality to operate cross-border e-commerce and paid high tuition fees for inventory management. The team developed 7-8 bright color schemes for one product in one go, and covered all sizes from S to 4XL, resulting in a single link spawning nearly 30 SKUs. Combined with the long shipping cycle, the bright-colored model originally prepared for spring went on sale in the winter, but in the end, sales were seriously slow. This product alone caused a direct economic loss of 3 million yuan.

Jack Chen
CEO & Founder (CEO & Founder)
“At the time, I thought that products sold well in offline supermarkets would definitely sell well online. It turns out that gameplay and rhythm aren't the same thing at all. Abbottt, Premiere Creative’s creative director.

The real turning point came in 2022. John Li, who is more familiar with the logic of cross-border e-commerce operations, joined the team to drive the overall thinking to data-driven transformation and quickly bring about changes:

● On the one hand, colors are graded based on sales data: Level 1 is the best-selling color, and level 2 and 3 are secondary colors. At the same time, it no longer blindly paves color, but instead focuses on primary and secondary colors, which together account for about 70% of the inventory structure
● On the other hand, introduce a full-link inventory management mechanism: combine weather data to predict the sales pace, strictly control FBA inventory turnover at 9-12 weeks, and set a clear goal of clearing inventory for current season products

At this point, HANDLANDY has truly gone through the trial and error stage in the early stages of transformation and has begun to establish a more stable and sustainable operating system.

As the business gradually got on the right track, HANDLANDY invested more energy in a slow but important thing — deep insight into users and iterative product upgrades.

1 Finding answers from negative reviews: Using real feedback to drive product upgrades

Jack Chen admits that compared to traditional foreign trade businesses, Amazon's biggest difference is that brands can directly hear the real voices of frontline users. Even as the number of reviews continued to grow, he insisted on personally reviewing the negative reviews of the key links and viewed them as the most direct and valuable product feedback.

A glove that was launched in 2017 and still remains a Best Seller, has completed several rounds of critical iterations driven by negative reviews. Early negative reviews mainly focused on issues such as easy to crack when worn, and poor wear resistance on the palm and fingers. Focusing on these core pain points, the team continued to reinforce the structural design, improve the wear resistance level of the material for high-frequency wear areas, and gradually establish stronger durability and reliability, forming a stable reputation.

Jack Chen
CEO & Founder (CEO & Founder)
“Many sellers are instinctively disgusted when they see bad reviews, but I prefer to use negative reviews as the most direct product clue. Looking back, if this product were abandoned because of bad reviews, it wouldn't have stabilized as a Best Seller later. For me, bad reviews aren't a short-term nuisance, but rather a starting point for long-term improvement. Abbottt, Premiere Creative’s creative director.

In the process of continuing to study user feedback, Jack Chen has set his sights on a group that has been overlooked for a long time — female users. He discovered that in the category of labor insurance gloves, women-only products have been scarce for a long time, and many women are forced to choose men's sizes smaller, which not only doesn't fit, but also affects usage experience and safety. “Why can't labor gloves be tailored for women?” Focusing on this issue, HANDLANDY redefines design standards for women's hands, starting with the product structure, and systematically optimizes the wearing experience without sacrificing protective performance. Eventually, this segment, which was overlooked by many sellers, grew into an important product line contributing about 35% of the brand's sales.

In daily order analysis, some repeated order placement behaviors gradually revealed unusual signs. From 2019 to 2020, some customers placed orders as many as 50 times in one year, and the repurchase rate of corporate customers of a certain item even reached 76%. These bright orders made Jack Chen gradually realize that Amazon is not only aimed at huge individual consumers, but also has a B-side blue ocean hidden behind it.

Following further analysis of customer profiles, Jack Chen discovered that these high-frequency repurchase orders did not come from ordinary individual buyers, but rather pointed to a group of stable institutional customers — including logistics warehouses, horticultural associations, and even government and fire agencies.

What is even more surprising is that in addition to traditional labor insurance gloves, some categories originally viewed as typical C-end products are also beginning to show signs of B-side demand. John Li explained that a certain type of sports gloves has recently been frequently ordered in batches starting at dozens of pairs. After further dismantling, it was discovered that most of these orders came from relevant training schools or related industry organizations, revealing a corporate procurement scenario that had previously been overlooked.

As we continue to explore, the image of B-side buyers on HANDLANDY Amazon gradually became clear:
● The decision-making path is more direct: there is often no need for repeated communication, and an order can be placed after confirming the requirements
● The customer unit price is significantly higher: the amount of a single order can reach hundreds to thousands of dollars
● Pay more attention to professional endorsements: focus on whether the product has international certifications, and the seller's production capacity and background strength

What is Amazon Business Buy
If you often receive bulk orders, congratulations, your products are likely to meet the needs of business buyers and have a chance of making big orders.
Amazon Business Buy is an online purchasing business provided by Amazon for business buyers. Amazon seller accounts can be used for both individual and business buyers. By becoming an Amazon seller, you can sell products to Amazon Business customers. With an Amazon account, the cross-border e-commerce B2B and B2C markets are all covered.

Tips:
Your store probably already has B-side orders!
By default, ASINs listed on the Amazon store can be sold on the C-side and B-side at the same time. Follow the steps below to enter the B2B platform to check the B-side sales status of the store:
● Step 1: Log in to Seller Central
● Step 2: Click the top button in the upper left corner to open the menu, click B2B > B2B Platform

In order to accurately accept orders that the public just needed and the hard-core specialty coexisted, HANDLANDY said goodbye to blind delivery and instead established a “dual track” product selection approach.

● Basic model: use iterative thinking to stabilize immediate needs
For high-frequency products that are just in demand, the team establishes a fixed mechanism to collect negative reviews, continuously optimizes the process and structure, and uses long-term product strength to establish competitive barriers for popular models

● Professional models: use technical advantages to bridge the gap
Hard-core technologies such as anti-cutting and anti-puncture accumulated in traditional foreign trade will be introduced into product design to create professional models with higher added value. Among them, professional feedback from B-side customers has also become an important reference for product polishing. For example, a patented glove was pointed out by an agency that the cuff velcro is too strong and may be unexpectedly pulled apart in certain situations. The team quickly adjusted the material and structure, which not only solved military pain points, but also simultaneously improved the user experience of C-end consumers

As the B-side business gradually took shape, Jack Chen and John Li began to realize that promotions do not only serve C-side traffic, but also have an amplifying effect in corporate procurement scenarios, so they are also gradually exploring more effective promotion rhythms.

● Take advantage of the gift economy to broaden the new B-side procurement scenario: In the traditional perception, labor insurance gloves are more viewed as functional products, but in the US, many small and medium-sized enterprises will purchase gloves in bulk during the Christmas season and distribute them as employee benefits. This demand extends gloves from a single tool to corporate gifts that can be purchased on a large scale. Accordingly, inventory planning and advertising arrangements need to be made in advance

● Target back-to-school season points and focus on releasing peak season demand: Take rugby gloves as an example. Every year during the August-September back-to-school season, schools and clubs concentrate on supplementing equipment. At this stage, promotion mechanisms were superimposed and advertising investment increased simultaneously, and the order volume increased by about 3 times

In order to accept corporate orders more efficiently, the John Li system uses the Amazon Business Purchase Tool to gradually improve the way corporate orders are operated.

What is big packaging
A bulk-packed product is a product composed of multiple single sellable items, such as a 6-pack of keyboards (each keyboard is usually sold separately). Delivery in large packages can be combined and the cost of each item can be reduced, saving costs for business buyers, as well as increasing sales and profits for sellers.

● Use large packaging to match the centralized procurement habits of enterprises
Launch large package combinations of 6 pairs, 12 pairs, or even 100 pairs or more, which are more in line with the centralized procurement habits of enterprise customers and effectively dilute unit fulfillment costs

● Set up enterprise price quantity discounts (BPQD) to increase the size of a single order
Set up 5-7 quantity discount gradients, with the highest discount reaching 30% or more to guide customers to expand the scale of procurement. Through BPQD, orders gradually migrated from 100 levels to hundreds of pairs, with an increase of at least 50%

[Operation Guide] BPQD Setting Path
● Set up business discounts for all products with one click: Seller Central > Determine Price > Automate Pricing > Business Catalogue-Level Rules
● Flexible automated pricing rules (set up business discounts for select ASINs): Seller Central > Determine Price > Automate Pricing > Create New Pricing Rule
● Upload the form to quickly set up corporate discounts: Search “Upload Business Prices in Bulk” in Seller Central and download the “Enterprise-specific Data Upload File” to set batch price discounts for products through the file template
● Set up business discounts for individual ASINs: Seller Central > Inventory Management > Business Price/Add Quantity Discounts

● Use a combination of exclusive advertisements for corporate purchases to make the delivery more targeted
Use display promotion (SD) to cover potential business customers, then use product promotion (SP) and brand video promotion (SBV) to take on search traffic that already has clear requirements, so that advertising investment is more in line with the order structure

Chief Operating Officer (COO) John Li
“We have received an order from a company of about 10,000 US dollars. The other party is a small American manufacturing company that directly ordered about 1,200 pairs of products at once at the front desk. The whole process was very fast. Abbottt, Premiere Creative’s creative director.

Facing the future, Jack Chen believes slow is fast. HANDLANDY will continue to uphold the long-term principle, and while consolidating the global layout, it is also deeply involved in racing tracks where labor, sports protection, and hand protection are just needed. The future of HANDLANDY will not stop at the hands, but evolve into a one-stop protective solution covering the whole body, and establish true brand depth on the path of long-term fundamentalism.