Li Jie, a cross-border veteran with many years of experience, is also an outdoor enthusiast. As early as 2015, he joined Amazon, initially selling across all Marketplaces and product categories. Later, building on his personal interests and leveraging the supply chain advantages of industrial clusters, he focused deeply on the outdoor footwear category. He entered the Japan Marketplace in 2021, and in just one year, his sales there exceeded 10 million. During the 2022 Prime Day event, sales more than doubled, bringing the outdoor sports brand SAGUARO into the daily lives of Japanese consumers. How did Li Jie turn his personal interest into a business with annual sales in the tens of millions, and what key steps did he take along the way to achieve his success today?Let’s take a look at his cross-border selling story.

Like many beginner sellers in cross-border selling, SAGUARO also went through a period of uncertainty in operations and product selection in the early days of cross-border selling, but the way they found a “breakthrough” was quite clever. In this era of growing health awareness, outdoor sports have become part of more and more people’s lives. For Li Jie, being in nature often brings him great physical and mental joy. Li Jie not only enjoys outdoor sports, but is also very interested in studying outdoor sports-related products. He has collected all kinds of athletic shoes and is a true “gear expert.” He believes that only comfortable products can make exercise enjoyable. Driven by his passion for and study of sports products, Li Jie connected with many local supply chains and factories, which gave him a deeper understanding of the business and helped him begin building his own business network.

Seller profile
■ Main product: outdoor shoes
■ Marketplace: 2015
■ Markets operated: Japan, Europe, the United States, Canada, and Australia

There are many types of footwear, and athletic shoes alone include several subcategories. If production is expanded across the board, it will put a lot of pressure on R&D, logistics, and warehousing, and it will be difficult to build competitive consumer awareness. Li Jie believes that choosing a niche category to focus on is the most important part of building brand momentum.

Li Jie said: “In our research, we found that many overseas users especially enjoy the outdoor lifestyle, and a pair of comfortable, durable outdoor shoes is essential for many outdoor enthusiasts. "

In recent years, hiking and creek tracing have gradually become new lifestyle trends in Europe and the United States, and many families there spend holidays outdoors enjoying nature. At the same time, many traditional sports brands on the market rarely specialize in the niche category of “water shoes.” Even when they do offer similar products, the underfoot experience is not very professional or well developed. Making “wading shoes” also happens to be a major strength of the Jinjiang industrial cluster, so after analyzing user needs and the resources available to them, Li Jie decided to make “wading shoes” SAGUARO’s flagship product. With a keen business sense in the outdoor sports industry and deep insight into consumer needs, Li Jie quickly found a breakthrough. After gaining deeper insights into the preferences and functional needs of users in Europe and the US, SAGUARO created multiple bestselling products and quickly became a hit in the European Marketplace.

Capture new Marketplace opportunities and get on the fast track to growth
After SAGUARO's wading shoes launched, they were recognized by many European customers, which gave Li Jie a lot of confidence. After the European and North American Marketplaces gradually stabilized, he began looking for new growth opportunities. At the end of 2021, he was pleasantly surprised to discover: “Japan, which is closer to us, is actually a blue ocean full of opportunities.” Li Jie found that Japan Marketplace has a strong geographic advantage: it is a mature Marketplace relatively close to China, which not only helps reduce logistics costs, but also helps better ensure delivery speed and makes management and after-sales service easier, allowing him to reduce costs and improve efficiency to a large extent.

Li Jie said, “As a fellow Asian country, Japan has consumer preferences that are fairly similar to those in China. At the same time, under the influence of European and American fashion, Japanese customers also readily accept European and American trends, so SAGUARO products that have been very well received in Europe and the US also have a chance of being accepted by customers in the Japan Marketplace. "

In addition, Li Jie found that the Japan Marketplace offers many major promotion opportunities. Whether it’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday or Japan’s own promotional holidays, promotion submissions in the Japan Marketplace are relatively easy to get approved. This can not only reduce operating costs, but also improve operational efficiency, letting sellers often enjoy the excitement of surging orders. Therefore, after weighing the many opportunities and advantages, Li Jie decided to focus on the Japan Marketplace and on four key areas to build strong category barriers:
1. Set up a professional technical team
Talent is the most important resource. Build professional operations, technical, and R&D teams, improve market sensitivity, identify customer needs, and gain professional data analysis so you can quickly find directions for new product iterations and efficiently address customers’ real needs.
2. Standardize production processes and mechanisms, and use professional tools to improve product selection success rates
The launch cycle for a pair of shoes—from research, design, development, and production to listing—is about six months to a year, and different operating rhythms may even need to be set for different regions and seasons. For each new product, launching it not only requires significant labor costs, but also involves a relatively complex production process. This requires more standardized production and operations mechanisms, as well as a reasonable division of labor and allocation of production; otherwise, an error in any step will affect end-delivery performance. Therefore, businesses need to make their production processes and production mechanisms more standardized and reasonable. One effective way to do this is to make good use of official tools to help improve the accuracy of product selection.
Li Jie said: ”We use KimonoV2, Kuriyama, monthly keyword analysis reports, and live streams shared by Amazon account managers to understand fashion trends and find product selection directions. We also use official product selection tools such as Product Opportunity Explorer and Marketplace Product Guidance to get true, comprehensive reference data and user feedback, and improve our chances of creating bestselling products. By combining official tools with years of industry experience, so far, our product selection success rate has reached 80%. "

To improve product competitiveness, we must pay attention to market feedback
After going deeper into the Japan Marketplace, Li Jie found that Japanese consumers have very high standards for products. Before purchasing a product, Japanese consumers compare options carefully and select products based on their preferences and quality. Even if they do not like a product after buying it, they rarely choose to return it, so the Japan Marketplace is characterized by “low return rates” and “few negative reviews.” However, in Li Jie's view, these characteristics are not necessarily good things. Because the less feedback users give on a product, the less user information the brand has, it cannot support iterative product upgrades, which in turn leads to user loss. Therefore, if you want to keep growing in the Japan Marketplace, you must study your customers and maintain a “craftsmanship spirit.”

When SAGUARO first entered the Japan Marketplace, its product manufacturing standards followed the product design, R&D, and operations experience from the Europe and US Marketplaces, but the team soon found that directly applying the product selection logic from the Europe and US Marketplaces did not work in the Japan Marketplace. Many Japanese users also left negative reviews because the shoe sizes did not fit, and Li Jie, who was highly sensitive to product issues, quickly realized where the problem was. “Shoe last length sizing systems are different in Europe, the United States, and Japan, so we invested a great deal of time and effort in deeply researching last shapes and last lengths, gathering feedback on product issues from multiple sources, and combining that with our supply chain’s production experience to adjust the last shapes and last lengths to better suit Japanese consumers and meet their needs.” The SAGUARO team even found new product positioning from Japanese users’ “negative reviews” and gained quite a bit of “inspiration” for new product development.

Li Jie said: “User reviews, whether good or bad, are very valuable. Although our shoes are positioned as ‘wading shoes,’ user feedback has helped us broaden our thinking and helped the brand discover more unexpected new opportunities. “

Some users said, “I injured my foot, and after wearing SAGUARO shoes, it healed quickly because they were soft, breathable, and provided good support. ”
Some users said, “The children at home don’t like wearing other shoes; only SAGUARO shoes don’t feel restrictive. ”
Many users also said, “Even in non-outdoor settings, SAGUARO shoes are still very comfortable and durable, and they’re also very comfortable to wear barefoot every day. ”

This real feedback gave Li Jie more room to imagine new product development and achieve product iteration by carefully listening to every piece of feedback. From children learning to walk to adults’ daily commutes, and from identifying the footwear needs of outdoor enthusiasts to gaining a deeper understanding of injured athletes’ rehabilitation needs, SAGUARO listened to different users and quickly launched several new products, including “barefoot shoes,” winning over more and more users in Japan. Li Jie has always believed that carefully listening to customer feedback and then iterating on new products is an effective way for brands to improve their products.

Building a brand is an important way to achieve differentiation
For traditional factory-based businesses, product quality is the “lifeline” of business development. While focusing on building strong products, enhancing brand strength and achieving differentiated competition has been an important reason SAGUARO has stood out from the industrial cluster.

“‘SAGUARO’ is a remarkable plant that grows in the desert. It has the resilience and endurance to overcome environmental limits, and with only a small amount of rain, it can grow massive, vibrant branches and thrive sustainably without constraint. The SAGUARO brand will also carry forward this “resilience” and “endurance,” and is committed to creating a comfortable experience for users in a “natural and sustainable” way.” This meaningful brand story embodies SAGUARO’s brand values. Looking back on his journey, Li Jie believes that to stand out in a highly competitive industry cluster, a brand must have differentiated brand and product positioning, and beyond meeting consumers’ needs for product functionality, it must also offer higher-level emotional value.

Li Jie said, “When a product becomes the kind of product users recommend by word of mouth, promotion can be even more effective than advertising. “

Li Jie places special importance on building the SAGUARO Brand Store, and will optimize the Brand Store in two ways to improve the user shopping experience:
■ On the one hand, by continuously sharing brand updates and showcasing the products and brand image in all aspects, more new and existing users can see SAGUARO’s evolution and growth.
■ On the other hand, use Amazon brand-building tools, high-quality videos, and rich visual and text content to enrich and optimize the Listing, improving traffic efficiency while also helping users truly feel the “power” of new products and bringing them a richer shopping experience.

Continue to refine your approach and drive cross-border selling for sustained growth

Li Jie said: “There are no small businesses, only people who do small business. Wherever there is demand, there is opportunity. "

At first glance, “wading shoes” may seem like a niche category, but a closer look at customer needs shows that they are actually a gold mine. By extension, this logic also applies to other categories. Choosing a category and continuing to study it while looking for opportunities to stand out often brings unexpected rewards.

Starting from scratch, SAGUARO captured a significant market share in the Japan Marketplace in just 1 year and attracted the attention of more and more Japanese users. In the future, SAGUARO will continue to be bullish on the “wading shoes” category and will focus on three areas to keep building in this category and uncover more opportunities within it.
1. Increase investment in R&D
Increase investment in product research and development, use craftsmanship to build strong products, avoid homogeneous competition, and offer outdoor sports enthusiasts more technologically advanced, more human-centered products.
2. Strengthen brand building
Use Amazon brand-building tools to help a high-quality brand image resonate with more users and make SAGUARO the quality choice for outdoor footwear.
3. Integrate and upgrade production capacity
In recent years, overseas consumer demand has changed significantly, making it necessary to better integrate the upstream and downstream supply chain and upgrade production capacity to better adapt to the new cross-border selling landscape and make rapid adjustments and evolve.

Finally, Li Jie would also like to share three practical tips and suggestions with new sellers entering the Japan Marketplace:
1. “It’s never too late for a good meal.” Sellers who got a late or slow start should have enough confidence and patience.
SAGUARO only began gaining traction in the Japan Marketplace in 2021, almost from scratch, but quickly made full use of the Japan Marketplace’s advantages and official support policies to achieve unexpected results. This shows that by making full use of a Marketplace’s unique features and combining them with your brand’s own strengths, you have a strong chance to outperform established competitors.
2. In a crowded market, refine your product selection and win customers over with product quality and brand strength.
Even the best advertising can’t compare to a high-quality product, especially for Japanese customers who have high standards for products. Once they recognize a product, they recognize the brand, so you should craft products with a spirit of craftsmanship and build your brand with a long-term mindset. These will become valuable assets for cross-border selling.
3. Be willing to dig deep into your work. “Love alone isn’t enough,” but if you don’t love what you do, it’s often hard to succeed.
For the direction and category you believe in, stay resilient. Challenges and opportunities often go hand in hand. By innovating and improving across multiple areas, such as functionality and use cases, and by defining unique customer needs and brand value within niche categories, you can succeed.
We hope SAGUARO’s cross-border selling story can provide useful guidance for sellers and help them find their own path to becoming a top seller in Amazon Japan, a Marketplace full of opportunities.