🇺🇸 Amazon US
$120k
From $38k starting point · 27% TACOS
How 100% Pure New Zealand Honey grew 5× by not defaulting to the US — and won Canada first. The case for choosing the right market before scaling the obvious one.
100% Pure New Zealand Honey is the New Zealand-owned premium manuka honey brand built around a clear thesis: independently certified UMF rating, sustainably sourced from New Zealand's East Coast, no cutting and no blending. Sold across Amazon.com with premium retail placement at grocers including Whole Foods Market.
By mid-2024, the brand was a credible challenger on Amazon US — established enough to be taken seriously, small enough to be lost in the noise. The category was dominated by Wedderspoon, Comvita, and Manuka Health: three brands with deep marketing budgets and mature shelf presence. Monthly sales had plateaued at around $38,000. The question wasn't whether to grow. It was how.
The conventional playbook for an established NZ brand looking to grow on Amazon goes like this: focus everything on the United States, because that's where the money is. Push harder on US ads. Run more US deals. Beat the US category. Then maybe — eventually — think about other markets.
The math underneath that playbook deserves a closer look. The US manuka honey category sits at 28–35% TACOS as a category norm. Every additional dollar of growth has to push through three deep-pocketed incumbents to land. Marginal returns on US ad spend were diminishing fast. The brand could keep buying US growth — at increasingly poor unit economics — or it could ask a different question.
The answer was no. Canada had a smaller manuka category, less competitive saturation, and meaningfully lower CPCs. The same playbook that was grinding in the US would land in Canada at half the cost. Opening Canada didn't mean slowing the US down. It meant pointing the next dollar where it would compound fastest.
The engagement ran one coordinated operating discipline across both markets — refined in the US, replicated in Canada — with a strategic call on sequencing that most NZ brands skip.
Subscribe & Save first-purchase coupons converted high-intent shoppers into recurring subscribers. Best Deals and Lightning Deals sequenced as a flywheel — sized for BSR lift, not margin clearance. Multi-unit promotions lifted AOV. Ads tuned to UMF and MGO rating intent. Every lever pulled monthly, for eighteen months without flinching.
End of 2024 — six months into the engagement — the call was made to open Amazon Canada in parallel with the US, not after it. The math was clear: Canada had a smaller manuka set, lower CPCs, and an established US playbook ready to apply. The next marginal dollar was more productive in Canada than in the saturated US category.
The full US playbook — deals, ads, listing optimisation, inventory management — applied to Canada from launch day. No re-learning curve. Canada hit #1 selling manuka honey in three months at 15% TACOS — half the US category rate. The US discipline subsidised the Canada launch by making it cheaper to win.
The aggregate number — $38k to $183k monthly sales — is the headline. The story underneath is the split. By December 2025, Canada was contributing a third of total revenue at a fraction of the cost-per-sale.
The visible result is the chart line. The deeper outcomes are what build a defensible position:
Profit grew faster than sales. 5.6× profit on 4.8× sales means unit economics improved with scale — the opposite of what happens to most brands chasing growth in expensive categories.
The Canada dollar earned twice as much. At 15% TACOS in Canada vs 27% in the US, every Canadian sale contributed substantially more to net profit. The same product, the same playbook — different market math.
The brand stopped being subsidised by the US. By month 18, Canada was a third of revenue and a structurally healthier contributor. The US scaled too — but the smarter capital allocation made the whole machine work.
Most New Zealand brands arrive at Amazon with a fixed sequence in mind: win the United States, then everything else. The US is the biggest marketplace, the most prestigious to crack, the one that signals "you've made it." So most brands point every marketing dollar there — and grind into the same wall of well-funded incumbents that the brand before them ground into.
The contrarian play isn't to skip the US. It's to ask, every quarter, "which market earns the next dollar fastest?" Sometimes the answer is the US. Sometimes it's Canada. Sometimes it's the UK or Germany or Australia. The job of a fractional Head of Amazon is to make that call with you — and to keep making it, every quarter, for the entire life of the engagement.
For 100% Pure New Zealand Honey, the answer for the next eighteen months was: do both. Run the US play with discipline. Open Canada in parallel. Let the harder market subsidise the easier one. Don't default to the obvious move. Default to the math.