Leveraging Data to Evaluate and Acquire FBA Private Label Brands

March 3, 2021

Sebastian Rymarz

Co-founder and CEO of Heyday

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Sebastian Rymarz is the Co-founder and CEO of Heyday. Heyday partners with sellers to acquire, launch, and incubate successful brands on digital marketplaces like Amazon. Its mission is to help e-commerce entrepreneurs reach new heights by providing the capital, tools, and insights to accelerate their brands in the marketplace ecosystem.

Prior to starting Heyday, Sebastian worked as the Chief Business Officer for Fundbox, a financial services platform that specializes in providing revolving lines of credit to entrepreneurs.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

Sebastian Rymarz shares the factors that have sparked the recent interest in FBA private label businesses
How Sebastian’s experience at Fundbox informs his work at Heyday—and what he loves about the Amazon space
Heyday’s process for maintaining an entrepreneur’s enthusiasm and passion after acquiring their business
How Sebastian finds founders looking to sell their businesses
Sebastian explains how he evaluates a business for current and future value
What Heyday does to differentiate itself from other buyers
The future of investors in the FBA private label space

In this episode…

With the current growth of the FBA space and the increased number of private label brand owners looking to sell and exit, it can be difficult for a buyer to evaluate which businesses to acquire. So, how do you determine the current and future value of a brand? Which criteria are most important? And, how do you choose one brand over another?

According to Sebastian Rymarz, the best approach is to leverage the power of data science to assess a business’ value and future potential. At his firm, Sebastian utilizes data to evaluate two essential pieces of criteria: defensibility and opportunity. With this data-driven approach, he can effectively decide which business to acquire based on the quality of its products, their differentiation in the marketplace, and more.
In this episode of the Buy Box Experts podcast, James Thomson In this episode of the Buy Box Experts podcast, James Thomson interviews Sebastian Rymarz, the Co-founder and CEO of Heyday, about how his firm leverages data from Amazon to evaluate and acquire FBA private label brands. Sebastian talks about how he finds businesses for sale, the criteria he looks for in a brand, and Heyday’s equity offer to sellers. Stay tuned.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

Sponsor for this episode…

Buy Box Experts applies decades of e-commerce experience to successfully manage their clients’ marketplace accounts. The Buy Box account managers specialize in combining an understanding of their clients’ business fundamentals and their in-depth expertise in the Amazon Marketplace.

The team works with marketplace technicians using a system of processes, proprietary software, and extensive channel experience to ensure your Amazon presence captures the opportunity in the marketplace–not only producing greater revenue and profits but also reducing or eliminating your business’ workload.

Buy Box Experts prides itself on being one of the few agencies with an SMB (small to medium-sized business) division and an Enterprise division. Buy Box does not commingle clients among divisions as each has unique needs and requirements for proper account management.
Learn more about Buy Box Experts at BuyBoxExperts.com

Podcast Episode Transcripts:

Disclaimer: Transcripts were generated automatically and may contain inaccuracies

Intro 0:09

Welcome to the Buy Box Experts Podcast. We bring to light the unique opportunities brands face in today’s e-commerce world.

James Thomson 0:18

Hi, I’m James Thomson, one of the hosts of the Buy Box Experts Podcast. I’m a partner with Buy Box Experts and the former business head of the selling on Amazon team at Amazon, as well as Amazon’s first Fulfillment by Amazon account manager. I’m the co-author of a couple of books on Amazon including the recent book Controlling Your Brand in the Age of Amazon. Today’s episode is brought to you by Buy Box Experts. Buy Box Experts takes ambitious brands and makes them unbeatable. When you hire Buy Box Experts, you receive the strategy optimization and marketing performance to succeed on Amazon. We also help investors with due diligence services. Go to buyboxexperts.com to learn more.

Before I introduce our guest today, I want to send a big shout out to the team at Disruptive Advertising. For off Amazon advertising, Disruptive Advertising offers the highest level of service in the digital marketing industry, focusing on driving traffic, converting traffic and enterprise analytics. Disruptive helps their clients increase their bottom line month after month. Check out disruptiveadvertising.com to learn more. Our guest today is Gabi Bar, Co-founder and Executive Vice President of TCM – Technology Commerce Management. TCM delivers the e-commerce aggregator industry’s first predictive AI driven e-commerce performance optimization. Started in 2016 in Israel, TCM now operates e-commerce businesses on Amazon, Shopify, eBay, Walmart, Wayfair, WooCommerce, and more. Gabi, welcome, and thank you for joining us today on the Buy Box Experts Podcast. I want to start by asking you about all these private label businesses on Amazon, obviously a lot of interest right now in companies looking to invest in these firms. And yet these private label businesses have been around since the start of the Amazon Marketplace. Why do you think all of a sudden there’s so much interest now, in these private label brands?

Gabi Bar 2:16

I think that we need to go back to private label by itself, we will look at a company, you probably you’ve heard just a small man co anchor, or is the first private label business on Amazon. I think they’re they’re publicly traded now and the Chinese Stock Exchange Traded I think last time seen about $68 billion. But if you look at the evolution of the business, you can see there was there was the notion that a business cannot be migrating to a different owner. That was the was the caution by all the FBA business owners that I’ve seen that the Amazon terms of services is being terrified of any movement that, you know, if you just change one thing, you’ll be blocked. And so there was not even the concept of ARIA, I can either sell my business or transfer otherwise a couple of years back, but I think when we started, we started as a service provider. And as we looked into the T Ras and we can examine burger, we saw that there’s really an option of transparency ownership of the business, and we sell it to sell it to give it a try. But it was not until I guess I have to give it to you. Well, I mean, give something to my really worthy rivals. Yes. ASIO as their only when they started really launching their capital injection, and it’s been all over the all over the media, then the aggregation businesses start picking up, because in one end, business owners now realize that they can transfer ownership on the other. There’s capital injection coming from a lot of places. And I mean, if you look at, like, let’s say, five, four years ago, maybe five years ago, I mean, one on one, e-commerce business was the same time we started, yes, you had to really sell out the business, not because it wasn’t doing great, but the lack of capital the investing community couldn’t really figure out and understand we the FBA business and how can we, you know as an investment view, and you know, again, I have to enter to trust you. It really opened up the investment community. And since then it’s been a flight capital over over $4.5 billion of capital being raised in last few years, even one and a half year. So I guess all of this combined with, you know, with the understanding that this is a really good business, because you’re buying a profitable business to begin with, you’re not buying a distressed asset, you buying a profitable business, all of this combined together. They’re really putting two aggregators, we’re okay wherever there’s something here, there’s something that I want to take advantage you and, and that becomes a new disruption in the market.

James Thomson 5:28

Well, what do you think’s gonna happen? What do you think’s gonna happen in the next couple of years as more and more investors pile in? I don’t think a week goes by where I don’t hear about or get a call from someone saying, Hey, I just raised $50 million.

Gabi Bar 5:41

Yeah, you’re right. You’re right. You’re right. If I actually had a call today, surprisingly, from an aggregator, Indian. Yeah, okay. Right. Yeah. And India, predominantly, an aggregation of business e-commerce business in India, this is a really growing market. But you have to understand how the India market is, is operating. But you’re absolutely right, as more and more money being put in by this one. And on the other end, I’ve read somewhere that over 140 million business online businesses have popped out during 2020 alone. So there’s so much traction on the business and the private label side. And there’s money on the other side, which also affect the valuation of the businesses and the multipliers. There’s some bidding wars. And that’s where our technology comes in handy. But if you look at the overall market, there’s I think there’s room at least for a couple more years, and when it’s will be even out as far as the multipliers And really, the businesses and but it also depends on the heartbeat or the market grows by itself, as the market grows at a rate that, obviously COVID is really given a given push up very quickly. So I believe that we’ll see, maybe in five years, we’ll be able to see some, even on the chart, but it will grow almost everything.

James Thomson 7:16

So let me let me ask you about your experience before you founded this company. You have been working with e-commerce brands already. And you’ve now managed over 130 e-commerce brands, as an investor and an operator, what has drawn you to this space? And what are the kinds of issues that have surprised you the most about what you see going on here among these types of entrepreneurs.