10 Questions

but they will also escrow your funds until you’ve received and inspected your goods. This reduces risk dramatically in comparison to wiring funds overseas and hoping for the best. Jungle Scout is another tool we use that allows us to see the sales history of most products on Amazon, which is where we do most of our business. This allows us to identify products that sell very well with limited competition. If an opportunity also has poor reviews, that’s the holy grail for us because that means people know the product has poor quality but they’re buying it anyway. Our competitors likely utilize many of the same tools and thought processes that I just described. One thing that sets us apart from our competitors, however, is our in-house industrial and graphic design capabilities. I have a rich background in engineering and have come to be quite dangerous in graphic design, so I try to leverage every bit of that experience to produce unique products that our competitors can’t.

To give you some perspective, it would cost us $9-11 to ship a set of golf ball whiskey glasses from Fargo-Moorhead to the west coast in 2-5 days. And that’s just the price of the label. That doesn’t include any of the labor required to pick, pack, apply the label, verify it’s correct, and deliver the order to the carrier. If you use Amazon MCF, they will do all of these things and deliver your product to the end customer for less than $8. They also rarely make mistakes, and they have warehouses all over the country. So once your inventory is in their system, they will spread it out across the country so you can offer 1–2 day shipping more consistently. It’s an incredible value.

06

Most people don’t realize this, but you can actually send all of your inventory to Amazon and then they will pick, pack, and fulfill orders from any platform you choose. For example, you can use Amazon to fulfill your Etsy orders and they will do it at a fraction of the cost of other channels. This is called Amazon multi-channel fulfillment, or MCF, and, given they have such massive volume, their prices are unbeatable.

GEMSHO started several years ago as an attempt to stay productive outside of work during the winter months. It was just a passion project when it all got started and when we saw some success, I was more than happy to spend my nights and weekends working on it. Fast forward to the end of 2022 and now I’m now married with two kids, and a third is on the way, and GEMSHO has grown into something that requires more than just nights and weekends if continued growth is to be expected. So, in other words, I have less free time than I’ve ever had, and GEMSHO is demanding more. So, something had to give, and it wasn’t going to be family. Either GEMSHO had to fall to the wayside, or I had to make it my full-time job. I knew I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t take a shot at turning GEMSHO into something great, so that’s what I decided to do.

07

Under your GEMSHO umbrella, I’m also familiar with your Mint Hockey shooting pad products. What can you tell the readers about that product line?

Mint Hockey was an offshoot idea from an earlier time when we were quite a bit less focused. Both me and my partner played hockey growing up and we wanted to do something in a space that we knew well. Since we’re now planning to put our focus on the “golf-themed barware gifts for men” hyper niche, we may have to put Mint’s growth plans on the back burner, but I’m still very excited about the Mint Hockey brand and products.

Right now, through Mint, we offer white and black hockey shooting pads made in Minnesota from recycled plastic. We also have a mint green colored pad that, unfortunately, isn’t made from recycled