“If the first thing you do every morning is open Seller Central with a coffee… this one’s for you.” New episode of The Ostrich Report with just dropped, and this time Hendrik Laubscher and I brought in someone who actually runs the thing everyone has an opinion about but very few truly understand: marketplaces. Jamie Roller from Dr. Squatch (yes, the Star Wars soap people with the ridiculous scents and surprisingly serious P&L discipline).
Jamie runs the marketplace business at Dr. Squatch, with a heavy focus on Amazon plus retail.com 1P. She’s not a “thought leader,” she’s the person who has to make the numbers work every 90 days.
A few threads we pulled on:
Marketplace Inception = a P&L inside a P&L.
Jamie’s team owns the whole thing end to end:
What to sell
How to get it into Amazon
How to price, bundle & merchandise it
How to put media behind it without destroying the margin.
If you’re promising +25% YoY on Amazon, you better understand what that actually entails operationally.
📦 1P vs 3P the knife fight.
We unpacked:
Why running 3P means owning the inventory.
How bundles become your secret weapon.
The real trade-off.
Cannibalization is out, incrementality is in
Two years ago, everyone was panicking:
“Is Amazon cannibalizing my DTC?”
Today Jamie’s more focused on:
“How do I prove incrementality of media and new product launches across channels?”
Jamie is magical. A caring, natural leader who listens and learns. A clasic practitioner who trusts her team. This enables success. Admittedly, she is a nerd for this stuff, but maybe you gotta be.
Jamie spends 20–30% of her time inside the numbers. First tab open: yesterday’s sales in Seller Central. Then deeper analytics Squatch has built in-house.
The bit most brands won’t say out loud:
Every channel has horrible blind spots.
Amazon just happens to give you enough data to keep you hooked and “just informed enough” to keep spending.
You win on Amazon by owning intent.
We debate whether AI agents will:
Supercharge big CPGs with deep pockets.
Or reward the brands who are faster at updating content, testing, and staying “recent” in LLMs.
Jamie’s view: we’re still early, there’s a lot of buzzword bingo, and the real work is still growth & media strategy, not AI theatre.
Culture > strategy (especially in marketplaces)
We also get into how she:
Runs a distributed, multi-time-zone team.
Keeps marketplace from being a weird silo off to the side.
This is a whopper episode.
Shares data & reporting so the rest of the business actually uses marketplace insights instead of treating Amazon like a dark art.
Oh, and yes, we did manage to talk about Star Wars soap, Chewbacca as a scent choice, and why marketplaces should still be fun.
…this episode will either make you feel seen or mildly attacked. Maybe both. Presented with our good friends from EVOLVE Commerce Club our communuty partner.
Episode here:
