In this episode, host Josh interviews Afolabi Oyerokun, co-founder of Honu Worldwide, about his journey building successful Amazon brands. Afolabi shares key lessons he’d apply if starting over: focus on innovation, automate processes, and prioritize time for rest and strategic thinking. He emphasizes creating unique products, niching down, and protecting intellectual property through patents and copyrights. Afolabi also discusses using data-driven research for product development and effective listing strategies. The episode offers actionable insights for entrepreneurs aiming to scale and protect their e-commerce businesses.

Chapters:

Introduction & Guest Background (00:00:00)
Josh introduces Afolabi Oyerokun, his background, and achievements in product development and Amazon businesses.

Lessons Learned & The Importance of Freedom (00:00:56)
Afolabi discusses lessons from his Amazon journey, emphasizing the original goal of freedom and challenges faced.

Three Key Takeaways: Innovate, Automate, Rest (00:02:21)
Afolabi outlines his three main takeaways: innovate, automate, and allocate more time for thinking and rest.

The Power of Innovation & Niching Down (00:04:58)
Afolabi explains the importance of innovation, creating unique products, and niching down to dominate categories.

Protecting Intellectual Property (00:08:30)
Discussion on the necessity of protecting product designs with patents and copyrights, and the types used.

Case Study: Copyright Enforcement on Amazon (00:10:24)
Afolabi shares a real example of using copyright to remove copycats and restore sales on Amazon.

The Value of IP in Brand Exits (00:12:19)
Afolabi describes how intellectual property increased the value and appeal of his brands during exit.

Finding Design Inspiration & Trend Analysis (00:14:08)
Afolabi details how they research trends, combine successful patterns, and create standout product and packaging designs.

Product Listing Strategy: Variations vs. Standalone (00:16:20)
Afolabi explains their approach to listing products as separate items rather than variations to maximize search visibility.

Closing & Future Topics (00:17:11)
Josh thanks Afolabi and hints at future discussions on supply chain topics.

Links and Mentions:

Tools and Websites 
“Honu Worldwide“: “00:03:00”
“Data Dive“: “00:14:30”

Concepts and Ideas
“Innovation”: “00:04:58”
“Automation”: “00:04:58”
“Thinking Time”: “00:04:58”
“Design Patents”: “00:08:37”
“Utility Patents”: “00:08:37”
“Copyrights”: “00:08:37”
“Intellectual Property (IP)”: “00:12:19”

Key Takeaways 
“Niche Down and Innovate”: “00:06:45”
“Protect Your Ideas”: “00:08:30”
“Create Unique Designs”: “00:14:30”

Notable Quotes
“Your business is in your IP.”: “00:12:19”
“If you don’t have any IP, you don’t have a business.”: “00:12:19”

Transcript:

Josh 00:00:00  Today I’m really excited to introduce you to Afolabi Oyerokun. He is the co-founder of Honu Worldwide and Innovative Product Development, Sourcing and 3PL company based in Pennsylvania. Afolabi has always been a has always been passionate about finding things, haggling and negotiating prices. His obsession with finding good quality products at bargain prices led him to help several seven and eight figure brands increase their profits and scale rapidly by buying smart from Asia and the US. He is behind the successful launches of several multi-million dollar products on Amazon and other retail channels. An entrepreneur at heart, Afolabi owns and has sold a few seven figure private label brands. He loves helping people design, develop and manufacture innovative products. Welcome to the show.

Afolabi 00:00:53  Thank you Josh. I’m happy to be here. I’m excited.

Josh 00:00:56  You know, if you were to restart on Amazon, which I think that’s what you’re doing now, is you’re creating some new brands and launching them on Amazon. What are some of those lessons, actionable takeaways that you can give to other sellers to say, hey, here are the challenges that we faced at different points in the business, that I’m going to make sure that we don’t go through these same challenges again in the future.

Josh 00:01:20  If you wouldn’t mind breaking some of those lessons learned for us. Breaking it down.

Afolabi 00:01:25  I’m going to, if I were to start all over again, I’m also going to weave some stories and past experiences into it. So when somebody goes into E-comm, you’re starting your e-commerce or you’re starting your Amazon business. Sometimes we forget the reason why we started in the first place. We forget the reason why we quit our jobs and we went into e-commerce. For me, my main driver was freedom. I wanted freedom, I wanted to be. I wanted to be able to control my time. I wanted to be able to be there for my family any day, any time. I wanted to be able to take off. If I want to take off, I want to take off, you know? Yeah. So you start this e-com business and you’re married to it. You know, you’re you’re you’re waking up 3 a.m. in the morning. You’re, you know, you’re sleeping late at night. So eventually it defeats the purpose of why you started in the first place.

Afolabi 00:02:21  So we found ourselves caught up in all those things. You know, me and my business partner, we would fight each other. You know why? Why? You know why are we running out of stock? I’m like, I didn’t know that product was going to run out of stock, you know? You know, we didn’t have a good system in place and we didn’t have the freedom or anything. So going back now, looking back to where we came from to now, there are three things I’m going to do differently this time. First, I’m going to innovate. Second, I’m going to automate. Third, I’m going to have a lot of free time to think. Because for me, I believe that thinking time is a very creative time. I believe that your rest time is very important. People ask me, you know, you know, jokingly, maybe I’m speaking to Norm, I mean, Norm. You know, there’s my business partner on you. You know, he picks, you know, he picks up on me a lot.

Afolabi 00:03:19  He’s like, hey, I love you. What did you do this weekend? I’m like, no, I did nothing. I just sat on my couch and I was watching soccer all day. I was not doing nothing. You know, sometimes he calls me. I said, I’m going to stop disturbing me. I’m on the field with my son. We’re playing soccer here. Please. You know. Yeah.

Josh 00:03:41  So, yeah.

Afolabi 00:03:42  Freedom. Time to spend time with your loved one is very important. So I’ll make sure that this time I automate so that I can free up myself to do whatever I want whenever I wanted to do it. I don’t want anything just pressuring me down all the time. Because when I’m thinking I’m creating things that are so valuable in my rest time. Yeah, I could be sitting on a lounge. I mean, on a on a on a recliner. And you, you know, you when you’re relaxed, when your mind is at rest, you so many creative ideas come to you and you can look into your business and, and actually spot all the things you are doing wrong when you’re in a relaxed mode, you know?

Josh 00:04:26  Yeah.

Josh 00:04:27  So you’re you’re kind of three takeaways then, right? If you were to restart would be to innovate, automate and then have more time for thinking and just downtime in general. Right. So awful lobby. Why don’t you expand on each of those three things that you would do differently? Let’s start with innovate. First. What do you mean by innovating and why is that an important lesson learned that you’re going to make sure to implement going forward?

Afolabi 00:04:58  Great. So when we started back in 2014 on Amazon, we I would say we started on a very good note because myself and my partner, we were we are creative people. We love graphics, we love to design stuff. So we so many, so many categories, about 2 or 3 categories on Amazon. Now we actually ruled those categories. We almost like invented those categories. And everybody started copying us after 2 or 3 years. But we had made we’ve made enough so we didn’t care. but it was innovation that made us different, you know, because our products were so unique.

Afolabi 00:05:42  We designed it from scratch. We didn’t copy anybody. We created them. We look at what was in the market and we’re like, we can do better than this with some 2 or 3 hours worth of work. We’ll create products that will sell like, you know, $50,000 a month. You know, we you know, we were so confident in our creative abilities. So going back again, we will create more and we will even go so unique. and we will niche down to what we’re what’s the easiest for us to do. So we’ll niche down and we will go deep and then wide. So what do I mean by that. So you let’s say you we started with Guardian signs. Right. So we will create this guardian sign and, come up with like one skew in the Guardian sign. Okay. And it takes off and it’s selling like crazy. And we’re reading reviews and people are saying, oh, I love your signs. I wish it was double sided. And I tell you, let’s do double sided, you know.

Afolabi 00:06:45  So we do we do double sided. That means we’re going deeper. We do double sided and then we read reviews like, yeah, I put the sign on my lawn and it just looks so small. I wish it was bigger. I have big lawns. Ding ding ding. You know, let’s make a bigger, two sided, bigger version, right? Well I’m not. And then so I you know I wish I don’t like that color. You know I wish it comes in another color. Then we’re getting wider now. Like now. Now let’s break into so many colors. Let’s give people what they want. It’s probably SEO of life. People are already giving you. They are already telling you what they will buy, you know. And, so we will give it to them. We will do a lot of research and we will, you know, we will create more. So going back now to start all over again, we would really, really consciously niche down, create some really jaw dropping designs.

Afolabi 00:07:41  And as the designs take off, we’ll keep going deeper into that niche instead of getting distracted by other things like, oh. Everybody else is making money off of this one. No, we would we would completely, you know, prevent ourselves from being distracted and just keep focusing on what’s working and just outdoing ourselves and outdoing ourselves by going deeper and giving the customer experience and then broadening it out. So that’s what I mean by innovation. And one more thing in the innovation is one failure. One thing we forgot to do was we forgot to patent our ideas when we started. This time, I’m never going to make that mistake again. Once you innovate a product, you have to protect it with everything you’ve got. So this time we create a product. We protect it before we even launch it.

Josh 00:08:30  What kind of patents are you talking about? Are you talking about utility patents or design patents? Copyrights?

Afolabi 00:08:37  It would be. So we use three types. So we would use design patent If it’s a completely creative thing that doesn’t exist at all, we would add utility pattern to it.

Afolabi 00:08:49  But many people don’t realize that copyrights are very strong. So when you talk about copyrights, everybody think, oh, I can copyright my listing, I can copyright my text. I’m like, no, no, that’s not what I’m talking about. You can actually copyright the design of your product. You can do a 2D copyright and you can do a 3D sculpture copyright. And that will protect you that Amazon respect that as much as patent and copyright. Cost like 50 bucks to do. Yeah. As opposed to patents that could lead you into, you know, five, 10,000 or even more. So we will use copyrights for 2D and 3D sculpture. That means we will, you know, we will do a 3D rendering of our products and we’ll copyright the 3D rendering. We’ll do a 2D version, which is the flat version design of our product. We will copyright that as well. And then we’ll go into patterns. If it is, if it is worthy enough for, utility partnering with the utility.

Afolabi 00:09:50  But in most cases it will be design patents.

Josh 00:09:52  Okay. Yeah. That and we previously had Rich Goldstein on the show and he works. Him and I worked together a lot on creating a lot of the design patents and copyrights for our own business. So yes, I completely agree with you. That is so important. We’ve started doing that in the last couple of years, and it makes all the difference because as you know, as soon as you come up with a unique design, it’s only a few months later that you’ll have overseas competitors that are mimicking your exact same design.

Afolabi 00:10:24  Exactly.

Josh 00:10:25  They have no creativity whatsoever, and it’s easy to shut them down. Only if you have a copyright or a design patent to protect it.

Afolabi 00:10:34  Correct? Correct. We had a product, a very simple product. was a bumper sticker that we had in those days, and we were selling like 75 units a day. And then everybody, every factory was copying us. They just flooded the market with our design. And, it dropped to like 10 or 20 a day and like, what’s going on? So we did a reset.

Afolabi 00:11:00  We saw that there were about about 50 or 60 people were copying us. And the sale, our sale could have been 100 or 150 a day if we didn’t have all those people. So we filed a complaint. Thank God we had copyrighted the design. So we filed a complaint to Amazon. We said this, this, this, this, this. We put in all the assets of everyone copying us within 24 hours. Amazon shut them down. Guess what? We went back from ten a day to 200 units a day.

Josh 00:11:30  Wow.

Afolabi 00:11:31  That’s a big difference.

Josh 00:11:32  That’s a great case study.

Afolabi 00:11:35  Yeah, it’s a big difference. So please anybody you you know, you want to create something. Number one, you should be creating something new. Don’t don’t try to do me two product. I’m very biased. I don’t like me to product because you just don’t have longevity in me to product, you know? Why are you selling what everybody else is selling? Why can’t you just create something new? You know, if you have an idea, you can, you know, direct message me or, you know, we can brainstorm ideas together, create something that can you can really, really sell.

Afolabi 00:12:05  You don’t have any asset selling. You know me to product. You know, like you said, you know, Josh, your your business is is in your is in your IP. If you don’t have any IP, you don’t have a business. That’s what I learned in a hard way.

Josh 00:12:19  Yeah. So when you exited your brands I’m wondering like did they care. Did you have IP that you were giving them and how important was that?

Afolabi 00:12:29  It was big. So there were two big things that made a brand. So that made us sell like almost five x. It was our copyright, our IP protection and our some of most some of our products in one of our brands, some of our most of our products are best selling products was made in the US. And the buyer loved it. Like I placed an order in a week it ships out and it ships for free direct to FBA. So they love that. They’re like no this is a slam dunk for us you know. So those two things we had to transfer.

Afolabi 00:13:04  So at closing do you have a reassignment of IP. So we have to, you know, reassign our trademarks, our patents, our copyrights and everything. We have to reassign it to the new owner.

Josh 00:13:18  Okay. Interesting. but that was something that was very interesting and appealing to them then. Right.

Afolabi 00:13:25  Very.

Josh 00:13:26  You feel like you got extra, you know, an extra multiple because of the intellectual?

Afolabi 00:13:32  I believe so, Yes, I believe so, because they have. They have a very strong brand presence. They have a, you know, some of these products. The the next seller to us is probably doing 20% of what we’re doing. You know, so and it was because, you know, we have this IP that if anybody tries to copy anything we just shut them down, you know. So for that they knew it was a good investment for them. And it’s going to deliver on their, you know, on their books, you know to their shareholders.

Josh 00:14:03  Yeah. That makes a lot of sense going back to, you know, innovating products.

Josh 00:14:08  I mean that’s that’s what you say is so, so important. And it’s the same for our business as well. I’m curious, where do you get your design inspiration, where you aren’t copying other people. So where do you see, you know, how do you come up with designs that are trending or get ahead of the trends to make sure that you create something that customers actually want?

Afolabi 00:14:30  Awesome. So we have a very simple rule. We would research. You know we could use data dive. You know my business partner does that. We use Brandon Young’s data drive or M10 and stuff. You know you would find out what niches and what categories are doing so well. And we will look at all the designs. We were like, no, we could do better than this one, you know. You know. And then we could, we could, we could look at into patterns as well and say, oh, what patterns are doing so good. So we will take the patterns that are doing good and the products that are doing good and will marry the two together.

Afolabi 00:15:09  Right? So we know these products are doing so good, but they’re boring. You know, they could they could take more. They could they could use more life, you know, both in the product and in the packaging design because we want to put the packaging, you know, in our listing so that some people see them like, wow, that packaging alone is like buying a Apple product. You know, you the experience you, you, you see when you’re opening the box of your iMac or whatever, you know, we will design the packaging to be completely, completely unique that, you know, so we get our inspiration from that. We look at what’s selling, what’s doing so well, and we go back to the drawing board and say, we could do a lot better than these because we are creative people. So we’re going, we go and design, you know, different, you know, different, variations of things. And we’ll launch them and see which one does better. And we’re like, oh, it looks like people like these ones.

Afolabi 00:16:05  Most we’ll keep them will scale those up. And the ones that are not doing so well, you know, we keep them for a few months. And if they still never pick up we just cancel them, like, okay, whatever. You know, we’re the ones that are doing good.

Josh 00:16:20  Do you add them as variations to your listing, or do you leave them as standalone assigns to occupy more real estate on the search results page.

Afolabi 00:16:30  We keep them separate. We keep them separate because when we’re doing product display ads and stuff like that, we want to spread, you know, because some people don’t really look at variations sometimes, you know? It’s not that variations are not good, but some people don’t look at it that well. You know, they don’t look at, you know, how Amazon displays them. So we would like to especially if if it’s a design that is very unique, we don’t want to put them together as under each, you know, under each one of them. Maybe by size we can put we can do variation by size.

Afolabi 00:17:03  But when it comes to color or aesthetic or whatever, we like to keep them separate, to take up more realistic.

Josh 00:17:11  Well, off the lobby. Thank you so much for your time, and we look forward to having you back on the show. Talk more about supply chain down the road, but thanks so much for your time today.

Afolabi 00:17:22  You’re welcome. Thank you so much, Josh. I really had a great time.