Been building for years and starting to wonder about the endgame. Has anyone here actually sold an Amazon brand? Curious what the market looks like now vs the crazy aggregator days of 2021.
My understanding is multiples came way down from the peak, but a clean, profitable brand still sells. Anyone been through it or looked into it recently?
Looked into it seriously last year, didn’t pull the trigger but learned a lot. The headline: yeah, the frothy 4-5x+ multiples from the aggregator gold rush are gone. But a genuinely good business still sells.
What buyers (aggregators, PE, individual buyers via brokers) actually pay for, roughly a multiple of your trailing 12-month profit (SDE), and the multiple goes UP when you have:
The brands that struggle to sell are single-product, no-moat, owner-is-the-business operations. Build the opposite of that and you have an asset, not just an income.
ill be the cold water. a LOT of the brands that sold to aggregators in 2021 did so at the top and the aggregators then got crushed. so the buyers got more disciplined. dont build your whole plan around a fat exit that may not materialize at the multiple you dream about. build a business thats great to OWN and the exit takes care of itself. if it never sells, you still have a cash machine. thats the right framing imo
From the ops angle, the single biggest thing that kills deals in diligence is messy operations. If your inventory records are a disaster, your COGS is fuzzy, and everything lives in your head, a buyer either walks or slashes the offer. Clean books, documented SOPs, and tidy inventory aren’t just nice - they’re literally worth money at exit. Run it like you’re always 6 months from selling, even if you never do.
this is helping me think longer term. im building a pet brand with a lot of repeat customers and it never occurred to me that the loyalty/repeat-rate is itself an asset a buyer would pay up for. makes me want to lean even harder into brand and retention vs just chasing new sales.