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Tim Jordan Founder of Private Label Legion

How to Source and Launch Products on Amazon With Tim Jordan, Founder of Private Label Legion

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Tim Jordan is the Founder of Private Label Legion, a community of sellers and entrepreneurs who come together to share ideas, impart knowledge, and create a solid network. He is a well-known Amazon seller, host of the AM/PM Podcast, and Chief Growth Officer at SellersFunding.

Tim sells on both Amazon and Shopify and is currently working on a crowdfunding project which he is documenting to share his path to success with other entrepreneurs. Started with contraband candy bars, and now we’re here!

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

  • How Tim got to work as a firefighter while in college and why he left 10 years later to go into entrepreneurship 
  • Tim’s experience selling “Me-Too” products versus “Differentiated” products on Amazon
  • How Tim sources products from different parts of the world for his business
  • The workshops and trips Tim organizes, what he teaches people, and how he finds new and trending product ideas
  • Tim’s product validation process and his advice to fellow entrepreneurs on choosing the right products 
  • Tim shares his experience being suspended on Amazon because of intellectual property violations and what he learned about using generic names for brand names and trademarks
  • Where to learn more and connect with Tim Jordan

In this episode…

When Tim Jordan started his e-commerce business on Amazon, he opted for the “Me-Too” type of business: that is, he sold products that had high keyword searches and other sellers were selling. He also made the common mistake of finding a high-selling product and sourcing it from China for resale without considering the trademark and intellectual property infringement violations it may create. So, what happened from there? He ended up with a suspended account and a lesson learned, which he now shares with other entrepreneurs and e-commerce sellers.

Resources Mentioned in this episode:

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by Goldstein Patent Law, a firm that helps protect inventors’ ideas and products. They have advised and obtained patents for thousands of companies over the past 25 years. So if you’re a company that has a software, product, or design you want protected, you can go to https://goldsteinpatentlaw.com/. They have amazing free resources for learning more about the patent process. 

You can email their team at welcome@goldsteinpc.com to explore if it’s a match to work together. Rich Goldstein has also written a book for the American Bar Association that explains in plain English how patents work, which is called ‘The ABA Consumer Guide to Obtaining a Patent.’

Intro (00:09):
Welcome to innovations and breakthroughs with your host Rich Goldstein, talking about the evolutionary, the revolutionary, the inspiration and the perspiration and those aha moments that change everything. And now here’s your host rich Goldstein.

Rich (00:34):
We’ll stand here. The host of the innovations and breakthroughs podcast, where I feature top leaders and the path they took to create change. My past guests include Kik. Kevin King is Ari and James Thompson. This episode is brought to you by my company, Goldstein patent law, where we help you protect your ideas and products. We’ve advised them tamed patents for thousands of companies over the past 25 years. So if you’re a company that has a product to design, you want protected, you can go to Goldstein patent law.com, where there are amazing free resources to learn about the patent process. And you can email my team@welcomeatgoldsteinpc.com to explore if it’s a match to work together. You could also check out the book I wrote for the American bar association that explains in plain English, how patents work. It’s cool. The ABA consumer guy to obtaining a patent. I have with me here today, Tim Jordan, Tim Jordan is a very well-known Amazon seller. He is the founder of the private label region, private label Legion, uh, which is a community of sellers. And he’s also host of the am PM podcast. Uh, he is the chief growth officer at seller funding and he sells them both Amazon and Shopify. And he’s currently working on a crowdfunding project, which he’s completely documenting so that he could show other entrepreneurs his path to success. So Tim, welcome. Thanks so much for being here.

Tim (01:55):
Thanks for having me. And I hope it’s a path to success, that crowdfunding project. One interesting thing about documenting what we do is you never know how it’s going to turn out, but even if we hit snags along the way, we’ll still document that because that’s a good learning opportunity.

Rich (02:08):
So, so regardless of the outcome, it’s going to be, it’s going to show the path that you took using, you know, your best knowledge, your best resources and the best people around you to, to, to try to gain success. And, uh, I think as we all know that there is no magic formula is like every different product is different. Every path we take is different, but the best we can do is learn from what others have done. And so you are giving people the opportunity to really learn from what, what your best effort is. So I think that’s really cool. And, uh, so I mean, uh, it’s one of roll it back a little bit. I mean, one thing I didn’t mention in your bio is that you are a firefighter. Um, and so, uh, tell me a little bit about that. I mean, how did you, how did you get to be a firefighter and then how did you transition into e-com? So the

Tim (03:00):
Firefighting thing was accidentally, uh, you know, kind of happened by accident. I was in college and I was in a small, a small college town, and then I needed money. Like, you know, I had to pay my way through school. There’s never any money. And I also liked adventure and I heard about this thing, this program that the college offered. Um, so the fire department offer for college students to become volunteer firefighters, but they get paid. So paid volunteers. I know it’s weird and I’ve never heard of this. I never knew anything about public service firefighting, but I thought, Hey, if I get to wear a cool helmet and occasionally get paid for false alarms. Great. So what they would do is they would have these college students, they’d send to the Tennessee fire Academy. Uh, they would give you, you know, your turnout gear and they’d give you some additional training.

Tim (03:43):
And for every call that you ran on, they would give you like 50 bucks. And the cool part about a cold, uh, a small college town there’s hardly ever any legit calls. They’re mostly fire alarms to the dorms that call it. So people burning, pop foreigners, setting off a smoke alarm with steam in the tree. That’s actually never happened to me, but the way the, uh, the part of our work is they had a few full-time, uh, staff, but they couldn’t afford like a full full-time department. So they would augment with these paid volunteers. So did that for a couple of years, and they eventually opened up an opportunity to, we were going to build a small apartment complex on the back of our station and me always paying for room and board. And I jumped at the opportunity. So what we would do is we would basically live me and five other guys in this Amex, like, like a dorm, but it was at the fire station and they got to count as the sports on employees, because we were at the fire station more than 40 hours a week.

Tim (04:38):
Right. So we would go in and out, we’d go to class, we’d go out with our girlfriends. We’d do whatever we wanted. But as long as we were there, we were all in. So it was, it was super cool. And when I left college for this step, I thought, you know, I’ll never go back to this. It was fun while it lasted out a few pool fires and moved down to Huntsville, Alabama, and was pursuing a regular job. And every time a fire truck would drive by, I would just be staring at it, man. That’s so cool. You know, a real city fire, you know, fire department, not this, you know, redneck hillbilly, you know, half volunteer thing. And it just, it was really, um, kind of becoming a passion of mine. So I applied there’s 2,500 applicants when I applied, they only hired 25 and I was one of them.

Tim (05:21):
And I was actually the only one of the 25 that got it. My first time around some of these guys that got hired with been trying for six or seven years. So, uh, it was awesome. Loved it. I got involved in like technical rescue teams and FEMA, urban search and rescue teams. And I was a smoke jumper and I was a hazmat tech. And, um, one thing about the fire departments, you work 24 hours and you’re off for 48 hours. So you go in, you spend 24 hours here. So essentially you work two days a week. And we all had side hustles. So I had a construction business, a high-end landscape business. At one point I had like 20 something employees, you know, and I was 25 years old, 24 years old, and didn’t make any money. It was a complete nightmare. It was terrible.

Tim (06:02):
I never paid myself a paycheck in like four years, but it, it started teaching me how to run businesses. And especially as side hustle, because I was still operating full-time job. So I sold that company, sold all my equipment, started working with another buddy of mine who was doing government procurement. If you guys have seen the movie war dogs where these guys are like doing government bids for weapons and Iraq and Afghanistan, that was me, except that we weren’t using, or we weren’t selling weapons. We were selling dump truck tires and diesel generators and quest protein bars and all that stuff. But it was all going to consulates embassies and a contractor basis in Iraq and Afghanistan. And that got me into procurement sourcing logistics. And it also gave us a ton of wholesale accounts. You know, like quest, um, quest protein bars. We were buying 15, 20,000 quest protein bars a month.

Tim (06:51):
You know, we were buying 18 wiggler loads of diesel generator, oil filters, you know, every month. And by getting those wholesale accounts, I figured out, Hey, we can sell this online too. That got me an Amazon quick lead me into private label. And because I have a history and a kind of experience in sourcing procurement logistics, private label was fairly easy for me because I had contacts in China. I knew how to ship stuff. You know, I’d already been traveling around, uh, meaning these people. So, uh, not only was I selling a lot at that point, launching private label brands, but also started a company called Hickory flats that did sourcing and logistics. And we built warehouses in the U S are set up, whereas the U S the three PL we did FBA prep. Uh, I ended up setting up a sourcing company in central America then in Guatemala. Um, pretty much done a little bit of everything. And, uh, a couple of years ago I was able to leave the bar department after 10 years. And I would just do full-time e-commerce and never in a million years thought I would have been here, but you know what I mean?

Rich (07:48):
Got it. And so you were doing a lot of, I guess, arbitrage where you were just, you were buying and selling goods, you were finding an opportunity for, um, uh, you know, where someone needed a quantity of something you sourced it, you found it, you made the connection. So basically a lot of it was through making connections between products and need. Um, and it was a side hustle, I guess, for quite a long time, until you finally made the leap and it’s becoming a full-time.

Tim (08:18):
Yeah. Even when I was at the fire department, my fire department job became my side hustle. It wasn’t what I was focusing on. You know, at one point I had, you know, the warehousing, the sourcing, the shipping, I had multiple brands, I had multiple Amazon accounts. I was, uh, doing all this great stuff and I’ll store in fire departments. So I would go in and I would check off my truck, check my equipment. And I would go back to my bedroom, open up my laptop and work, you know, unless we got a call or unless it was mealtime, or we had to go to a training thing. I was back there working. So in the mornings, it was an inconvenience for me to do my truck checks. And if we had to go do like a two hour training, I was mad because it was keeping me away from my real job. That’s the point I realized, okay, like, I’m not doing this job. You know, the, uh, you know, I’m doing a disservice to this job. So I decided to leave and they ended up hiring someone else to replace me and gave them an opportunity.

Rich (09:09):
And now that guy is working on e-commerce stuff.

Tim (09:13):
There are, there are a number of guys that I used to work with that are now selling online because they would sit and watch me on my computer all day doing stuff. And they’d see me go buy my wife, a new car, or go on these nights vacation. They’re like, you know, at first they thought it was a multi-level marketing scam or something. And, um, turns out that, that it wasn’t thankfully,

Rich (09:32):
Right. So they have a picture of you up in the firehouse. Like you’re the inspiration for yeah.

Tim (09:38):
You know, the, the guys that are doing it now would never admit that they watched what I was doing. Um, and you know, when you leave the fire department or leave a police department, like when it was public service things, your name is kind of thrown in the muddle a little bit. You know, I was not, I was not popular for leaving, you know, it was, uh, Oh, he’s uppity, you know, he’s too good for us, too. Good for us to go work a white collar job now. So I’ve still got a lot of good friends there, but there’s definitely not a picture of me on a firehouse wall somewhere, unless it’s got a fake mustache and dark thrown through my forehead.

Rich (10:11):
Yeah. Right, right. No, that’s funny. But, uh, uh, let’s, you know, let’s talk a bit about products and, uh, so, so you’ve sold lots of different types of products and a lot of it has been, um, kind of existing products that you’ve kind of found the need for. And I guess to some extent, there’s been a lot of me too, where you’re selling products that exist, but you find a better way to sell it or to a better market for it. Um, I mean, let’s talk about like the difference between me too, and when you have a differentiated product. Yeah.

Tim (10:44):
It’s, for me, it’s not just about differentiated, uh, it’s about in demand with no competition. So when I first started selling, I was selling me too products. I was following what I call the jungle scout method, figure out, uh, a product that a lot, you know, a handful of people are selling well and try to get on that train. You know, like I have samples of those products, like I want sold this mechanical meat tenderizer. Right. And, uh, here’s another one that the veggie spiralizer spiralizer slicer bank. So what I will do is I’d look at these products and say, Oh, there’s only five sellers are selling. Well, I can be number six, but by the time I went and sourced it and got it shipped and got it launched, there’s 500 listings, you know, for the same thing. So I started realizing there’s gotta be a way to get out ahead of the game.

Tim (11:28):
So I figured out that instead of looking on Amazon, you can start looking off of Amazon to get product ideas because Amazon slow to the market. So, uh, look at places like Pinterest, great joy, Etsy, life, hack blogs, go to physical markets like ASD America’s Mart, EBU in China, and find products that, that I can attach keywords to. So I find a product and I don’t know if it’s going to be a good product or not, but I think, Hey, this is interesting. I’ve never seen it go to see if it’s there. And a lot of times it’s not, and then find out if there’s actual keyword domain. So if I got the coolest park in the world, but on Amazon people, aren’t looking for it. They’re never going to look for it. So I’ll use tools like using 10 and find the keywords that people are looking for that they’re really not being offered.

Tim (12:07):
If you guys want to see an example of that, go to YouTube and type in helium 10 project X, it was a big case study, did healing 10, where that’s exactly what we did we found and are still successful with selling two products. One of which, um, really like there’s one, one seller on Amazon that was always out of stock, like 10 months out a year out of the stock. Their listing was horrible. We never would have found it by looking on Amazon, but we found that on Pinterest, once the Amazon realized people were looking for this thing, there’s only one person selling it horribly. And they’re out of stock 80% of the year. And, uh, that’s one way of doing things. The other thing that I do is I do differentiate products, but I get the, the ideas for the differentiation off of Amazon.

Tim (12:49):
So the project X product that we used for that was an egg tray. All right. So wooden egg tray. I got it back here. So basically we went to Amazon and we found egg trays, and you set your eggs in here and you put in your refrigerator, look on your counter or whatever. And they were all ceramic. They were all plastic and there’s tons of them and they’re making tons of sales, but everybody’s selling them. So if you type eight, train Amazon, that’s what was offered. But if you went to Pinterest and typed egg tray, like half of the top results on Pinterest were the same ordinate tree that wasn’t even on Amazon. So we’ve determined, Hey, people are being offered this product, but they want this product. So we just differentiate it to the woodwind, throw it up. And I think right now, again, today we’re out of stock we’ll order 500, a thousand, 2000. And we can’t even keep them in stock because they’re selling so fast. They get on page one for eight tray, which is competitive. So it’s, it’s a me too category, but by differentiating, we now have a unique product.

Rich (13:47):
Yeah. And also it sounds like you’re spotting, um, you’re spotting a trend. You’re spotting a difference. You’re spotting the discrepancy between what is being offered and what people are looking for. Exactly. So, um, it’s kind of like having a Kia, I, um, a keen eye for the gap, like you noticing where the gap is and that’s where you, then that’s what you’re going for. Yes. Yeah. Pretty cool. And, um, so, um, now in terms of, uh, of, of sourcing and launching products, so like you, once, you know, what you want, uh, where do you begin to start to find how to, how to get that actual product so that you could, you can sell it.

Tim (14:32):
So it depends on what the product is. Um, there’s, you know, still 90% of the world’s products being made in China, you know, even with COVID and the political stuff that’s going on and the tariffs, and, you know, people are saying, Oh, China is not going to be the source of production anymore. I think that’s wrong. China’s just better than everybody. You know, the people that are tweeting out about, Oh, we’re gonna have to stop producing a child on our tweeting on their iPhones, which China, you know, they’re just better, but there are products that are made better elsewhere. Eastern Europe is getting to be popular for a lot of products. I’m personally sourcing products in India. Right now it’s a limited number of products, but the products that are being made, there are super high quality, MOQ are super low, and you can differentiate, you know, a little bit of the story.

Tim (15:14):
So it really depends on the product. More specifically to answer your question. I use sourcing agents, people ask me all the time, like, do you use the Alibaba? Do you, you know, go and find the factory direct. There is an advantage to going directly to a factory sometimes, but generally speaking, I’m just one of a million people reaching out to these factories and the best factories out there, especially in places like China, India, I’ll never be able to find, they don’t have English speaking salesmen. They don’t have export departments that don’t have good marketing departments. And I have found that the relationships with sourcing agents have by the time they add that little markup in there, it’s still the same price as it would’ve cost me to work directly with the factory, but it’s hands off. I only have so many hours a day. There’s only so much I can do.

Tim (15:56):
I can only be an expert at so many things, which really isn’t that many actually. So I have determined that the best way for me to scale businesses is to outsource that aspect. So I have a really good sourcing agents. I send requests for quotes to multiple sourcing agents for the same product, but, um, you know, kind of battle it out and see who can come up with the best option for me. And if I pay them 10% more than if I spent all this time, energy effort going to the factories and trying to find them myself, that’s fine because I can actually scale up faster by doing that. So when it comes to sourcing, don’t be, don’t limit yourself to a certain region. Um, but you sourcing agents I’ve even done a U S manufacturing. Uh, and I’ve used people like, um, like a gimbal to go find those suppliers for me, because it was easier to pay them to do their job and be pros at it. And let me go out and find additional products while they’re doing the sourcing.

Rich (16:46):
Got it. And, uh, you know, and it actually just, um, make, has me remember that that’s sourcing like that is something that you do, you do workshops in that, um, where, um, like during like ASD market week, um, the big, big, um, you know, sourcing event, you, you run workshops where you show people how to, how to go about it. And, uh, um, um, what’s that like? What, like, what are those workshops like? How do you, how do you typically, um, show someone?

Tim (17:15):
Yeah. So, uh, I do workshops around ASP in Vegas and also in EBU China, we take trips over there and teach people kind of how it’s done. And what I’ve found is the sourcing shows places like ASD and America’s Martin will, uh, even Canton fair. I prefer to go there, not necessarily meet the supplier, but to get ideas, right? So I told you, I go to places like Pinterest Cratejoy Etsy ask for these physical locations because these physical locations are full of products. I would never think to even look for otherwise. And I can also take advantage of the research, the R and D the, that these brands have gone into to figure out what products should be trending, right? So big brands that are paying tens of thousands of dollars for one booth at the ASD trade show in Vegas. They’re not going in there blindly and just throwing products in the shelf.

Tim (18:02):
They know what’s trending, what’s popular, what’s up and coming. So I look at their most prominent shelf position. If I look at the corner, the corner spots, I look at what they’re focusing on because they’ve already been at work for me. And luckily since Amazon is so slow, you know, Amazon’s 18, 24 months slower, you know, than most other platforms and marketing areas for trends. I can find stuff that’s becoming popular in mainstream brick and mortar. And I use those trade shows to find it well before Amazon, I can oftentimes go to Amazon and see, there’s really no product sold under that category description, but people are actually searching for it using tools like noon 10. Uh, when I do that in China, it kind of, I can kind of double up because I can go and see millions of products in one day. People think that’s an exaggeration, if not billions of products in one day, and now I’ve got the supplier for it. So I take the idea, I go back and validate it based on keywords. Are people looking for it? Is it not saturated? And now I have a supplier to go ahead and buy that product from.

Rich (19:01):
Great. And so it sounds like, um, like really what the training is, is you’re training people to spot opportunities,

Tim (19:08):
To, to spot potential opportunities, then validate the opportunities, then launched the opportunities.

Rich (19:15):
Great. Yeah. The spot them, but validated. And I guess let’s talk a little bit about the validation part and how far you typically get into, uh, well, how invested you get into a product, um, until you validate that it’s actually going to be something that people buy.

Tim (19:33):
Yeah. There’s several layers to it. Um, typically what I’ll do is, is, and let me back up for a second. So there are a lot of ways to sell products online. What I’m telling you is not the only way to do it. I was just talking to one of my coaching students this morning, and she’s got a product that it doesn’t quite get me super excited. Like it’s not really low hanging fruit, meaning there’s a ton of demand with very low competition, but I still think she’ll be successful. We talked about different ways to do that. So typically when I validate, I’m looking for that, low-hanging fruit, I’m looking for something that has three or 4,000 searches a month on Amazon. And there’s like none on Amazon. Right? Um, sometimes there are things that are a little bit more saturated. There’s more sellers, but I can differentiate.

Tim (20:13):
There’s a lot of different ways to, to come up with a validation. But generally speaking, nothing’s going to be perfectly validated. I used an example yesterday of Marfan syndrome. Do you know what Marfan syndrome is? Rich? Yeah. So it’s, uh, yeah. It’s for those of you that don’t know, it’s a medical condition that can’t 100% be diagnosed. It’s a connective tissue disorder and people like Michael Phelps, the Olympic swimmer has it, Abraham Lincoln, they think had it, my wife has it. Right. And it’s a connective tissue disorder where you have a series of indicators. All right. So one of them is your wingspan is longer than your height. She’s five foot nine. She has a six foot wingspan. Her arms are super long. Um, there are things like loose joints. She has shoulders that a pup that a place needs it to pop that place, to have that surgery to correct that.

Tim (21:06):
And the reason they track this is one of your most important connective tissues is around your aorta. So if you have a connective tissue problem, you need to go and get echocardiograms to make sure that your aorta is not dislodging or enlarging. Right? So the reason that I use as an example is because there’s not a genetic marker. There’s not a blood test that actually qualifies, you know, a diagnosis of Marfan syndrome. So what do they do? The doctor sits down with you and has a checklist, and they start going through these things and you might not hit every checkbox, but if you hit enough check boxes, they go, okay. We can’t say with a hundred percent certain that you have Mark vans, but you hit enough of the qualifying symptoms that we’re going to say, you have more things. Right. Does that make sense?

Rich (21:48):
So it’s, it’s kind of, um, it’s, it’s, uh, like, uh, the more factors are present, the more of a probability that it’s there. Yeah.

Tim (21:56):
Yes. So when I think about product validation, is this going to work? I never have a crystal ball to say yes or no. There are people out there that have spreadsheets and say, Oh, if it checks off, we’ll give you a thumbs up or thumbs down. It doesn’t always work that way. Like those are good indicators, but there’s never definite. So I’ve never launched a product that I was a thousand percent sure would work. But if I have enough of those indicators, I can say, I don’t know, a hundred percent that I have more friends, but we’re going to assume I have morphine. So same thing, you know, I don’t know, a thousand percent sure this is going to work, but I’ve checked off enough boxes that I’m relatively confident, like very confident this is going to work. Right. But yeah, people that are waiting for that definitive, yes.

Tim (22:35):
Are never going to move forward. Like you got to crap or get off the pot essentially, you know, and eventually you have to realize like, there’s no, you know, you know, uh, magic, you know, eight balls. That’s going to tell you, this is the product that you’re gonna make money on. So minimize your risk by going wide, but not deep, you know, try to find three or four products that you can afford to launch at the same time. And hopefully two or three of them work, but don’t go so deep, especially on your first product, you really can’t afford to lose the money. Um, because your first product, you’re going to make some mistakes. And what if you pick the wrong one, you know, so make sure that you’re not going a hundred percent and don’t let anybody tell you, Oh, I know 100% sure this will work because there’s a lot of factors at play.

Rich (23:13):
Yeah. That’s great. So it’s like, don’t focus on just one product, focus on multiple, and then if you can get, um, I mean, you’d never get certainty that it’s going to be successful, but if you’ve got a high probability and then you multiply that by several products, then you go to hit with a couple of them. So that’s better than just going all into one product. Yes. Great. Um, Hey, let’s talk a little bit about IP and the role that it’s played in, uh, in your business.

Tim (23:44):
So the experience I have a VIP got my butt suspended from Amazon. Um, I was, uh, I didn’t, I didn’t know what I was doing, but I found a me too product that was selling well. It was an emergency hammer, a little orange hammer of two metal ends that you use to break out tempered glass, car windows. So if you get in a wreck, your door, won’t open, your car goes in water, you break the window out of the seatbelt cutter. And I saw a guy that was selling these things like crazy for 15 bucks, you know, probably selling 200 units a day and I could buy them for like 60 cents in China. So I got a buddy to send me over 300 and they are the exact same product as a listing. And I thought, well, I’ve got the same product. So I shipped them into his listing and I sold 30 of them in like at her of hours.

Tim (24:23):
Like I’m going to be rich. So I bought like 5,000 of these things. And as I’m bringing them over my account, which at the time was doing a lot of wholesale and very large numbers, I think there was about $120,000 in my Amazon account. Suspended funds locked up. You’ve been suspended for IP violations or hijacking listing selling counterfeit goods. This is like back 2015, 2016. Holy crap. What do I do? So I learned quickly that even though I had the same hammer, the same product from the same factory, they had a little brand logo on it. It was a little sticker. And I were thinking this sticker doesn’t matter that sticker, wasn’t a logo, which is trademark. So I was, even though it was the exact same product, because it didn’t have that sticker and it didn’t have that trademark. And I was telling you that trademark brand, I was a counterfeit seller.

Tim (25:11):
That was my first experience with it. I’ve done. I had some other crazy stuff happen. I’ve had brands, um, registered and trademark the course that, um, you know, I went through a few iterations trying to get, uh, at one point I had filed for a registration of a brand name that was a little bit too generic, we’ll say. So it would be like, um, I’m just trying to find an example. Like, uh, if I was selling this permanent marker, I would have had the brand name, something like ink forever. Right? So ink forever, permanent markers. Well, the words, ink and forever used when you’re talking about writing has already been used. It’s like too generic. Like, you know, everybody has the word ink and you know what lasts forever. So I actually waited, I didn’t get like a good professional trademark service, like Goldstein, Pat law to check this out for me.

Tim (26:10):
And I just filed for it. And I, I sat waiting for like a year to get the results back when we finally got it back, they said, Oh no, this name, you can’t do it. So I wasted a year. There was another time that we filed for a Mark that was similar to that in that the name was all too generic, but we had the name within our logo and within the loan. So we have the logo, the name, and then our domain. So w in the logo, www dot, um, ink forever.com will say, as an example, trademark got passed loaded into Amazon. Amazon actually goes to the U S PTO website to pull the exact name. Well, U S PTO website had registered it as ink forever, www.e.com. So Amazon took our us PTO trademark information and move it directly in listing. So one day I woke up to my listing brand registered great that’s incorrect, or www.ink forever.com black permanent marker.

Tim (27:07):
And also because on Amazon, you can’t have your URL name in it. You can’t direct. And Amazon, themselves put my domain name into the freaking title. Cause that’s what they did. So it was just a robot. And then we also pull that entrapment. Yes. And I was like, Oh, like, I need to open a case. Oh crap. I can’t open a case because it’s not like when a case they’re going to go, Hey, we have to suspend these guys again. But I’m like, but if, I don’t know if a case, so, uh, I’ve had a few, a few lessons I’ve learned with IP. Um, but it’s been good because as I’ve learned that I’ve realized how to protect myself, how to find opportunities, how to protect, um, my products, my brands. So I can stop other people from competing with me by, uh, putting them in the same situation that I was in when I shouldn’t have been competing with these people.

Rich (27:55):
Right. Yeah. That’s pretty great. That’s awesome. And, and, uh, and I mean, really great information for, um, for people that are starting out, people that are looking to launch products. I mean, some great takeaways from this in terms of like looking for trends, validating those trends, looking for, uh, the positive factors that show that are, you are likely to be successful, but diversifying doing multiple products, having multiple shots at it, because no matter how hard you try, no matter how many, uh, how much experience you have, it’s still not guaranteed to be successful. So you have to try different things and learn from great people like you. And I really appreciate, uh, you being here. And I I’m wondering, so, so Tim, for people want to learn more about you or possibly work with you. Like what’s, what’s the path toward that.

Tim (28:46):
Yeah. They can track me down on social media, Facebook, the go-to private label, legion.com, um, go to Facebook and type in private label Legion. There’s a free Facebook group of several thousand members. You can join, um, stay really, really active as much as I can on that website, private label, legion.com. There’s going to be a notices for events when events kicked back up after the COVID, um, come hang out. We do meetups, we do workshops. We take trips to China. I go to India, um, all sorts of breaks and stuff. And then you can also check me out on the podcast am PM podcast. It’s actually owned and kind of hosted and sponsored by Healey and Tim, but they have me be the host. So like back there, you can see my, uh, my set for a and P M and a, I operate kind of independently from helium 10, which is cool.

Rich (29:32):
So I get to have on guests that I get to choose, and we focus not just on selling on Amazon, but entrepreneurism in general. Uh, so track me down there, amp and podcast. And then if you’re interested in, uh, like a coaching program, we have a really cool group mastermind coaching program. That’s very inexpensive, but a lot of bang for the buck. You can find it@thecenturionleague.com. So it’s like the upper echelon of the Legion, right? Uh, the Centurion lead.com and it’s also on the private label Legion website. You can find it there. Awesome. That’s really great. And, uh, and by the way, that’s a really big deal that you’re the host of am PM podcast is a podcast you took. I got that invite. Yeah. Congratulations. That’s really amazing. Um, and, and again, um, really appreciate you being here. Fantastic information and, uh, yeah, hopefully I’ll see you soon. Thanks.

Outro (30:25):
Great. Thank you. Thanks for listening to innovations and breakthroughs with your host, rich Goldstein. Be sure to click, subscribe, check us out on the web@innovationsandbreakthroughs.com and we’ll see you next time.

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