It isn’t just that online retailer MasonBottle.com is proud to make its mason jar baby bottles in the U.S., doing so makes financial sense, says CEO Laura Belmar.
Kinetika Inc.’s Mason Bottle launched in July 2015 by husband-wife duo Sebastian and Laura Belmar as a web-only e-commerce website that sold baby products made in the U.S. This way, the retailer could ensure the quality of its products and supply chain, says Laura Belmar.
“As a parent, when I look at products for my own child, I wonder, ‘Where do the materials come from?’” Belmar says. “You often hear stories of products from China where the materials get amalgamated or have additives. We wanted to keep tabs on the supply chain and maintain that purity.”
Belmar also likes that its New York-based factory Extreme Molding provides U.S. jobs.
And while all of those items are important to the retailer for their product’s value proposition, the U.S.-based manufacturing and warehouse also helps MasonBottle.com’s bottom line, she says.
Because the e-commerce merchant’s products and customers are in the U.S., Mason Bottle does not have to pay to ship its products across the Pacific Ocean like it would if the products were manufactured in China, she says. Mason Bottle’s manufacturer also serves as its warehouse and fulfillment service, alleviating the retailer’s need to find a warehouse or drop shipper.
The retailer is a small operation, with about 13 SKUs and less than $200,000 in 2017 sales among all its channels. Sales are increasing about 10-15% month over month each month, Belmar says. Belmar is pleased with the slow and steady growth as she can keep up with orders, she says. Roughly 40% of the retailer’s sales are via its website, 60% are via Amazon.com Inc., where it sells as a marketplace merchant, and less than 1% of sales are wholesale to physical baby boutique stores. Amazon is No. 1 in the Internet Retailer 2017 Top 1000.
Mason Bottle manages its inventory via shipping software ShippingEasy, which integrates with its Shopify e-commerce platform. Regardless if a shopper buys the product on Amazon or MasonBottle.com, it all draws down on the same inventory, which Belmar can see in one spot.
The stateside warehouse also shrinks the lead time needed on its products orders—the retailer can make a product order and the inventory is available the next day—and it can order small batches of inventory. If the retailer had its products manufactured in China, it would need to order products further in advance and in large quantities to have a sizable enough margin on the cost of shipping it, as well as to have enough inventory on hand in case there is a fluctuation in orders, she says.
Now, Mason Bottle can adjust how many products it orders each month based on the sales of the previous month. For example, last year the retailer ran a 40% promotion around Earth Day in April 2017 and had stronger sales than expected, Belmar says. The retailer ran out of inventory, but could quickly get more, and it only had to have a one-week shipping delay.
This year, the retailer is going to order three-times the number of products it would typically order, to prepare for another Earth Day sale, she says.
With flexible inventory, the retailer also can experiment with promotions and how it bundles its products.
For example, the retailer sold the Mason jar baby bottle like any other baby bottle, with all the parts of the bottle, including the nipple and a silicone sleeve to protect the glass. However, the retailer received messages from shoppers that they already had a lot of their own Mason jars, and they don’t want to buy another one. And so, the retailer decided to create a “DIY Kit” that sells all the parts for the bottle without the jars.
Only having to produce as much inventory as expected allows the retailer not to have its cash tied up in products, and it can invest in digital marketing, Belmar says. For example, the retailer produces videos with “authentic and useful content” for new parents that are related to its products, such as how to prevent over-heating breast milk, or seven ways to save on feeding supplies.
After the retailer creates the videos it uploads its customer list to Facebook and uses the social media platform’s look alike audience tool to serve the ads to shoppers that are likely to be interested in it.
On average, its videos generate a 5% click-through-rate to its site, which Belmar is very pleased with.
Between its email marketing, search ads and social media ads, the retailer gets $4 back for every $1 it spends on marketing, Belmar says.
“The return on investment in our ads we are very happy with,” she says. “We can scale it at the pace at that we want to grow.”
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