Naturally Fresh has carved a niche for itself in the cat litter industry. Made from 100% walnut shells, not only is the litter fast-clumping and odor-absorbing - it is also 100% natural and eco-friendly!
It is no wonder why Naturally Fresh is one of the most popular cat litter brands on Amazon - the positive customer reviews and ratings are a testimony to its success and how much feline enthusiasts like the products!
While Naturally Fresh has a great customer base now, this is not how things were a tad over 3 years ago. When Naturally Fresh signed up with SalesDuo on June 25th, 2018, the company was facing a plethora of issues.
Up until early 2018, Naturally Fresh’ products were white labeled and sold by a much larger brand - let’s call them BB. However, that association ended in early 2018.
As a consequence, Naturally Fresh had a handful of new ASINs for their products. The products that were earlier sold by BB had great reviews and ratings that were all lost now. Not only had the company lost reviews and ratings, it also had low glance views and sales velocity for Amazon to place any large orders for these new ASINs via Vendor Central.
Although the earlier ASINs that were created for these items were part of the Vendor Central catalog, they could not be used as the UPCs had changed and the packaging of the products had evolved quite a bit.
In terms of sales, what used to be a full truck load of orders had come down to just a few bags per week!
In order to restore the sales velocity of the new ASINs to the same level as the old ASINs, it was required to somehow leverage on the old ASINs. SalesDuo first considered deprecating the old ASINs and using them as the Source ASINs to merge into the Target ASINs (new ASINs).
However, there are several prerequisites that need to be met before Deprecate and Merge can be achieved.
● If any other Vendor Central accounts have offers on the Source ASINs, those accounts should mark the ASINs as Obsolete.
● No Vendor Central account that has offers on these Source ASINs should have any open Purchase Orders for the same.
SalesDuo procured the list of all large distributors from Naturally Fresh who potentially could have a Vendor Central account and may have offers for the old ASINs - starting with brand BB.
SalesDuo, then, started pulling out the list of contacts of people at the large distributor companies who could potentially help out with the situation.
After compiling a list of 6 companies that could potentially have offers on the old ASINs from their Vendor Central account, it was time to take action!
With no time to waste, SalesDuo started reaching out to the companies and asked them to mark the old ASINs as Obsolete and shutting off any open POs that they may have.
This task was not as straightforward as it sounded as SalesDuo had to reach out to the companies multiple times. Moreover, there was a lot of back and forth between the members of the companies’ teams — but, finally, everyone obliged and helped out by marking out the old ASINs as Obsolete.
The entire process of following up with all potential companies and getting the old ASINs removed from their systems took almost 3 months!
Next, it was time to reach out to Amazon and ask them to Deprecate the old/Source ASINs and merge them with the new Target ASINs.
Upon reaching out to Amazon, SalesDuo was informed that there were still a few open POs from other Vendors who had offers on these ASINs and unless they were closed, it would not be possible to proceed with the Deprecate and Merge process.
What ensued was another round of follow-ups with the same set of companies and requesting them to turn off the ASINs and any open POs. Once all the vendors had confirmed that they had turned off the ASINs, SalesDuo went back to Amazon and proceeded with the Deprecate and Merge process.
Coming to the actual process of Deprecate and Merge by Amazon - it took Amazon around 3 weeks and 2 iterations but finally, what SalesDuo had set out to do was achieved!
Ultimately, all the positive reviews and ratings from the old ASINs got moved to the new ASINs along with the sales velocity and traction!
Naturally Fresh’ Purchase Orders gradually started flowing in and started to pick up steam. As a prudent step, SalesDuo even set up Vendor Central/Dropship to ensure that they cover as much ground on the Availability/Buyability situation as they could.
After running this process for a few months and stabilizing the process, it was time to increase Naturally Fresh’ visibility and sales to cover the lost ground.
SalesDuo started focusing on Amazon Advertising to grow sales after all the Detailed Pages, A+ Pages and the Brand Page had been completely spruced up.
In around 6 months from the time Naturally Fresh had signed up with SalesDuo, the brand had started seeing 50% of the earlier numbers before the deal between BB and Naturally Fresh had terminated. In 2019, Naturally Fresh achieved 300% of what they had achieved in 2018. In 2020, they, again, achieved another 218% more than they had in 2019.
At present, Naturally Fresh has introduced larger bags of its renowned natural cat litter on Amazon!
Now, there is nothing stopping Naturally Fresh from marching on, garnering a larger share of the market and upgrading numerous litter boxes with a better, environment friendly cat litter!