Newsletters Log in Subscribe

US MARKETS CLOSED
In the news
Dow Jones +0.87% Nasdaq +1.7% S&P 500 +1.18%

HOME MARKETS

A 34-year-old entrepreneur earns

up to $42,000 in revenue a month
selling socks and tights on Amazon.
She explains how she built her e-
commerce business with $2,000
upfront.
Kathleen Elkins Nov 9, 2022, 1:00 AM PST
:
 Shan Shan Fu, founder of Millennials In Motion. Courtesy of Shan Shan Fu

Shan Shan Fu started her e-commerce business with

less than $2,000 upfront.

She keeps things lean by taking her own photos and

launching products on Etsy before Amazon.

In October 2022, she earned over $42,000 in revenue by

selling socks and tights online.
:
:
 Advertisement
:
 When the Covid-19 pandemic sent the US under lockdown
in the spring of 2020, Shan Shan Fu had a lot of free time —
and an idea.

"All my friends needed face masks but they couldn't Hnd

good quality ones," she told Insider.

Fu was living in San Francisco at the time and working at

an IT consulting Hrm, but she'd been thinking about
starting a side hustle for a while: "I've always had a passion
for passive income and e-commerce so I decided, 'this is
the time I'm going to Hnally launch my product — and it's
going to be face masks.'"

She launched her e-commerce company, Millennials In

Motion, in April 2020 and immediately started making
money.
:
 Advertisement

Her timing was ideal, she explained: "It was easy to sell face
masks in April 2020. I was very lucky that I was early.
Normally it takes months, if not years, to climb up to the
Hrst page on Amazon; but for me, because there was such a
huge shortage of face masks, I got pushed to the Hrst page
of the keywords I was targeting within two weeks of
launching."

After six months of selling masks, she was earning enough

from her own business that she felt comfortable leaving her
day job.

Today, at 34, Fu is a full-time entrepreneur based in Miami,

:
 Today, at 34, Fu is a full-time entrepreneur based in Miami,
Florida. In addition to running Millennials In Motion, she
does consulting work for an Amazon advertising agency

called Trivium and a legal start-up called OnlineVisas,

which is the company that helped her secure her O-1 visa.
(This is a type of visa for individuals with extraordinary
ability.) Fu was born in China and her parents immigrated
to the States when she was six. She's currently in the
process of getting a green card.

Building an e-commerce business from

scratch with $2,000 upfront and a
library of YouTube videos

Fu used YouTube to learn the ins and outs of running an e-

commerce business.

Advertisement
:
 "I would watch these 'I made 20 grand a month selling on
Amazon' videos that walk you through the process step-by-
step and think, 'I can do this too!'" she said. "Some of them
are quite broad but if you watch enough of them — I've
watched hundreds by now — you eventually get the gist."

After she decided on her product, face masks, her next

immediate step was to buy inventory. She reached out to
her dad, who works in import-export, to connect her with a
manufacturer.

"Through our network, we found some factories in Asia

and got the face masks to my door within two weeks," said
Fu.

She invested about $2,000 of her own savings into the

company. Most of that, $1,250, went towards her Hrst batch
of inventory. She spent $370 setting up a limited liability
company (LLC), $220 on a Rollo printer and labels, $70 on
logo printing, $45 on poly bags to mail her product, and $13
on a Canva subscription, she said.
:
 Advertisement

Once the masks arrived at her doorstep in San Francisco,

her next immediate step was to take photos of them using
her iPhone and write up a product description. She started
by posting them for sale on Etsy, which is a little cheaper
and easier to do than Amazon. She then took her most
popular products to the Amazon marketplace.

Fu kept her operation lean. Instead of hiring professional

photographers and models to showcase her products
online, for example, she used her iPhone and asked friends
to pose in the masks. She didn't rent a studio; rather, they
took the photos on the streets of San Francisco.
:
 Fu uses her iPhone to take photos of her products, including these tights. Courtesy
of Shan Shan Fu

"I used the cash cow I made from my Hrst run to do my

second run, and then the cash cow from my second run to
do my third run. It was all quite organic and bootstrapped,"
she said. "I never got any loans. I never got any venture
capital.

However, she put in a lot of hours. After wrapping up her

day job around 5 p.m., "I would work on Millennials In
Motion from 5 o'clock to midnight, trying to get it od the
ground. It was exhausting."
:
 Advertisement

After six months of working both jobs, she was making

enough money selling face masks to cover her bills. At that
point, she decided to leave her day job and direct all of her
energy towards the start-up.

Pivoting when face mask sales

plummeted in 2021 and losing money
on a failed product

As face mask mandates started to expire in 2021, Fu saw her

sales drop.

"It really started to die in 2021, and it just kept dying and
:
 "It really started to die in 2021, and it just kept dying and
dying until, by 2022, there were basically no sales in face

masks," she said. "I was really stuck. I was kind of lucky
with my Hrst product and I needed to Hnd a sustainable
second product."

Fu knew she wanted to continue selling small, lightweight

items.

Advertisement

"When I sold face masks, I realized it was very important

that they were small because the shipping and storage
costs were really low, so you could make decent margins
even though it was a low-cost product," she explained.

With that in mind, she decided to launch socks and

:
 With that in mind, she decided to launch socks and
lingerie.

Her socks sold, albeit slowly, while the lingerie "didn't work
at all," she said. It failed for two main reasons: "Amazon
bans lingerie for their advertising, and it's very diecult
without Amazon's advertising platform to get any traction
on the product. The second challenge was sizing. I got the
product from China and I would ask for extra large, for
example, and they would show up and be too small on me
— and I'm typically a size extra small. As you can imagine,
they didn't really sell very well."

She lost whatever money she spent on inventory, she said:

"Thankfully, because I'm quite conservative and I always
buy a small quantity for the Hrst batch, I didn't lose that
much: maybe a few thousand dollars."

Advertisement
:
 Fu didn't have time to dwell on the lingerie failure.

"I was stressed but I kept going out of necessity," she said. "I
left my six-Hgure tech job in 2020, so all I had was
Millennials In Motion. There was no option to fail."

Earning up to $42,000 a month in

revenue selling on Amazon

Fu decided to lean into what was working: selling socks.

"Although I was earning a very tiny amount of proHt

because socks are like $10 each, it was still succeeding. I
was getting sales," she said. "And with enough volume I
could start marking decent money, so I expanded into
odering products in that category, like tights and
stockings."
:
 Advertisement

None of her products hit quite like face masks did in April
2020, but over the past year, she's seen gradual growth. In
August 2022, she brought in $12,100 in revenue and in
September, she brought in $14,200, according to
documents viewed by Insider.

Fu had a breakthrough month in October: Her revenue

spiked to $43,500. The majority of those sales ($41,900)
came from Amazon. The rest came from sales on Etsy,
Walmart, and her website.

She attributes her recent success to working with Amazon's

advertising partner Trivium. Fu joined the team as the
:
 advertising partner Trivium. Fu joined the team as the
head of business development and also became a client in
September 2022, meaning Trivium's team of engineers

work with her to set up advertising campaigns to help grow

her products.

Up until she started working with Trivium, she was a solo

act. Watching YouTube videos was enough to get her
company up and running but what she learned from her
failure with lingerie is that, "you can't do it alone," she said.
"It was just me doing research and it was such a small error
that I made, which was checking if Amazon allows lingerie
to be advertised. But I missed it, and that miss cost me a
failed product."

Advertisement

Besides leaning on the team at Trivium for advertising

:
 Besides leaning on the team at Trivium for advertising
advice, seasonality also contributed to her big October, she
noted: "My product designs are edgy and trendy. It's what

people would typically buy at Halloween." Plus, "any

Amazon seller will tell you that Q4, the last three months of
the year, is the best for a lot of product categories."

Fu has also learned from experience and trial and error

how to run a lean, proHtable e-commerce business.

A key part of her strategy is launching on Etsy to test her

products before taking them to Amazon. It's cheaper and
easier to sell on Etsy, she explained: "With Amazon, you
have to have a barcode for every unique product and
variation of a product. It's not very diecult to get but you
have to buy it, so it's an extra cost."

Typically, 20% of her products do 80% of her sales, she

explained. Whichever products perform the best on Etsy,
she brings to Amazon.
:
 Advertisement

Using keywords is another part of her strategy. She's

looking for keywords with high demand, high search
volume, and low competition. To Hnd them, she uses an
analytics platform for Amazon sellers called Helium 10.

You can search any keyword, such as "cute socks," she

explained. "And it will tell you something like, 'cute socks'
has 10,000 monthly searches and 1,000 competitors. You
have to compare all the keywords that are out there and
Hnd the ones that have the highest demand with the lowest
competition."

Once she Hnds the keywords that she thinks have the most
:
 Once she Hnds the keywords that she thinks have the most
potential, she reaches out to her contacts to Hnd a factory
that makes that speciHc type of product. She then picks 20

diderent types of the product based on what she personally

prefers, has them shipped to her apartment, takes pictures
of them, writes up descriptions, and posts them to Etsy.
Once they're on Etsy, she's looking at click through rates
and conversion rates to see which ones are performing the
best. Of her 20 products, she'll take the top four to Hve,
launch them on Amazon Prime, and start to spend money
on advertising to improve her products ranking on the site.

"For Amazon, ads are mission critical," she said. "All

Amazon sellers will tell you that the only real sustainable
way to grow your businesses is to use Amazon's advertising
platform because that's how you get pushed up in ranking."

Advertisement
:
 When you sell on Amazon Prime, you send your products

directly from the factory to Amazon's warehouse, "so you

never have to personally touch it," she explained. That's
when the income starts to become passive.

"When you Hrst start out, it's not going to be passive

because you're building a business," she noted. "You'll
probably work more hours than you would in a typical job.
But as your business grows it will become more passive. For
me right now, that $42,000 I did in October, most of it was
just automatic. I never even saw the product."

Fu is working on testing more products and continuing to

scale Millennials In Motion. She still works a lot, but
expects her business to run in a relatively passive manner
in the near future.

"If I stayed working in corporate America, I probably could

climb up the ladder. But the higher you climb up the
ladder, the more you work," she said. "Whereas with e-
commerce, the more you work now, the less you'll work in
the future."

Read next
:
 Read next

Investing Amazon eCommerce More...

Advertisement
:
:
Recommended video

Advertisement
:
:
 Advertisement
:
:
 Advertisement
:
:
 Advertisement
:
:
 Advertisement
:
:
 Advertisement
:
:
 Advertisement
:
:
 Advertisement
:
:
 Advertisement
:
:
 * Copyright © 2023 Insider Inc. All rights reserved. Registration on or use of this site constitutes acceptance of our

Terms of Service and Privacy Policy .

Contact Us Masthead Sitemap Disclaimer Accessibility Commerce Policy Advertising Policies

Coupons Made in NYC Jobs @ Insider

Stock quotes by Vnanzen.net Reprints & Permissions

Your Privacy Choices

International Editions: INTL AS AT DE ES IN JP MX NL PL

: