Alex Yale own two seven-figure brands: Uncle Todd’s and Flip-It! Cap.Courtesy of Alex Yale
Alex Yale owns two seven-figure brands, one that he launched on Amazon and another that he acquired.
He has specific advice for entrepreneurs trying to make it in the e-commerce industry.
He recommends sourcing domestically, selling patentable products, and focusing on quality.
Building a business is not for the faint of heart.
“Being an entrepreneur is great. It’s awesome. But the grass is green wherever you water it,” consultant-turned-entrepreneur Alex Yale told Business Insider. “It takes a lot of hard work, and it takes a lot of time and energy. You have to have a certain skillset and a certain appetite for risk.”
He added that success is not guaranteed: “There’s a huge graveyard of failed entrepreneurs.”
Yale has avoided that graveyard so far. After more than a decade of working in corporate America — he started his career as a consultant at Deloitte, spent years at Facebook in various roles, and joined Amazon aggregator Thrasio for a couple of years before the startup went sideways — Yale quit to work for himself in 2023.
He launched a cleaning brand, Uncle Todd’s, and started selling products like septic pods and shoe deodorizers on Amazon. Shortly after, he acquired Flip-It! Cap, a company that sells bottle-emptying kits. Both brands do seven figures in annual revenue on Amazon, which BI verified by looking at screenshots of Yale’s sales dashboards. His Uncle Todd’s products are also in more than 3,000 retail stores, including Walmart, Home Depot, and Piggly Wiggly, and he plans to continue growing the retail side of his business.
In Yale’s experience, there are major differences between working as an employee and working for yourself.
“As an entrepreneur, you take things really to heart. It’s your product, your baby, your brand — and when something goes wrong, you lose sleep over it. You lose dollars over it,” he said. “In the corporate world, your boss might be upset or your performance review might not be stellar, but you’re getting the same paycheck.”
Despite the challenges, Yale said he’d never discourage anyone from giving entrepreneurship a go and shared his top three pieces of advice for succeeding in business — specifically the e-commerce space — in 2025.
After years in the corporate world, Yale quit to build his own company.Courtesy of Alex Yale
1. Source domestically. “Given the Trump administration, try to source domestically. Dealing with international trade is kind of a hot potato right now. It’s on again, off again. It’s 50% then it’s 20% then it’s 100%,” he said, referring to tariffs. “Starting a brand and a business is hard enough without a daily looking-over-your-shoulders, waiting for the shoe to drop on new tariffs or freight changes.”
Yale said that Flip-It! Cap, which is currently 100% made in China, has been more affected by the tariffs than Uncle Todd’s, which only has a couple of products produced in China. It helped that he anticipated a trade war: “When Trump got elected, before he got inaugurated, I just knew that China was in his crosshairs.”
To prepare for a potential trade dispute, “I basically front-loaded a whole lot of inventory at the end of last year to buy myself at least time to resupply if these crazy tariffs moved in. So frankly, I never had to place a PO during the extreme 200% tariffs, and they’ve since abated, but I’m actually moving production for Flip-It! Cap to Providence, Rhode Island in January.”
2. Sell patentable products. A major problem for e-commerce entrepreneurs in 2025 is competing with Chinese sellers, Yale explained: “A lot of Amazon e-commerce sellers are basically reselling products they get made in China. And, back in 2019, 2020, 2021, especially around the pandemic with the e-commerce boom, a lot of these factories that were making products for American brands said, ‘Hey, why am I letting them make a profit off my product? Why don’t I just set up an Amazon account, ship my goods over, sell directly, and I can be much more price competitive?'”
Alex Yale is the founder of the cleaning brand Uncle Todd’sCourtesy of Alex Yale
One way to avoid the competition outright is to sell patented products that nobody can copy.
“Try for some IP advantage if you can,” said Yale, whose Flip-It! Cap product is patent-protected. “I stay away from any Chinese-sourced products that don’t have a patent or any kind of IP protection, because within two months, if you see success on a product that you import from China, they’ll be selling it for 20% to 30% less on Amazon and competing with you.”
3. Sell a high-quality product — ideally, a consumable — that solves a problem. At the end of the day, to succeed in e-commerce, you need a good product.
“A lot of e-comm entrepreneurs think so much is in the marketing and the advertising and the brand aesthetic that they forget about the core product performance — they almost overlook the quality of the product,” said Yale. “If your product quality is not there, you might hit it big on TikTok and see a whole bunch of sales, but then when people realize the product doesn’t actually work or it doesn’t solve a problem or it doesn’t have the efficacy they’re looking for, you’re going to be as dead as quickly as you came alive.”
Ideally, you want to sell a consumable — or a product that people need to buy over and over again — like septic pods. That way, you don’t have to continually acquire new customers.
And make sure it solves a problem, Yale added: “Necessity is the mother of invention — that’s a real thing. People are looking for things to solve problems.”
