1. What’s the quick origin story of your brand, and what makes your product or positioning genuinely different from other options in your niche?

Justin Taliaferro: JETT started in a Georgetown dorm room with a stack of sneaker boxes against the wall.

Hi, my name is Justin Taliaferro, owner and founder of JETT. I grew up in Portland, Oregon, where I got pulled into sneaker and streetwear culture by accident in high school. The first online transaction that I ever made was back in 2018 with a Supreme x North Face Mountain T-shirt I bought for $64 and resold the next day on eBay for $125. That one flip has taught me more about how markets actually work than any class ever did. By the time I left for Georgetown, I was already running a small reselling operation out of my parents’ house.

College was a balancing act. I was a D1 athlete, an accounting major, and a small business owner all at the same time. Most weeks one of those three got the short end of the stick. Being an athlete taught me to do hard things on a schedule, while school taught me to look at the numbers honestly even when they were ugly. The business taught me that nobody was coming to save me if I made a bad decision, so let’s just say, I became an adult pretty quickly.

All three lessons compound into how I run JETT today.

College was going well, I was making friends, working hard, and enjoying my move across the country, until spring of 2020. COVID hit, and shut down campus. After spending a few months cooped up at home, I called a buddy of mine and we formulated a plan to get out of the house. We bought a 17-foot box truck, like an old U-haul, and drove it across the country buying sneakers, clothes, and any inventory we could turn for a profit along the way. We bought over $200,000 worth of goods, and that one trip solidified in my mind that the business I was running on the side in college wouldn’t be just a hobby. By my sophomore year at Georgetown University, JETT had crossed seven figures in revenue, all of it bootstrapped, no outside capital, no co-founder. Just Me, inventory, and time.

As I prepared to graduate, I took my wealth of knowledge and skills from having sold products online for almost 7 years, and built out professional services to offer brands. These services are the solutions to problems we see them face every single day online. What makes JETT truly different though, is structural. I mean that the default model in our industry is what I like to call, the “Generic Amazon Agency.” Brands pay a monthly retainer, the agency runs ads and sends reports, and the agency gets paid whether the brand grows or stalls. The brand gets put by the waist-side after a few months, and very little iteration happens from that point. That misalignment is why most brand-agency relationships end in frustration, and why JETT operates the opposite way.

We’re a wholesale distribution PARTNER. We buy inventory direct from the brand, run the channel end to end as their primary marketplace seller, and our margin only exists if their product actually sells. There’s no retainer, there’s no fifty other accounts. When the brand wins, we win. That structural alignment is the pitch, and it’s the reason we’ve been able to attract brand partners across CPG, functional wellness, and beverage who were burned out on the agency model and looking for a partner with real skin in their outcome.

I believe in the brands that we partner with, and I would preach the products myself to friends and family, so we are not just in this business for a quick buck. That’s what I was doing in my teens. I built JETT to exist as the honest option for brands and founders who understand the importance of having experienced help when it comes to growing online.

2. Since launch, what have been the 1-2 real turning points for your brand-specific decisions, pivots, or experiments that noticeably changed your growth or profitability-and what did you learn from them?

Justin Taliaferro: There have been three turning points that defined where JETT is today.

The first was a summer night in 2021, sitting at my desk in DC, when I cross-listed sneaker and clothing inventory I already owned onto Amazon. I had been moving product on eBay, StockX, and GOAT for a few years and I genuinely thought Amazon only sold what Jeff Bezos owned. I had no idea that 60 percent of every unit on Amazon ships from a third-party seller, not Amazon itself. I uploaded the listings before bed almost as an experiment, expecting nothing.

I woke up the next morning to notifications. Sales were $30 to $100 higher per unit than what the same units were selling for on other platforms, and I had moved through about 20 percent of my inventory overnight. I sat on my bed staring at my phone for a minute trying to figure out if it was real. That single night changed how I thought about the business: The channel you operate on matters as much as the product you sell, and Amazon was a different ocean entirely. Within six months I had pivoted almost all of my inventory there.

The second turning point was the deliberate decision to move out of arbitrage and into brand partnerships. Arbitrage (buying retail products from a physical or online store and reselling them at a markup) was profitable and exciting, but it had a ceiling, and the ceiling was me. Every dollar of revenue required me to find another deal, source the inventory, store it, list it, and move it. I was working harder every quarter to make the same money. And honestly, being a faceless third-party seller bouncing between random product categories felt like a small way to build a business. I wanted to work on something that lasted longer than a single SKU.

Wholesale brand partnerships were the opposite, being slow to build, painful to pitch, and the early months felt like running through wet sand. But one good brand relationship could replace a hundred arbitrage flips, and the relationships compounded in a way arbitrage never could. Making that pivot meant I had to slow down to grow up. It taught me hard lessons at a young age about patience, trust-building, and walking away from short-term money, all of which I’m grateful I learned at 21 instead of 31.

The third was bringing AI into the operational layer of the business. I had built JETT on my own writing voice, my own outreach standards, and my own audit process, and I genuinely didn’t think AI could match that. I was wrong!

The breakthrough came when I stopped treating AI as a writing tool and started treating it as a system that I could train on my voice and my judgment. I documented how I wrote a cold email, what I looked for in a brand partner audit, what my non-negotiables were, what good output looked like, and what bad output looked like. From there, I built a series of engines that handle the parts of the business that don’t need my hands on them anymore: lead gen, cold outreach, audit drafts, listing copy, content, and internal documentation.

The work that used to take hours now takes about 20 minutes from research to send. I’ve roughly 6x’d my outbound capacity without making the emails sound templated. And the team feels the difference too, they spend less time formatting reports and more time on the actual numbers, which is where their judgment matters. AI let me stop doing the work that wasn’t a good use of my time in the first place.

3. Which 2-3 channels drive most of your revenue right now (for example SEO, paid social, email, marketplaces, influencers), and what have you learned about making those channels work in your category?

Justin Taliaferro: Marketplaces drive the vast majority of JETT’s revenue today, and Amazon specifically is the engine. Over 60% of every unit sold on Amazon ships from a third-party seller rather than Amazon or the brand themselves, and that’s where we operate. We run our brand partners’ channels as their primary marketplace seller, which means we control listings, advertising, inventory, customer experience, and brand protection.

The lesson Amazon teaches you fast: the brands that win are the ones with the cleanest channel. Listings without unauthorized resellers, pricing that doesn’t fluctuate by the hour, inventory that doesn’t go out of stock, and reviews that get answered. Most of our work for brand partners is closer to operations than marketing, and that’s the part most agencies undersell when they pitch a brand on “managing Amazon.”

The second channel is Walmart, which most operators undervalue. Traffic is smaller than Amazon, but the competition is meaningfully lighter, and the brands that get there early are building positions that will be hard to displace once the category fills in. The dynamic we’ve watched play out: Walmart’s algorithm rewards consistency and reliability more than Amazon’s does. A brand that ships on time, holds inventory, and maintains a clean storefront can climb faster on Walmart than the same brand would on Amazon, where ad spend dominates. We’re actively expanding several brand partners into Walmart in 2026 specifically because we think the next 18 months are the window before that gap closes.

TikTok Shop is the wildcard. The buyer behavior is different, and the brands that win on it look nothing like the brands that win on Amazon. The pattern we see: TikTok Shop is dominated by sub-$15 products tied to fast-moving social trends, and the conversion math only works if you’ve already built the trend on TikTok itself. What’s more interesting is the indirect effect: TikTok is now one of the biggest drivers of brand discovery, but a large share of the actual purchases happen on Amazon afterward, where the customer already has a buying account and trusts the fulfillment. So for most of our brand partners, the right TikTok strategy isn’t to sell on TikTok Shop. We use TikTok to drive Amazon traffic, then convert there.

What we’re deliberately not doing is chasing every channel. Most operators treat omni-channel as a checklist. Every channel we run is a real commitment of inventory, ad spend, and operator attention, so adding a channel means deepening it, not just listing on it. The brands trying to be everywhere at once from the get go usually end up being nowhere at scale, and we’d rather run three channels well than five channels badly.

4. How are you thinking about search in 2026 – Google, AI assistants like ChatGPT, and other discovery platforms? What, if anything, have you changed in your content or site to stay visible as AI search grows?

Justin Taliaferro: The shift in how people find products is the most underrated structural change in e-commerce right now. The default mental model for the last 15 years was: customer searches on Google, lands on a product page, buys. Now, customers are increasingly starting their search inside AI assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity, inside platform-specific search like Amazon and TikTok, and inside private channels like creator recommendations and community groups. For brand operators, this is the kind of structural shift where the brands that adapt early build a moat, and the brands that don’t quietly disappear over the next three to five years.

For the brands JETT operates, we’re adapting in three ways:

First, we’re treating Amazon’s internal search as the primary discovery channel for the categories we operate in, not Google. Over 62% of online U.S. shoppers start their product search on Amazon, so for most product categories the brands still optimizing for Google PDPs are fighting a battle that already moved. Brands that don’t show up on the first page of an Amazon search aren’t just losing sales. They’re losing them directly to competitors who are bidding on the brand’s own keywords. And believe me, Amazon is prioritizing the brands that want to take the channel seriously with real operators and real ad budgets. The brands that try to coast on organic ranking alone are the ones we typically inherit a year later, after a competitor has eaten their lunch on their own keywords.

Second, we’re paying close attention to how AI assistants surface brand recommendations. When someone asks ChatGPT “what’s the best functional caffeine pouch,” the answer is shaped by training data, product reviews, third-party content, available citations, and brand mentions across the web. Brand storytelling and review velocity matter more than ever, because the AI assistants are reading the same internet everyone else is, and they’re surfacing the brands with the cleanest story and the highest signal across sources. The brands that show up in AI recommendations got there because their reviews, press mentions, and third-party content all reinforce the same positioning.

One nuance worth flagging here: Amazon has actively designed its platform to block AI scrapers from pulling product data for outside recommendations. They want to keep the customer inside the ecosystem they’ve spent decades building, and to their credit, that ecosystem is genuinely seamless from a customer experience standpoint. But Amazon’s catalog authority is so dominant that the AI assistants end up recommending Amazon products anyway, just from indirect signals: reviews, third-party content, brand mentions, and the broader web. The walls Amazon built haven’t stopped the AI shift, they just made it more important than ever to own and control your branded presence on Amazon, because the AI assistants are going to send people there whether you’re ready or not.

Third, we’re building content that lives on the marketplace itself. A+ content, brand stories, product comparison guides, and video that surfaces inside Amazon’s own ecosystem. We know the buyer is already on Amazon (roughly 75% of U.S. households are Prime subscribers), so the brand needs to win them there, not redirect them somewhere else. The mistake we see brands make most often is pouring resources into a beautiful DTC site while their Amazon listing is a single hero image and three bullet points written by a freelancer in 2021. The DTC site is the brand’s home, while the Amazon listing is where the actual sale happens. Treat them with equal seriousness.

The deeper takeaway from all three: discovery is fragmenting faster than most brands realize, and the brands that win the next decade are going to be the ones whose presence is consistent across every surface a buyer might find them on. There’s just the buyer, and the question is whether your brand shows up clearly wherever they happen to be looking. The brands that understand how having a growth partner, with years of experience in the nuances of e-com, will be the one’s that win.

5. What do you do to turn first‑time buyers into repeat customers and advocates? Are there specific experiences, content, or community touches that work especially well for you?

Justin Taliaferro: Retention on marketplaces is structurally different from retention on a DTC site, and a lot of brands don’t realize how different until they try to run the same playbook in both places.

On your own site, you have the customers email, their purchase history, their browsing behavior. You can build loyalty programs, run flows, send SMS, and reward repeat buyers directly. On marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart, you don’t own any of that. They do. You can’t email your buyers, see who they are, build a list. Changing the playbook entirely.

What you can do is build a brand presence inside the marketplace that earns the repeat purchase on its own. For the brands we operate, that comes down to three things:

The first is an obsessive focus on review quality and volume. Reviews are the closest thing to a loyalty signal that exists on Amazon, and review count plus star rating is the single biggest driver of repeat consideration. We spend real time here: making sure new SKUs hit the ground with Vine reviews, that negative reviews get addressed quickly, and that the brand voice shows up in customer-facing responses. A brand at 4.6 stars with 400 reviews wins the second purchase that a brand at 4.2 stars with 80 reviews never sees.

The second is building product bundles and subscribe-and-save offers that anchor the customer to the brand and not just the SKU. Subscribe-and-save is the closest thing marketplaces have to a true retention mechanic. The customer can cancel anytime, and you still don’t own them; but, for consumable categories, it’s the difference between a one-time transaction and a recurring revenue line.

The third is using brand-registered storefronts and A+ content to tell a story strong enough that the customer remembers the brand the next time they search a related category. Most brands treat the storefront as an afterthought, but we treat it as the closest thing to a brand-owned page that Amazon will give you. Customers will go convert on your other channels if this is done properly!

The deeper lesson, and the one I had to learn the hard way, is that retention on marketplaces is about owning enough of the customer’s attention that they choose you again without thinking about it. That’s a different kind of loyalty than DTC, but it compounds the same way.

A lot of how I think about this came from communities and mentors. Being in rooms with other operators, talking through what’s working and what isn’t, and having a business coach who pushes me to look at retention as a long-game metric rather than a 30-day one, changed the way I run the brands we partner with. Most of what I’ve learned that’s worth anything came from conversations, not search results, so I would highly recommend finding the right communities or creators that resonate with you. It took me a long time to take the leap, and I wouldn’t be writing here today if I hadn’t surrounded myself with the right brand partners, business mentors, and good people in my corner.

6. If you had to write a short playbook for an ecommerce founder one stage behind you, what would you double down on over the next 12 months – and what would you stop doing entirely?

Justin Taliaferro: Three pieces of advice for founders who are one stage behind where JETT is today. All three are things I learned the hard way during the transition from arbitrage to brand partnerships, which is the same stage transition most of the founders reading this are about to go through or are in the middle of.

1. Average product plus sharp operator beats great product plus messy founder, every time.

I’ve passed on more deals because of the founder than because of the product. Products can be repositioned, packaging can be redesigned, stories can be sharpened, listings can be rebuilt. A disorganized or unfocused founder is much harder to fix, and trying to fix one usually costs you more than the partnership is worth. I learned this the hard way when I said yes to a brand partnership I knew in my gut wasn’t the right fit. The numbers looked okay, the founder was charming, and I talked myself into it. Within a few months, the relationship was bleeding my time, my team was frustrated, and the product wasn’t moving the way the founder had promised. I should have walked away on the first call, and I knew that, so set out to build a clear set of non-negotiables that I bring to every brand conversation. If you’re one stage behind, this is the lesson I’d most want to save you from learning the way I did.

2. Start before you’re ready, but start small enough that being wrong doesn’t kill you.

My first transaction was a Supreme x North Face shirt I bought for $64 and sold for $125 the next day. If that had gone badly, I’d have been happy to keep the t-shirt and a lesson, not a year of my life. The pivot from arbitrage to brand partnerships followed the same logic: I didn’t quit arbitrage to chase a wholesale model on a whim. I kept the cash flow running while I tested the pitch, ran the first audits for free, and figured out what brand partners actually wanted from a distributor. The first paid wholesale partnership I closed was the natural conclusion of six months of small, testable bets that worked. Small enough to be wrong, fast enough to learn, and disciplined enough to keep going when the early signals were mixed.

3. The most valuable work you can do is usually the work nobody is asking you to do.

This is the piece most founders ignore. Sales reports, dashboards, and quick wins feel productive because they’re loud and visible; but, the quiet work: building systems, deepening relationships, writing down how you actually make decisions, is the work that compounds. When I was transitioning JETT out of arbitrage, every day there were inventory deals to chase, listings to refresh, and short-term revenue to protect. The quiet work was the pitch deck I rewrote 20 times, the audit framework I built from scratch, the founder-to-founder voice I documented so my team and my AI engines could replicate it, and the brand partner relationships I built over months of conversations that didn’t pay anything for a long time. If you’re sitting on the fence about doing the quiet work, this is the sign to do it.