Amazon Catalog Overhaul Drives 132% Revenue Growth for Smith Tea

Smith Tea (Steven Smith Teamaker) is a renowned specialty tea brand known for exceptional craftsmanship, botanical blending, and premium full leaf teas. With a dedicated customer following and prominent retail placement in specialty grocers such as Whole Foods Market and New Seasons Market, the brand has established strong market presence and high brand affinity.

Prior to partnering with Brandwoven in 2024, Smith Tea managed Amazon primarily through an unsegmented product offering that mirrored its traditional retail distribution. As the brand expanded wholesale grocery distribution, third-party (3P) marketplace dynamics began undermining its ownership of the Amazon marketplace. Without dedicated marketplace catalog differentiation and strategic demand planning, the brand struggled to maintain price integrity and channel control, resulting in declining year-over-year sales performance.

Smith Tea faced persistent operational friction in managing Amazon FBA inventory levels. The brand operated without formal stocking rules or safety stock buffers, relying on reactive injection plans limited strictly to whatever finished goods happened to be on hand at a given moment.

These supply constraints led to frequent, prolonged stockouts across high-velocity items. In Amazon’s marketplace algorithm, repeated stockouts severely penalize organic search ranking, suppress advertising efficiency, pause consumer subscriptions, and negatively impact overall sales momentum.

This combination of unpredictable stock availability and volatile pricing led to poor subscription retention in Amazon’s Subscribe & Save program which builds customer loyalty and higher repeat purchase behavior. For a consumable, high-frequency CPG category like specialty tea, the inability to capture and retain automated recurring subscriptions impacted customer lifetime value and restricted sustainable growth.

To eliminate direct overlap with wholesale distribution, Brandwoven developed and executed a tailored Amazon-exclusive packaging strategy. Instead of relying solely on single 15-count retail cartons, Brandwoven guided Smith Tea to introduce bundled and multi-pack offerings specifically engineered for the marketplace.

Brandwoven spearheaded the launch of a 10-Flavor Variety Pack which rapidly scaled to become Smith Tea’s top-performing hero ASIN in 2025. We recognized that flavor exploration drives high consumer conversion in Amazon’s specialty beverage categories, and our newly launched multi-pack captured significant new-to-brand demand while completely bypassing 3P seller competition.

Additionally, Brandwoven introduced intermediate 30-count and 36-count carton bundles for core blends. These packs bridged the pricing gap between entry cartons and 100-count bags, allowing Smith Tea to recapture lost carton volume, boost average basket sizes, and protect product margins.

Brandwoven initiated inventory management conversations with Smith Tea’s leadership team to help transition operations from reactive shipping to data-driven FBA replenishment. Our goal was to offer better solutions that would empower Smith Tea’s team and transform how they executed inventory production and stocking, ultimately setting the brand up for long-term success.

We started by rebuilding comprehensive demand forecasting models—iterating approximately 10 forecasting cycles—to account for seasonality, promotional surges, and production lead times. We knew that a lack of in-stock product was the number one issue preventing sales growth for the brand, and the most impactful challenge that we had to solve.

Through daily collaboration and operational alignment, Brandwoven instituted a standardized 6-to-8-week safety stock protocol. This buffer stabilized inventory levels, prevented costly stockouts, and provided the operational foundation necessary to scale advertising and additional customer acquisition efforts, like Subscribe & Save.

The comprehensive operational and strategic overhaul executed by Brandwoven’s team transformed Smith Tea’s Amazon brand into a high-growth, high-margin channel. Our results include:

• +132% YoY Revenue Growth: Strategic catalog restructuring and buy box recovery more than doubled the brand’s overall Amazon sales volume.
• +113% YoY Shipped Units: Unit volume grew rapidly thanks to both the Amazon-exclusive multi-packs and consistent, rigorous inventory forecasting.
• +26% Increase in Buy Box Percentage: Marketplace protection efforts reclaimed buy box ownership across the brand’s Amazon catalog.
• +68% YoY Conversion Rate Lift: Re-establishing price integrity, curating variety packs, and maintaining consistent in-stock products drove significant improvements in shopper conversion.
• +32% YoY Increase in Sessions: Enhanced catalog setup and advertising alignment expanded Amazon listing traffic.
• +9% Increase in Average Order Value (AOV): Intermediate 30- and 36-count packs lifted overall cart values.
• 16% Increase in Average Selling Price (ASP): Core 15-count carton prices were stabilized as full MSRP was restored.
• Sustainable Subscription Growth: Stable inventory enabled a fast-growing Subscribe & Save subscriber base, driving recurring monthly revenue for the tea brand.