You can spend $25 million creating a category. And then watch Amazon hand it to
By Liranhirschkorn · February 18, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
You can spend $25 million creating a category.
And then watch Amazon hand it to your competitors for free.
I was on a call recently with a founder who did exactly that. Built a brand. Invented a product category that didn't exist. Went national with TV, radio, spent years and millions educating the market.
It worked. They became the category leader.
But here's the problem:
It was great at first until cheaper competitors starting entering the market. Every person who saw their ads and then searched Amazon for that product? They were immediately introduced to 10 cheaper knockoffs.
Their Amazon revenue was always stuck at roughly 10% of total sales — no matter how much they grew. $200K/month in revenue? $20K on Amazon. $1M/month? $100K on Amazon. Always 10%.
That's not Amazon working for you. That's Amazon tax on your brand awareness.
So what do you do when you created the category but you're losing the shelf?
Here's the framework we talked through:
Own the "Original" positioning. Showcase your media placements and PR. There's an old marketing principle the founder shared with me on the call. He said "being the original is so powerful that if you're not the original, you should invent a new category just to claim it".
This brand IS the original. But their listing didn't say that anywhere. Your listing should make your brand story impossible to ignore.
Stop competing on price. Compete on trust. Lifetime warranty vs. no warranty. Premium materials vs. cheap alternatives. Founder-led brand vs. faceless import. Build comparison content that makes this obvious at a glance. The brand has all this, but isn't leveraging it on Amazon.
Use Amazon's upper funnel like your own media budget. Streaming TV ads, DSP retargeting, lookalike audiences built from your own email list. Amazon's ad platform has evolved — you can now run a full-funnel strategy that mirrors what you're already doing on D2C.
Consider a fighter brand. Same quality specs as the knockoffs, but backed by your supply chain and reputation. Compete on volume where you need to. Protect your premium line where you can.
The biggest mistake category creators make on Amazon?
Assuming the brand awareness they built everywhere else will automatically translate on the platform.
It won't. Amazon is its own ecosystem. You have to re-earn attention there — but you have advantages no competitor can copy. You just have to use them.