Learn how home goods brand Kazi grew their business by more than 350%

In 2009, Alicia Wallace went on a volunteer trip to Sierra Leone and was inspired to find a way to economically empower the women there. Shortly after, she met Greg Stone who had been working with weavers in Rwanda. Greg told Alicia the artisans needed her help selling their handwoven baskets and other products in the United States. Alicia wanted to create real change for the artisans and their families by connecting the artisans’ products with buyers in the US and ensuring fair wages. In 2013, Alicia founded All Across Africa with a mission to create fair employment for artisans in Ghana, Rwanda, and Uganda. This eventually led to the launch of the Kazi brand in 2016.

As a small business, Kazi turned to Amazon Ads to help get their brand story and products in front of a wider audience.

Increasing sales on Amazon was also imperative. Achieving this would allow them to continue bringing fair employment to more artisans, and scale the positive impact to their communities.

“You think it’s just a basket, but actually I’ve seen women come from nothing to constructing homes for themselves. I don’t think there is anything more empowering than economically empowering someone, and that’s something that Kazi’s doing, and makes me proud to be part of the team,” says Lydia Tuhaise, Production Director, Uganda.

To boost sales and profitability, Kazi bet big on a new product strategy: Rather than only offering intricate, ornate products, they decided to test lower-cost home essentials they believed would interest a larger audience on Amazon. This included new placemats made from a material called cattail.

As a result of the new product testing, Kazi confirmed that the essential products resonated better with audiences on Amazon. They also found the cattail placemats to be their new hero product, showing 300% higher sales than their other products.

While sales of the cattail placemats were taking off, it presented an unexpected hurdle for the company: The product was so successful they found themselves out of stock. With their top-selling hero product unavailable for several weeks until the new shipment arrived, Kazi needed a plan to uphold sales.

Kazi pivoted their Amazon Ads approach swiftly. They invested in promoting other complementary products made from the same cattail material in Sponsored Products and Sponsored Display campaigns, helping them maintain visibility and sales velocity.

When the cattail placemat was back in stock, they reinvested their ad spend towards the hero product, and found people were naturally returning to buy the complementary products as well, leading to steady growth.

Through testing a new product strategy they thought would resonate more with a wider Amazon audience, and through pivoting their Amazon Ads strategy to focus on these items, Kazi saw significant results. The brand’s sales were up 350% compared to the previous year.* In their best month of 2024, they achieved a ROAS of 4.**

“By effectively utilizing the tools on Amazon Ads in tandem with our new line of hero products, Kazi has flipped a year of tough sales into the most successful year ever on Amazon,” says Alicia. “That makes a huge difference. Not just for our staff here in San Diego, but also for more than 8,600 artisans along with their children and their communities.”