Charles Chakkalo Building an E-Commerce Empire through Private Label and Resale

Hi, my name is Charles Chakkalo. I run an e -commerce business both on the private label front as well as resale. Primarily specialise in Amazon. That’s really where my journey started from high school till now. And that’s where we’re at. I’ll start it off there from my days in high school, I guess. 2010, started selling in my high school library until about now where it’s entirely for real.

It primarily started as a family business. We started out in resale, so I was always into tech as a kid, always. And I used to go to Best Buy for fun, I still do, if I’m completely honest. And I used to get some stuff on sale. Whenever Best Buy would run a special, I would know the prices of certain products and I would know what a worthwhile sale would be. So I’d make a small margin as a markup and just redo the same thing. Resale, and then from that point on, we were but when I say we, I started the business with my brothers. We were able to spot that same trend, not just with technology, but with other things too, primarily bled into home goods. And once we became accustomed to the full price of items, we knew once it went on special, how much to invest, how much to put on the line inventory, and then when to sell because the same group of people would go in at a different time.

It just becomes a matter of who can wait out who longer, and then you can raise the price, make more of a margin than the people who needed to cash out quicker were able to make. So that’s, that’s how we got into the resale side of things. We’re still in it and in it pretty deep, but realised that the way of the future is private label. So that’s, that’s how we got that resale journey started. The fact that it’s in the home goods niche really stemmed out of the, that’s where we were able to specialise. We were able to know the vendors, the merchandise, the price points, and it just came out of that evolution of technology and knowing that education in the price points was where the money was to be made.

So the private label brand is the private label brand is I would put it in the Amazon home and kitchen category and the whole idea is we have quality goods that are mostly manufactured in the United States or at least North America. And they’re big bulky, but light items. So,imagine the cost of shipping a container of let’s say something like a bowl. You’re basically shipping air from China and to pay a full container’s price, which nowadays is around 10 ,000, to ship across sea just for the lower labour in China would not make sense. So we’re offering quality home goods.

We are familiar with the fulfilment process, be it Amazon FBA, buy with Prime, any sort of expedited process that we are all used to as consumers becoming increasingly so. And we’re able to provide that to the American public. Now, is our price point the same price you would find at a dollar store or dollar general that you can walk into? No. But that would require you to take the time out of your day, get into a car or any mode of transportation you use, go to the store, and then transport it back home. But then again, these products are light and bulky. So where we specialise is in getting that product at a quality premium to your doorstep. So that’s the way of life and the price structure of where we fall in. So home and kitchen, but we’re no dollar general, but we’ll get the quality product to you.

We have two. So there’s the middle -aged woman, think 35 to 45, that knows what her home requires. And I say this based off of the demography and the analytics that we get back. We have another that’s actually really trendy right now. I guess we’re recording this in September of 2024. We just had a rush of people getting supplies for their dorms, soap dispensers, dish racks, things like that. People, mean, right now college students, just a few years younger, they don’t really know that you could go and get a product cheaper by going to the store, be it Home Goods, Dollar General, Dollar Tree. But hey, you can just get it on Amazon at your doorstep and have a really respectable home.
That’s just the general trend that we’re seeing, those two demographics.

Its really that. It’s the fact that we know that the manufacturers were able to do a lot, not majority, but a lot of our manufacturing here. And our basic familiarity with the e -commerce process, most of the money to be made is in logistics, especially given the product dimensions and classifications I told you about. The way to ship bulky and light products is knowledge that comes with time and experience and a lot of, I’ll call it growth pains. I mean, one bed truckload of products to FBA facilities or one bed batch of labels being printed can cost you in the thousands and probably tens of thousands. I’m talking about additional fulfilment costs, additional postage adjustments that happen. That class of products is different.

And then also,what people tend to do with plastics internationally is cheap out on the quality, make it thinner to save on material, save on price point, and then don’t really invest much because the price point is low. So you can’t really invest that deep into, let’s say, graphics creatives, be it video or pictures. So that’s where our strong suit is. Last but not least, the family business or let’s say the family business we chose not to be a part of is heavily invested in home goods and has been for over 40 years. And whenever we have a question, we can just say, Hey dad, can you help us out? We’re selling a dish rack, it is the, these are the details. How can you help us out? And you know, dad’s not going to charge us for advice. So, seeing his boys in the home good space, but rocking and rolling is his pleasure.

Right now we actually just launched our infuser pitcher. So let’s say people want, they want flavoured water. They don’t want to resort to let’s say soda and any, any other, highly sugar drinks or, what’s the word I’m looking for high fructose kind of drinks. You know, you can always infuse your water with mint fruit, vegetables, different, different kinds of vegetable peels, things like that.

We actually offer a guide to different mixtures you can use to put in the infuser in the middle. And that is a great seller for us. It’s about a 2.9 litre pitcher. And people use that all the time. The next best seller is actually our clip fans. Imagine you’re in a dorm room or you’re in a greenhouse. You need a small fan. It’s a six inch fan. It has two speeds.

A lot of people sell it with a USB ending, but there aren’t really that many USB endings in a greenhouse. Not everybody’s looking for an ending where, let’s say you want to cool down a bunk bed, not everybody has a USB ending that plugs directly into the wall. So we just have a regular 110 volt outlet ending, and that’s how it works. So those two are our best -selling products.

My future plan for the brand, I want to get more specialised. I like utilising tools like Shulix and looking at different product feedback to see where we can improve. Because right now we’re ranking well for highly commoditized items. So I want to get more into the specialty field and see where I can really distinguish myself or the brand.

And then my next step is also, I’m a hyper learner. I love learning. I love networking. I love presenting and I’m looking to share my journey in e -commerce. Do you mind if I plug things?

So I’m getting something off the ground called charlestheseller.com and it’s sort of going to be my home base. I’m very active on LinkedIn. I do video content as recently as this morning and what I think the field needs is a seller, a seller that has nothing in it for himself. Agencies have their own megaphones. They’re the ones presenting at these conferences. Nothing against them. They’re great. I use them. I hire them, nothing from the point of the seller. And being located in New York City, I get the privilege of attending plenty of conferences and having access to a lot of different networks.

So, whenever there are developments, either in the e -commerce space or Amazon in particular space, I’m there. I’m reacting to it from the point of the seller so that others, agencies and the platforms themselves can actually see how the seller is impacted and what we think about it.
When Amazon makes a certain update and it affects sellers negatively, they should know that. And thankfully we have a platform using my YouTube and LinkedIn channels to magnify it. So definitely give me a follow on LinkedIn and hit me up on charlestheseller.com. That’s where I plan on going. So on the products front, I like to be more specialised.

And when it comes to my learning journey, I want to take as many sellers as I can with me. I just, one more thing came to mind. I also want to get started on a DTC front. I like to see it as an insurance policy on owning the customer. So that’s a third thing that just came to mind as I was talking.

Though, I mean, we, I guess it wouldn’t be too uncommon for the entrepreneurs to say that they faced a COVID bump. A lot of people in the e -commerce field did face that bump, which was a good thing. And we struggled to find our footing after that bump. We did have one year that was, that was a down year just because of the high. We sort of got complacent thinking that the elevated traffic would be, we’ll just continue.

And a lot of the e -commerce brands had a major advantage in that they weren’t, their storefronts weren’t forced to close. We had, we had a difficulty of, of how do we stay open and comply with local regulation? But for the most part, we overcame that. And I’m talking in the industry as a whole, but we remained complacent and the year following, I believe it was 2022, 2023, we sort of recovered and we realised that We couldn’t be complacent. We did have to pivot the way we did. That was, we had to find a new trajectory. Certain products just didn’t fit the mould of going to China, modifying a certain product based on, based on customer feedback and then launching it. the products really needed a level of creativity to it. That just wasn’t, wasn’t that simple and automated. It required a level of familiarity with the use and, and the customer avatar. So.

That was one area of improvement we definitely needed to do. The second was we looked at our average conversion rate in our niche, which was 15%. Our product detail pages were converting at that 15%. But we didn’t invest in, let’s say, A plus premium content, where the creatives would take up the full width of the screen. That would just result in more customer engagement, the listing would objectively look more beautiful and might increase that conversion rate for anything above the industry standard of 15%. We thought, all right, we have the industry standard, we can settle for that. There’s no way we can actually exceed that. An experiment we started just last month was, let’s invest in our listings to see if we can increase that conversion rate from the industry 15 % to something higher than that.

And I’m purposely not capping it to see just how high we can go with that small change. It required significant investment, but not everything in business is going to work and i just have to try and something will stick eventually.

Exactly where I ended my last answer. I keep on. Not everything will work. Not everything is supposed to work. And that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep trying. If you’re starting a brand, it always helps to make sure you have an emotional investment in it. I don’t particularly care about home goods, but I do care about making a home more comfortable at a reasonable price.

I enjoy building a movement that is centred around that and so those two pieces of advice I’d give to people who are aspiring entrepreneurs and e -commerce brand builders for sure. There’s more where that came from, but I’d say follow my content. I don’t want to take up too much more of your time.

When it comes to branding, you have to rely on social media content, especially in the beginning when you don’t have, let’s say, something like an email list built out. Right now we rely on newsletters for our email list. And to build that list, there are strict, strict compliance regulations around garnering email addresses from orders, both from the FTC front and if you’re selling on a platform.

So that’s one way to collect email addresses. And then the other is obviously the social media track. You can direct people to an email opt -in, start getting some loyal followers. You can eventually start communicating with those followers when you’re at a low subscriber count, because you know, the first pioneers, they’re gonna be your champions from the beginning. You can sort of solicit their feedback and advice on what products they wanna see, what kind of improvements they wanna make, You can segment them based on certain open rates and engagement metrics saying, we want to put you on an advisory board and we’re going to highly value your opinion. We can get you on a zoom call and so on and so on. So right there, there’s a few tidbits that you can utilise and definitely use to higher engagement, set up some sort of referral program. It’s going to require effort. It’s going to require engagement, but I wouldn’t put it past any entrepreneur that’s worth their buck that they can put it in.

That’s about it. I think I said it a couple of times. I’ll say it again. Not everything is supposed to work. So just keep trying. Something will work. It’s a matter of, you don’t, one of my friends, Steve Chu, I’ll give him a shout out. He’s a great inspiration to follow as an e -commerce entrepreneur. You are the one who decides to quit and stop trying. So just keep that in mind.

Thanks for having me.