The Model Most Brands Don’t Know They’re Trapped In. Why the next generation of consumer brands won’t hire online agencies, and what they’ll do instead.
- Jun 7
- 3 min read
By Justin Taliaferro
I started JETT in a Georgetown University dorm room with a stack of sneaker boxes pushed up against the wall.
I was a freshman, full time student athlete, and was buying inventory faster than I had room to store it! By my sophomore year, the business had crossed seven figures. By the time I graduated, I had stopped flipping sneakers and started doing something I believe is going to matter a lot more over the next decade: rebuilding how consumer brands sell their products online.
Here is what most people don't know about Amazon. Roughly 60% of the U.S. online product searches start on Amazon.com, and close to 80% of every unit sold on the platform ships from a third-party seller, not Jeff Bezos. The brand on the label often has no idea who that third-party seller is, what they paid for the product, or whether they'll still be there next month. Most brands respond to that chaos by hiring an Amazon agency to bring things “in house”. The agency builds okay listings, sends a fragmented monthly report, and charges a large fee to do so.
I'll say the quiet part out loud. That model is broken, and the brands that figure it out first are going to win online in the next year.
The structural problem is simple. Agencies don't carry inventory. They don't take risk. They get paid the same whether the brand grows, stalls, or quietly bleeds margin to a counterfeit seller in another warehouse. The result is that the agency's incentives and the brand's incentives are pointed in different directions from day one. That misalignment is why most brand-agency relationships end in frustration within 18 months, the traditional model itself is built on a fault line.
What's replacing these outdated agreements look a lot like the wholesale relationships brands have always had with traditional retailers. A distribution partner buys the inventory directly from the brand, owns the channel end to end, and only makes money when the brand actually sells. Rebuilt listings, ad management in house, logistics in place, but with one critical difference: when the brand wins, the operator wins. When the brand stalls, the operator eats it.
That is the model my company JETT runs on. We partner with consumer brands across CPG, functional wellness, beverage, and many other categories. We buy products wholesale, and act as a primary marketplace seller across Amazon, Walmart, and TikTok Shop for the brands we work with. We protect the channel from bad actors, we build the brand's story online the way the founder would build it themselves, and we live or die by whether the product moves. Unlike other agencies, we partner with brands we really believe in!
This is the legacy I'm trying to build. Not a bigger agency. Not a software platform. A distribution company that becomes the trusted long-term partner for the top generational consumer brands, the way certain wholesalers have been the trusted partner to retail for a century.
In any service-based industry, if your partner doesn't have skin in your outcome, the model is going to keep producing the same bad results. The brands that get this are going to look back in five years and wonder why they ever paid for anything else. Generic agencies will adapt or they won't. Either way, the model that comes next is already being built.
Connect With Justin
Instagram: @jett.llc
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