Where they were
Amazon was 96% of Bracken Field’s marketplace revenue and had grown 14% in the previous year, down from 40% the year before. The category was getting more expensive to advertise in, and the founders were reasonably nervous about having one channel.
They had tried Walmart once, in 2023, by uploading their Amazon catalogue as a flat file and turning on automatic campaigns. It sold about $2,000 a month and they concluded the channel did not work for them. The catalogue had gone up with Amazon image sizes, Amazon bullet formatting, and no shipping template, so it was never really tested.
What we did
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01
Pick the products that travel
Not everything belongs on every shelf. We took the 34 SKU catalogue and identified eleven products with the price point, review depth, and shipping profile to work off Amazon. The ultralight range, which depends on a technically literate buyer reading a spec sheet, stayed on Amazon only.
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02
Rebuild the listings for each retailer
Walmart rewards different things than Amazon does. Content quality score, shipping speed, and price competitiveness all feed placement. We rewrote titles to Walmart’s structure, added the attributes their search actually reads, and set up a shipping template that qualified for two day delivery.
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03
Start small and let the data decide
Walmart Connect launched with $900 a month across four SKUs and automatic campaigns only, for six weeks, to find out what people actually searched for. Manual campaigns came after that, built from real search terms rather than the Amazon keyword list.
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04
Target Plus and REI on invitation
Both are curated, so the work was commercial rather than technical: a category submission, a margin conversation, and a range built specifically for each. Target took the family camping range. REI took the technical shelters and left the rest.
Where they are now
Nine months later, 31% of marketplace revenue comes from outside Amazon and total marketplace revenue is up 34%. Walmart reached profitability in week 18 and now runs at 2.9x blended.
Amazon did not shrink. It grew 12% over the same period, partly because the brand searches generated by Walmart and Target shoppers came back to Amazon to convert.
We had already written Walmart off. Sentinel went back and showed us we had never actually run it properly, which was annoying and correct.
Figures come from the client’s Seller Central and advertising accounts over the period described. Past results are specific to that brand, that catalogue, and that category.
