“If the first thing you do every morning is open Seller Central with a coffee… this one’s for you.” ☕📊

New episode of The Ostrich Report just dropped, and this time Hendrik and I brought in someone who actually runs the thing everyone has an opinion about but very few truly understand: marketplaces.

🎙 Guest: Jamie Roller
🧼 Brand: Dr. Squatch (yes, the Star Wars soap people with the ridiculous scents and surprisingly serious P&L discipline)

Jamie runs the marketplace business at Dr. Squatch, with a heavy focus on Amazon plus retail.com 1P. She’s not a “thought leader,” she’s the person who has to make the numbers work every 90 days.

A few threads we pulled on:

🧮 Marketplace = a P&L inside a P&L
Jamie’s team owns the whole thing end to end:

• What to sell

• How to get it into Amazon

• How to price, bundle & merchandise it

• How to put media behind it without destroying the margin

Her line that stuck: if you’re promising +25% YoY on Amazon, you better understand what that actually entails operationally — not just in a deck.

📦 1P vs 3P and why unit economics are a knife fight
We unpacked:

• Why running 3P means owning the inventory, the fees and the fulfillment pain

• How bundles become your secret weapon when a single bar of soap can’t carry $2.50+ in FBA fees

• The real trade-off: pristine margins vs access to Amazon’s absurd demand firehose

♻️ Cannibalization is out, incrementality is in
Two years ago, everyone was panicking:

“Is Amazon cannibalizing my DTC?”

Today Jamie’s more focused on:

“How do I prove incrementality of media and new product launches across channels?”

We talk about:

• Customer journeys that definitely aren’t linear

• Launching new SKUs that cannibalize your own range vs your own channels

• Why the goal is channel-agnostic loyalty, not channel purity

📊 Dashboards, data & the uncomfortable truth
Jamie spends 20–30% of her time inside the numbers. First tab open: yesterday’s sales in Seller Central. Then deeper analytics Squatch has built in-house.

The bit most brands won’t say out loud:

• Every channel has horrible blind spots

• Amazon just happens to give you enough data to keep you hooked and “just informed enough” to keep spending

• You win on Amazon by owning intent on specific keywords, not by “being present”

🤖 AI, agents & who actually wins
We debate whether AI agents will:

• Supercharge big CPGs with deep pockets

• Or reward the brands who are faster at updating content, testing, and staying “recent” in LLMs

Jamie’s view: we’re still early, there’s a lot of buzzword bingo, and the real work is still growth & media strategy, not AI theatre.

👥 Culture > strategy (especially in marketplaces)
We also get into how she:

• Runs a distributed, multi-time-zone team

• Keeps marketplace from being a weird silo off to the side

• Shares data & reporting so the rest of the business actually uses marketplace insights instead of treating Amazon like a dark art

Oh, and yes, we did manage to talk about Star Wars soap, Chewbacca as a scent choice, and why marketplaces should still be fun even when they’re stressful.

If you’re:

• Running Amazon / marketplace P&Ls

• Still arguing internally about “cannibalization”

• Or secretly afraid of your own dashboards

…this episode will either make you feel seen or mildly attacked. Maybe both.

What we got into with Jamie