By Steve Laule, Director at Cartograph, a Harvest Group Company
Earlier this year, Harvest Group acquired Cartograph, a team with deep expertise helping emerging CPG brands build and scale on Amazon.
Over the last eight years, our team has helped more than 700 brands develop an Amazon growth strategy that supports profit and sustainability. More than 50 of those brands came to us before launch or shortly afterward, and within two years, we helped take them from $0 to more than $1 million in annual Amazon revenue.
I’ve seen what separates the brands that gain momentum from the ones that get stuck. The fundamentals aren’t complicated, but missing any one of them can slow growth. Based on Cartograph’s experience, a strong Amazon growth strategy begins with three fundamentals that emerging CPG brands need to nail (in no particular order).
1. Do Not Go Out of Stock
Amazon rewards momentum. Its algorithm gives more organic exposure to well-reviewed products with strong sales velocity. Nothing kills an emerging CPG brand’s momentum faster than a stockout on a key SKU, because the platform won’t show shoppers a product they can’t order. It’s especially damaging for subscription products (supplements, pet food, beauty), where a break in a fixed delivery schedule frustrates your most loyal customers and can trigger a wave of negative reviews.
While you’re scaling, monitor inventory and sales velocity daily. Growth curves for new products are unpredictable, so err on the side of overstocking until sales stabilize, and plan several months ahead for promotional pushes and major sales events like Prime Day Black Friday. We’ve watched too many brands pour money into a flashy ad campaign or influencer push, then miss most of the upside because they weren’t stocked for the spike.
Long story short: staying in stock needs to be a core part of your Amazon growth strategy. Otherwise, you risk losing the momentum you worked so hard to build.
2. Prioritize Hero Images, Product Titles & Item Highlights
In an ideal world, your brand store, PDPs, and A+ modules would all be polished and singing in harmony. And eventually, that should be the goal. But when you’re starting out, you need to prioritize the elements that get a customer through the door. A shopper usually sees your product in search results before they ever see your Store or read your full product description. In that moment, you have very little time to communicate what the product is, who it is for, and why they should click on it.
Focus first on the parts of the listing that have the biggest impact on that decision:
- Hero Image: It’s the first thing a shopper sees in search results, so convey as much as you can at a glance: size/quantity, flavor/scent, and any standout ingredients or differentiators. If you’re selling a 6-pack of raspberry sodas with 25g of protein each, that should register instantly; don’t show a single can with text too small to read and expect shoppers to work it out. It’s also a great place to show the product outside its packaging. One cat food brand we partnered with nearly tripled conversions overnight after we added callouts and an inset of the food in a bowl.
- Product Titles & Item Highlights: As of July 27, 2026, Amazon changed how titles are formatted. Gone are the keyword-stuffed names longer than most novels. You now get 75 characters for the title and another 125 for “Item Highlights.” Together, those fields should help shoppers quickly understand what the product is and why it is relevant to them. Use clear, accurate product information, including relevant identifiers, search terms, sizing or variation details, and key benefits or differentiators. The right structure will vary by brand, category, and Amazon requirements, but clarity always wins.
A good Amazon growth strategy does not require every creative asset to be perfect on day one. It requires you to get the most important information in front of shoppers clearly, quickly, and consistently.
3. Niche Down Your Keyword Advertising Strategy
We see new advertisers fall into two traps: spending on branded keywords before there’s search volume (or while they’re already winning top-of-search organically), or burning the whole budget on broad category terms that are expensive and rarely convert. For a brand trying to get its flywheel spinning, neither moves you toward the goal. Branded search only matters once you’re established and competitors start bidding on your terms, while broad category terms are crowded and pricey.
A better place for your budget is specific, longtail keywords that speak to your product’s niche, for two primary reasons:
- Lower competition, lower cost. The more specific the keyword, the fewer brands you’re bidding against. This can keep your cost per click reasonable and give you a shot at the top of the page without breaking the bank. Early on, efficient learning matters more than winning every broad search term in the category.
- Higher intent, higher conversion. Shoppers searching generic terms are usually still in discovery mode. Shoppers using more specific terms usually know what they want and just need to decide which product to buy. For a new brand chasing sales and reviews, those are the customers worth paying to reach.
For emerging CPG brands, the goal is not to build the most complicated advertising account right off the bat. It’s to spend your budget where it is most likely to generate sales, useful data, and repeatable momentum.
The Bottom Line
None of these fundamentals are complicated on their own. The hard part is executing all of them consistently while you’re heads-down building everything else emerging CPG brands need. Keep your best SKUs in stock, win the moment a shopper sees your listing, and put your ad dollars where buying intent is highest. Do that, and $1M in annual sales stops looking like a moonshot and starts looking like a milestone on the way to something bigger.
That’s the flywheel we help emerging CPG brands build every day. If you’d like a second set of eyes to focus on your Amazon growth strategy while you focus on literally everything else, we’d love to talk.
Learn more about our Amazon Services, and fill out our Contact Us form to get the conversation started.
About the Author
Steve Laule is a Director at Cartograph. In his current role, he partners closely with the Brand Management team to help CPG brands profitably scale on Amazon. Prior, he led a cross-functional marketing team at Thermo Fisher Scientific that collectively managed over $20mil/year in ad spend across various digital platforms and product categories. This included launching the popular Nalgene water bottle brand on Amazon, which now generates ~$1.2M in sales per month on the channel.