Amazon is selling its own private label diapers again, now under the Mama Bear brand

Amazon quietly launched its own private label diapers on its site last week, this time under the Mama Bear brand. The brand, which already sells other baby items like baby food and diaper pail refills, is now carrying size newborn through size 6 diapers. However, shoppers will have to request an invite to purchase the items, as they’re still being launched.

The arrival of Amazon’s own diaper brand follows reports from last year which claimed Amazon was planning to re-enter this market, after pulling its line of diapers sold under the Amazon Elements name back in January 2015.

While Amazon Elements continues to sell baby wipes, it more recently expanded to include vitamins and supplements – not other baby products.

But the success of Amazon’s baby wipes line may have rival diaper manufacturers fearing Amazon’s return to the market. Today, Amazon Elements wipes have achieved 14 percent market share, up from 9 to 10 percent since last year, notes the firm One Click Retail. Another brand, Water Wipes, have gained more market share in wipes, but Amazon Elements is the number 2 gainer, the firm said.



While still invite-only, Amazon’s new diapers area already proving to be a strong sales driver for the Mama Bear brand. The seven ASINs (Amazon Standard Identification Number, or basically, an Amazon SKU) for these new diapers have now accounted for 38 percent of the brand’s sales.

In addition, Amazon launched a new diaper pail refill ASIN around three months ago. On its own, it accounted for 41 percent of Mama Bear sales last week.

In other words, diapers and the diaper pail refill combined accounted for around 79 percent of Mama Bear sales last week.



While Mama Bear sales have spiked before – such as during Amazon’s sales holiday, Prime Week – the launch of the new private label diapers led to the largest sales spike the brand has ever seen last week, says One Click Retail CEO Spencer Millerberg.


Amazon’s investment in its private label lines has been exploding in recent months, including fashion, home, and other verticals. Its latest additions, reported this week, were new lines of activewear clothing, via brands called Goodsport, Rebel Canyon, and Peak Velocity. It also just entered the furniture market, with brands called Rivet and Stone & Beam, following earlier expansions into lingerie, shoes and handbags, and plus-size fashion.

A number of Amazon’s private labels today have seen millions, or even tens of millions or hundreds of millions in sales. A prior report from One Click Retail found the AmazonBasics line, for example, has over $250 million YTD, or 85 percent of total private brand sales in the U.S.

Meanwhile, Amazon’s apparel label Lark & Ro and its baby care and vitamins brand Amazon Elements have each grown 90 percent year-over-year, with respective sales of approximately $5 million and $10 million, the report said.

The new Mama Bear-branded diapers are being manufactured through Kimberly Clark, a source familiar with the situation says.

The diapers also come in two pattern options, white and a bears print, and are sold as 4-packs, with a varying amount per pack, depending on the diaper size. They’re competitively priced with leading brands: for example, 128 newborn diapers will sell for $25.49 when launched; 216 size 1 diapers are $38.49; 184 size 2 diapers are $39.69; and so on.

For comparison’s sake, 128 newborn Pampers Swaddlers are $26.28 and 216 size 1 Huggies Little Snugglers are $37.04 – to give you an idea of diaper pricing in general.

When comparing four sizes of Pampers Swaddlers that did have exact equivalent pack sizes to Mama Bear’s packs, Amazon’s brand saved shoppers 11 percent to 17 percent.

For Amazon, the addition of its own diapers and other private labels will have a bottom line impact, due to their increased margins. Plus, in some cases, the labels are used to drive customers to subscribe to Prime, as the brands themselves are Prime-only. So far that’s been the case for Mama Bear products, but the diapers aren’t yet labeled this way. However, that could be because they’re still in invite mode.

Source: TechCrunch

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Metro Africa Xpress Looks To Bring On-Demand Local Delivery To Urban Africa

Adetayo Bamiduro had to convince his co-founder Chinedu Azodoh that starting an e-commerce site wasn’t necessarily the best idea — at least, not yet. Instead, the two decided to start Metro Africa Xpress (or MAX, for short), a last-mile delivery service for urban Africa based in Lagos, Nigeria. MAX is launching onstage today at TechCrunch Disrupt London.

The service gives merchants a way to have their goods delivered to customers within three hours through a platform that can use an API the company built, as well as through text messaging and other platforms. Merchants summon MAX couriers through the platform and MAX charges the merchants based on distance instead of weight and other factors that logistics companies often use. In addition, traditional logistics companies currently can’t offer that kind of speed, which is largely the focus of MAX, Azodoh said.

“We hated the way things are done today — you have kilograms, measuring, everyone wastes time,” he said. “Typically, the whole process wasn’t well-organized or well thought out, so for us we do it to simplify the process and make it easy to use our platform.”

MAX does have crowdsourced couriers, but it also has a baseline staff of people to deliver packages on branded motorcycles. The couriers they employ full-time are paid on a salaried basis, while its crowdsourced couriers — if the demand is there — get paid per delivery. Around 70% of the drivers are full-time, Azodoh said on stage.

The pair is from Nigeria, and they went through TechStars (one of the first to come out of Nigeria). Azodoh said they built MAX in Africa to help encourage others on the continent to start companies.

“When you look at the landscape, there weren’t many successful companies that were African-owned, it made it difficult for younger people to look up,” Azodoh said. “Cities in Africa have some of the highest urbanization rates compared across the world. With more and more coming into the system, it’s very important we have things that you can look up to, and say hey, if MAX has done it, I can do it.”

Another reason they built the company in Africa is they want to enable retailers to grow by giving them the tools to actually deliver their goods — which is a natural precursor to growing, you’d expect. On the e-commerce side, one of the reasons it hasn’t hit the penetration rate that is seen in the UK and the United States is that there isn’t a good infrastructure for delivery, he said.

“When you look at comparable markets, the growth of e-commerce has directly correlated with the appearance of strong last-mile delivery,” Azodoh said. “Our main goal is to empower retailers and consumers across the company. The most effective way to do that is to provide last-mile delivery. That provides a real way of commerce workflow.”

Of course, there is the elephant in the room: Uber. The company could end up going after the same space that MAX is going after, given its history of being an aggressive — and well-funded — company with a knack for handling trips from one point to another. Azodoh knows that there’s a chance that Uber could be gunning for them eventually, but said he’s just heads down working on the company right now.

“The great thing has been focusing on executing and executing like crazy,” he said. “We want to get things done as fast as possible. We’re not too focused on what the competitors are doing. We love them and respect them; we don’t use that as a scale of measurement of our performance.”

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Kenya: ICT start-ups to get boost from upcoming innovation showcase

At Mobile World Congress 2015 (MWC), Surfline Communications held an intimate press conference in order to disclose to IT News Africa that both parties plan to expand their 4G LTE network collaboration. The agreement is essentially planned to cover all regions in Ghana.

According to Huawei, after a grueling evaluation process, it emerged as the winning vendor for expansion due in part to their success as a worldwide market leader on frequency division duplex (FDD).

The expansion will cover major cities such as Takoradi, Kumasi, Cape Coast, Tamale and Ho, and include all key municipalities within the data-hungry country. Once completed Surfline will boast 700+ cell sites, making it one of the world’s largest independent LTE networks, an amazing feat for the country’s only telecommunications network that is wholly owned by Ghanaians.

At the media briefing, Surfline explained that this announcement follows its successful launch last August, which saw Surfline raise the bar on both new and existing operators through their commitment to bring international standards to Ghana by introducing sophisticated experiential stores, superior customer service and incomparable data speeds.

According to Surfline, it has experienced tremendous growth in its customer base making them a force to be reckoned with within the competitive marketplace.

At the briefing, Surfline and Huawei representative’s confirmed that they will be doing similar projects within Africa; however, Surfline will not enter Nigeria, which is due to the high rate of telecom operators already within the territory.

Source: ITNewsafrica report by Darryl Linington

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Publishizer Is A Crowdfunding Solution That Connects Authors With Publishers

As a seasoned self-published author with an excess of one book under my belt, I’ve been looking for new and interesting publishing tools for indie writers. Recently I found something called Publishizer, a crowdfunding system just for books. While I’m not entirely convinced it’s the way to go for new authors, it does seem like a compact and focused solution for getting your book into the world.

The entire system is based around the concept of proposals. To submit a book you simply enter the title and then a little bit of information including a 1,000-word description of the work and a bio. Everything is very free-form and there is little in the way of vetting. Instead, the creator, Guy Vincent, and his team approve your project and you can start selling pre-orders which you receive once you reach your funding goal. Vincent and his team also send out helpful email notes and there is a full list of resources and best practices for folks who need a little push.

“I tried to self-publish my first ebook, “Waking Up Early”, and it failed miserably. My first attempt at Publishizer was to build a beta reading platform, which failed. I ended up working for a book printing company in Singapore, and saw potential for independent authors to fund printing costs with preorders,” said Vincent. “So, I built Publishizer as a preorders platform for books from India. Now we’re experimenting with book proposal distribution: connecting authors to publishers with preorders.”

In other words, Vincent wants to create a platform that publishers might use to find new books, a sort of literary minor league stadium for hunting up new talent. Right now, however, it’s a fairly succinct way to get a book proposal up on the Internet.

I tried it on a new book I’m working on, Technotopia, and it worked fairly well. The interface was clean and usable and the system pulled my headshot from my social media. It took about an hour to create the proposal and Vincent recommends adding images and videos to increase awareness.

The result is a nice page with some pre-order buttons. The site also has front-page feature opportunities and they also send out an email newsletter.

The site is self-funded and they are currently applying to accelerators in the US. They also plan to move to New York this year to be closer to publishers.

“There are lots of crowd-funding sites (Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Pozible), and even a number of hybrid crowd-funding/publishing sites (Inkshares, PubSlush, Unbound). Publishizer is the first crowd-publishing platform that will connect authors to thousands of publishers.”

“Now, we’re looking for our first success story for book proposal distribution: helping one of our authors land a traditional book deal through a successful preorders campaign on Publishizer,” he said.

Until Publishizer does start convincing real publishers to start looking at their site, however, I think they’ll be hard-pressed to find much traction. While I do like the interface, I’ve always had better luck with the big two – Kickstarter and Indiegogo – and worry that niche sites like this one offer too little in the way of traffic to be true contenders. Kickstarter and Indiegogo allow for serendipitous, organic traffic thanks to their wide range of products. You could back a metal smart wallet one moment and then click over to a book of poetry. With sites like this one you end up looking at more books.

A guy can dream, however, and we’ll see how my book – and others – fare on the site. This is just the dawn of crowd publishing and indie books will soon be a major force. Hopefully folks like Vincent can push things forward.

Source: Techcrunch

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