In 2018, Amazon will turn to private label goods (AMZN)

This article is going on three weeks old but combined with the Amazon post earlier today and especially yesterday's, helps give an outline of what's coming.

From Digiday, December 29:

Amazon has long honed the business of being the middleman — getting brands to sell on its site, letting shoppers pay for and receive those items fast and efficiently.

But 2017 was the year Amazon started taking steps to create its own brands. If done at the right price point, Amazon will be in a strong position next year to prove it not only can help other retailers grow, it can be a retailer itself. 

Amazon already has its AmazonBasics line of essentials like batteries and chargers. These items are largely commoditized, said Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulpuru-Kodali. It’s easy for Amazon to keep growing there: By bumping those products up in search results and pricing them right — which will be easy to do since Amazon owns the data — this line is poised to keep growing.

But the more interesting prospect is for private-label items that aren’t Amazon-branded. There are at least 19 brands Amazon owns and doesn’t operate under the Amazon brand name — from lingerie brand Arabella to furniture brand Strathwood. In October, Amazon rolled out private-label sportswear brands, including Goodsport (which competes with Champion), Rebel Canyon and Peak Velocity. Amazon may boasts fantastic brand recognition, but Amazon-branded panties are still a hard sell.

An October report by firm One Click Retail examined how Amazon’s private labels have performed. Amazon owns around 45 brands, and about 15 percent of its private-label sales come from those. The biggest one is women’s clothing line Lark & Ro, which had about $10 million in sales in 2017 to date when the report came out. Amazon’s Amazon Essentials clothing made about $3 million this year.

In apparel, Amazon’s most successful category with private label, L2 research found that the absence of major fashion brands that have traditionally abstained from selling on Amazon creates more room for private label to swoop in, a trend that would continue next year. 

“This is the uphill battle,” said Mulpuru-Kodali. “This is dependent on leveraging data and picking the right things to develop or manufacture.”...

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