Ashley Kinkead got “revoked” by the BBB for attempting to manipulate reviews.
Her company, PL Mastery, now holds an F rating due to 147 complaints, with the most severe accusations stating that she took tens of thousands of dollars from students, then closed her course and filed for bankruptcy. Lawsuit pending.
Here was my original Private Label Mastery review.
Ashely made over $5 million the last few years selling online.
Before ecommerce and entrepreneurship completely changed the trajectory of her life, she had several jobs.
She worked in corporate America, did substitute teaching, and on the weekends, she worked for this promotional company, helping out with bourbon and whiskey tastings.
All that added up to about $70 Gs a year. Not terrible, but not enough to get ahead.
Plus, all she did was work.
“One day I just kind of sat down and realized I’m living paycheck to paycheck,” Ashely said.
“And I hadn’t really fulfilled my potential,” she admitted.
“I liked what I did. I got a lot of fulfillment out of my jobs. But I knew I could do a lot more with myself.”
“I was very driven. At the time, I was 26 or 27 years old,” she recalled.
“So I started to think about my future and what I wanted that to look like. What side hustles could I do that were more passive, that didn’t require me to go get another job and work for somebody else?”
“So I went online. This was back in 2015.”
“And I Googled ‘how to get started in an online business.’ And I was really fortunate because a lot of people do that and they end up in opportunities that don’t really work.”
“It could be like affiliate marketing, network marketing, pyramid scheme type things.”
“Luckily, I didn’t land on any of those,” Ashley laughed.
“My very first business was selling on Amazon FBA. So I became an Amazon seller in 2015 and it was so great. I loved everything about it,” she remembered.
In the early days, Ashley was basically just learning from other sellers in these Facebook Groups she had found.
Uncle Mastercard funded her first few products.
Month one, she made a couple grand.
That’s when she knew, Holy crap, if I can make $2k a month doing this, I can make $10k a month doing this. And $10k could easily turn into $30k, and on and on.
It was simply a matter of finding more products to sell, working a little harder, just rinsing and repeating what she’d already proven, right?
So what was Ashley’s first product?
A used book, believe it or not. It was just sitting around her house; she scans it with the Amazon Seller App and realizes, Wow, this $0.50 book is selling for $17 on Amazon.
Once she sold that for a profit, she hit up places like Goodwill, Salvation Army, and other thrift shops to source more inexpensive books.
She’d throw ’em all in a box, ship it off to Amazon, make another $1-, $2-, $3k in profit.
Over time, she got better at sourcing, faster at scanning, smarter at maximizing margins.
“I got really good at just looking at a book and knowing if it was gonna be profitable on Amazon,” Ashley said.
“I also started going to book fairs, library sales, garage sales, yard sales, charity thrift shops. And I got my total inventory up to 15,000 books.”
“And then I moved to more of a wholesale model, online arbitrage.”
“I was able to scale my inventory down to much fewer products, buying books at places like T.J.Maxx, Marshalls, Walmart, Target, and then resell those books on Amazon,” she explained.
“That allowed me to really grow my business.”
Ashley’s best month flipping books was about $30k in sales.
Then she moved to shoes, clothes, beauty products, etc., and got all the way to $100k in a month.
Roughly 30% of that was profit.
Her final move was making the switch to private label. Ashely created a speciality bath bomb brand and a natural soap brand.
That’s ultimately where you wanna get to, is having your own private label brand selling 24/7 on Amazon.com.
Ashely will teach you how in her PL Mastery course.
Cost is $12,000 though. Ouch.