Two Teachers Turned $100 Into $180,000 in Sales Reselling Bras on Amazon

Nate and Alysha Jackson, both former public school teachers, started an Amazon FBA retail-arbitrage business with a $100 investment in inventory. Within a year they had turned that into more than $180,000 in total sales, and went on to sell over $1 million worth of product on Amazon. "It was costing me money to go to my job," Nate said of the point, about a year and a half in, when they both quit their teaching jobs to run the business full time.

Their sourcing centers on clothing, bought mainly from Kohl's, which they settled on because clothing isn't a "gated" category requiring Amazon approval, the extra care its packaging demands deters casual sellers, and the sheer variety of styles and colors means less competition for the Buy Box on any one listing. They stack discounts aggressively — Nate says there are "at least 8 different layers of discounts you can stack on almost every purchase" at Kohl's — tracking codes through dedicated Facebook groups and even building their own Kohl's discount calculator. On one occasion they tried to buy more items than Kohl's point-of-sale system could process in a single transaction, learning the hard way that it caps out at 200 items.

On margins, Nate aims for roughly 100% return on cost of goods sold and follows what he calls the "30% rule" — targeting about 30% profit before Amazon's fees are deducted, which nets out to roughly 25% profit in practice. They also source inventory online using a tool called TacticalArbitrage, though margins there run thinner due to more competition. A batch of oil diffusers illustrates the risk: they bought a trial run at $35 each and sold it out at $70 each, so they spent their full budget restocking the same item — only for the manufacturer to start selling the diffusers on Amazon for $35 the very next day, wiping out the profit margin. "Go wide, not deep. Buy one of a hundred different things," Nate said. "If 20 of them end up being bad buys, the other 80 will end up being good buys." With experience, only 5-10% of their buys now turn out to be losers, down sharply from their early days.

To scan and track inventory they use Scoutify 2, which integrates with InventoryLab and the price-history tool Keepa, letting Nate check whether he's bought an item before, how much stock he has, and what it sold for. They've also hired helpers — mostly friends and family — paid an hourly rate to prep and shadow Nate, plus a commission tied to how much profit their sourced items sell for.

In their first year, while still working full time and without kids, the Jacksons shopped every spare moment — weekends, before and after school, even during lunch breaks — and paid themselves nothing, reinvesting all profit back into the business. Alysha says the first few months often ended with nothing to show for the effort, and tells new sellers plainly: "for the first 6 months, we really tell people it's just for learning." The business has since become far more passive: Nate now spends about three days a week, roughly 15 hours total, sourcing inventory, then hands packing and shipping off to a small team. They're now considering expanding into private-label products as a lower-effort next step.