Michael Poythress

ACHIEVEMENTS

• Helped make Amazon the fastest-growing—and second-largest—of all the brand’s distribution channels
• Achieved and maintained over 25% YoY growth via the Amazon channel from 2020 to 2024 (and still going)
• Used data, AI, hundreds of experiments, and analysis to identify proven incremental growth opportunities. Then, leveraged those with millions of advertising dollars, validating success constantly along the way
• Optimized every facet of the Amazon relationship for success—from brand management, relationship negotiation, organizing listing content, inventory planning, and paid advertising—documenting it all with written playbooks
• Helped keep this brand in the top three most efficient performers measured against 6+ sister brands across the metrics of ROAS, ACOS, growth rate, and conversion rate
• Accomplished all of this without using any product discounts, in keeping with brand policies

This product was created to provide a simple, painless, full-service and no-cost option for retail businesses to get online orders.

Our team developed an elegant and user-friendly interface for a very complex set of tools used to do a variety of tasks:
• Manage products.
• Publish product listings on marketplaces such as Amazon, Walmart, and eBay.
• Provide customer service at scale
• Manage all aspects of shipping and product return logistics

Customers are acquired through a distributed, commissioned direct sales team.

This business now successfully handles all aspects of eCommerce sales for hundreds of companies, using algorithms, machine learning, APIs, financial processing, security, reporting, and big data; additional features and capabilities are also being continually added.

Created an internal business management tool, for a product merchandising company with a staff of over 250 people serving a major US retailer.

• Increased efficiency of a completely distributed staff by more than 50%
• Reduced costs and mistakes by at least 25%
• Grew revenue and profit by removing growth bottlenecks and offering new client services enabled by the new digital workflow

The project was a success—meeting or exceeding every goal the client had, and is still in use today.

Delivered features on time, to meet business-critical contractual deadlines for a large national bank.

The application tracks thousands of data points for each of 7 million+ accounts and passed a SAS 70 (now SSAE 16) audit.

As the product manager, I coordinated the efforts of multiple teams and vendors as we prioritized and delivered a long list of mission-critical features.

There were numerous stakeholders and expectations to manage—in a high-stakes, high-stress scenario—but we did it successfully and launched the application on time.

With no prior “large warehouse” or fulfillment center inventory management experience, I was assigned to lead a team in inventorying all the products in a 100,000 square foot warehouse and obtain data that had been integrated to an eCommerce platform for immediate sale and fulfillment.

I led programmers to rapidly deliver a functional MVP and the stock-taker team was able to begin using it in the warehouse the very next day.

This inventory management system has been continually enhanced and is still in active use, now serving multiple warehouses with a unique high-speed and efficient system.

In my role, I led the design, testing, manufacturing, import, marketing, sales, and distribution of brand new consumer products in the home-goods industry.

The products were a profitable success, selling out multiple production runs, and company was ultimately hand-picked by Amazon as a back-end supplier.

A mid-size customer appreciation gift company was unable to grow further, due to using a series of time-consuming manual processes to transfer information between completely disconnected software tools—for accounting, inventory management, CRM, shipping, surveys and responses, product customization, and order processing.

I led a team to design and build a custom web application to streamline the business processes—all within a firm budget—using Agile methodologies.

The new application met and exceeded the owners’ goals, and has enabled a new wave of growth and profitability through new products and services. Five of the previous software tools were completely replaced, and the remaining two are now tightly coupled with the main application through API integrations.

Our team successfully created and launched an online service that could be added to a user’s Twitter account and connect with the user’s PayPal account and/or credit card to initiate payments by posting a tweet including a hashtag (#makeitrain) or username, and an amount.

Designed as an alternative to “text to give,” specifically for social cause marketing and raising awareness for needs, we coordinated a roll-out with a handful of non-profits and celebrities.

Created and managed an independent Groupon-like flash sale application, used by local marketing agencies in several cities.

This platform served email lists of approximately 200,000 addresses, and successfully processed thousands of financial transactions per day.

Created and operated one of the largest regional advertising websites for 7 years, serving over 10,000 customers/real estate sellers.