A 20-brand portfolio, scaled from $1M to $50M+ — by building a system instead of fixing one brand at a time.

1. Situation

Piranha was a portfolio of more than twenty consumer brands spanning medical and service uniforms, activewear, footwear, jewelry, furniture, and pet products. Combined Amazon GMV sat around $1M, and the catalog was fragmented: three separate product databases, every brand merchandised its own way, no shared standards, inconsistent presentation across marketplaces.

Growing a single brand is hard enough. Growing twenty at once the old way — one listing, one fix, one brand at a time — doesn't scale. The effort grows with every brand added, and quality drifts the moment attention moves elsewhere.

2. Diagnosis

The constraint wasn't any one brand. It was the absence of a system of record.

Three business units were running three catalogs with three different commercial models: marketplace selling, promotional group sales, and retail group sales. The same product existed three times with three sets of attributes, and nobody owned the discrepancy. Without one governed source, work didn't compound — every gain was a one-off that decayed as soon as the team turned to the next fire.

3. Build

One system of record. Initiated and co-architected a headless master product database with the CTO and development team, consolidating three catalogs into one. Designed it so validation happened at the point of entry rather than through downstream cleanup — bad data can't enter rather than being caught by a report three weeks later.

Standards others could execute against. Authored the data and content standards governing the unified catalog, and the Amazon content standard for the medical scrub portfolio. Both were adopted across multiple brands and executed by teams outside my reporting line, which is the real test of whether a standard works.

Complex categories under active enforcement. Built multi-axis variation architecture for fine jewelry across clarity, grade, carat, and metal. Directed expansion into PPE and medical devices through COVID under FDA-adjacent claims review, supplier verification, and platform policy that changed weekly. That scope increase drove the promotion to Director.

Storefronts on the same foundation. Stood up a Shopify Plus multi-storefront organization on top of the database in 2022 and directed 10+ custom microsites on it, several supporting large hospital group and B2B uniform programs.

A team to run it. Led a content team of up to 12, with a Manager of Content reporting in.

4. Result

Amazon GMV grew from roughly $1M to more than $50M across the US, Canada, Mexico, and Brazil, inside a portfolio reaching about $75M in total revenue at peak.

The growth held because it ran on a system rather than on individual effort. New brands and new markets plugged into rails that already existed.

5. What it shows

Scaling a portfolio isn't twenty growth projects. It's one operating system applied across all of them. Build the governance, the standards, and the team to run it, and the catalog scales without the wheels coming off.