Losing our supplier after our first sell-out: happy or sad?

Sometimes the best problems to have are the ones that catch you completely off guard.

This is the story of how we sold out faster than we planned, lost our supplier, spent two months taste testing in the dark, and somehow came out the other side with a bigger bet on the board than we started with.

The Move

We launched Organic Hojicha Powder on Amazon in early October 2025. We had projections. We had a timeline. We had what we thought was a comfortable amount of inventory.

We were wrong — in the best possible way.

We sold through 50% faster than predicted. What we thought would last us well into the new year was gone by mid-December. For a first product, on a new brand, with no existing audience — that was a signal we couldn't ignore.

The board was responding. Time to restock and scale.

We placed the call to our vendor. And that's when the first unexpected move came from the other side of the board.

They no longer produced our original Organic Dark Roast Hojicha.

The Lesson

Losing your supplier after your first sell-out is a special kind of chaos. On one hand, you're celebrating. On the other, you're scrambling. Both things were true at the same time, and we had to hold them together without dropping either.

All of November was spent taste testing. We tried batch after batch from new suppliers, chasing the same toasty, caramel-like depth that made our first product work. Some were too bitter. Some were too light. Some smelled right but tasted wrong. Finding the right hojicha isn't just sourcing — it's sensory, and you know it when you finally taste it.

By December we had our supplier. But now came the next layer: we weren't just restocking — we were going 4x our previous inventory size. That meant finding co-packers who could fit us into their schedule, coordinating across time zones with a Japan team, and managing an order-to-mill product that doesn't sit in a warehouse waiting for you. It gets made when you order it, which means every delay compounds.

There were miscommunications with the Japan team. Things got lost in translation — literally. We paid in early December expecting to receive product by January (considering the holiday timeline already). We didn't see it until mid-February.

Two months of sitting on a live Amazon listing with no stock. Two months of watching our ranking slip. Two months of learning exactly how fragile a supply chain feels when you're small and you're building it for the first time.

The Next Move

While we were taste testing hojicha in November, sourcing suppliers in December, and chasing shipments in January — we were also quietly working on piece two.

Read all about it: Organic Butterfly Pea Flower Powder. Blue Matcha.