How Haunted Portraits doubled December profit with a leaner team

What Norm wanted to fix was the cost of running it.

Fifteen people are a lot of payroll for a single Amazon brand, and it was eating into the margin he should have been keeping.

He wanted one thing from us: Don’t let revenue slip while I take headcount down by half.

On a catalog of 15,000-plus products, where one careless week of ad spend can undo a quarter of progress, that’s harder than it sounds.

That was the easy part. The harder part was running ads across the whole catalog without letting efficiency drift.

We managed spend at the ASIN level and grew sales month over month through most of 2025, pushing gross margins above 30 percent and holding them near 35, higher in some months.

They stayed there even after the summer and Q4 peaks rolled off, which is usually when margins on a catalog this size start to sag.

Late in 2025, Norm changed his pricing. His average sale price had been climbing gradually, roughly $14, then $15, then $16, and he decided to step it up across most of his ASINs in one move.

A jump that size can wreck conversion and organic rank if the ad strategy doesn’t move with it. We shifted spend and targeting alongside the new prices so the account held while they took effect.

Sales grew from $223K to $355K and profit more than doubled.

Earlier in the year, the summer months had already run more than $100K ahead year over year at high margins, so the catalog had proven it could grow before the pricing change ever happened.

After the price increase, the shape of the business changed on purpose. Volume came down and per-unit profit went up.

In January, the account did about $73.6K against $78.4K the prior year, fewer units sold and more money kept, and February and March followed the same line.

Lower revenue for higher profit is the result Norm cares about most, and it’s the one we set out to protect.

More profit doesn’t always come from more sales. Norm raised his prices, sold fewer units, and made more money. It worked for one reason: his ads held his organic rankings while he increased prices.

A price increase only works if your products keep ranking after it, and Norm’s did.

He came to us wanting to cut his team in half without losing ground. He ended up with half the payroll, higher prices, and the most profitable December the account has ever had.