MAKING MILLIONS FROM BEZOS' BILLIONS.

Deep-pocketed investors are rushing to bet on Amazon’s third-party sellers. The stampede will change retail forever.

- LAUREN DEBTER

Business was booming for Adam St. George when he decided to shop around his four-year-old brand Angry Orange Odor Eliminator. Sold primarily on Amazon, his citrus-scented petodor remover was racking up more than $2 million in annual revenue.

Within hours of listing the operation on an online brokerage, St. George was inundated with phone calls. Planned time off to visit family in Ohio morphed into a marathon of negotiations with brokers, family offices and individual investors. The winner: consumer-products startup Thrasio, which sent a term sheet within a week of the listing and insisted on a response the next day.

“They weren’t messing around,” says St. George, 52, who sold Angry Orange for $1.4 million in 2018, a sum beyond his wildest dreams that paid for a nearly month-long vacation in Hawaii and a new fishing boat. “You get this big check and it’s like, wow. It’s a trip.”

That check, though, paled in comparison to the return expected by Thrasio, which quickly revamped Angry Orange’s operations and has since increased its annual revenue eightfold, to $16.5 million. Named after Thraso, a brave Amazonian warrior from Greek mythology, Thrasio was founded by two serial entrepreneurs in July 2018 with a single mission: to roll up third-party sellers on Amazon. Over the last two years, it has spent over $100 million snapping up nearly 100 businesses, boosting their revenue to more than $400 million; it now sells 10,000-plus items—massage guns, hiking poles and everything in between—on the nation’s biggest online retail platform.