Liran Hirschkorn, who once worked in Great Neck at Citibank and later became an insurance agent, said that over the last decade, he was interested in Internet marketing and trying to make extra money online.
But it would turn into a fulltime venture, Hirschkorn said, after selling his insurance business in 2015.
“I initially started out by going to trade sales and buying products wholesale,” Hirschkorn, who has an office in Lake Success, said in an interview. “And then I transitioned into creating my own brand.”
The first brand Hirschkorn founded was Emolly, which focused on selling onesie costume pajamas, with Amazon helping by allowing him to ship his inventory directly to their warehouses and fulfill his orders.
Hirschkorn said the onesie idea spawned from four international students who worked for him part time telling him about the popularity of onesies in college dorms. He then saw an opportunity, he said, because many of the listed products were only from sellers in China.
“This was kind of just going on a sort of whim from the advice of the college kids that worked for me,” Hirschkorn said.
The next brand he founded would seem totally unrelated: Royal Decanters, which designs and creates special whiskey decanters to hold bottles.
“That’s also an interesting story because sometimes people ask me, you must know whiskey or know a lot about whiskey … And the truth is that I don’t know much about whiskey at all,” Hirschkorn said with a laugh. “I don’t drink whiskey.”
Hirschkorn said his nephew had asked him to teach him how to sell on Amazon, so he began to look at the data and said he saw an opportunity to differentiate his decanters from more generic looking ones.
“My nephew ended up not really being very interested in it so much, so it ended up being my brand, a second brand that I built,” Hirschkorn said.
Hirschkorn said that starting his businesses on Amazon allowed him to found brands that are now on track to do more than $2 million in sales because of low start-up costs, lower risk and the ability to outsource work.
On top of those two businesses, Hirschkorn also works with partners to teach people how to build a brand on Amazon and offer an array of services in copyrighting, graphic design, and consulting, he said.
“The great opportunity about Amazon is you don’t need like 10, 15 or 20 people to have a successful business,” Hirschkorn said, noting that he has one full-time assistant and one “virtual assistant” abroad.
And, Hirschkorn said, he is in the process of creating a third brand, this time involving event kits and higher end disposable party supplies.
