The E-Comm Show
The E-Comm Show
Community-Driven Marketing & Pink Stork’s $25M+ Success Story | EP. #202
Looking for inspiration on growing a mission-driven eCommerce brand while staying true to your values? In this #202nd episode of The E-Comm Show, host Andrew Maff sits down with Amy Upchurch, founder and CEO of Pink Stork, a women’s wellness company generating over $25M+ annually and trusted by customers worldwide.
Amy shares how she built Pink Stork from scratch—starting with a deeply personal health challenge—and scaled it into a globally recognized brand with 170+ products, a loyal community of women, and a mission-first approach that puts faith and customer care at the center.
From community building and omnichannel sales to social media virality, operational insights, and innovative marketing tactics, Amy breaks down what it takes to grow authentically in today’s competitive eCommerce landscape. Whether you’re a founder, marketer, or aspiring entrepreneur, this episode delivers real strategies you can apply to build a brand with impact.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode
- Faith-Driven Leadership: How Amy built a nationally recognized women’s wellness brand without compromising her mission or values.
- Community & Customer Engagement: The role of Facebook groups, brand ambassadors, and hyper-personalized customer service in scaling trust.
- Omnichannel Growth: Selling on Amazon, Target, Walmart, international markets, and the DTC site—while balancing data, attribution, and convenience.
- Social Media Strategy: How Pink Stork tailors messaging for TikTok vs. Instagram vs. Facebook for maximum authenticity and reach.
- Operational Insights: Managing 170+ SKUs, in-house fulfillment, and global distribution without losing control of the brand experience.
- Marketing Innovations: From handwritten notes to the Fight Back Award—creative ways to surprise, delight, and empower customers.
- Scaling with Purpose: Lessons on leadership, team building, and keeping the brand mission-aligned while growing into eight figures.
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CONNECT WITH THE GUEST!
🌐 Website: https://pinkstork.com/
📱 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pinkstorkbyamysuzanne
📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pinkstork/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@pinkstork
📱 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/amysuzanneupchurch
📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amy.suzanne_/
Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@amy.suzanne_
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So our portfolio is still large and that's a challenge in and of itself. I wouldn't recommend that to anyone
Narrator:Welcome to the E comm Show podcast. I'm your host. Andrew Maff, owner and founder of BlueTusker, from groundbreaking industry updates to success stories and strategies, get to know the ins and outs of the e Commerce Industry from top leaders in the space. Let's get into it.
Amy Upchurch:Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the E comm show as usual. I'm your host, Andrew Maff, and today I am joined by the amazing Amy Upchurch, who is the founder and CEO over at Pink Stork. Amy, how you doing? Ready for good show? Hey, thanks so much for having me on your show.
Andrew Maff:Yeah, I appreciate you joining us. Super excited to have you on the show. Obviously, you have an amazing background. You've built an amazing business. There's a lot of us, a lot of stuff for us to get through, and we're going to do what we can to try and get through all but I was like starting these off pretty stereotypically, so I'd like to give you the floor and just tell us a little bit about your past, how you got started with Pink Stork, where it's at now, and we'll kind of take it from there.
Amy Upchurch:Okay, great, yes. So I, um, I started off actually from my own personal experience, kind of solving a problem that I was having. So with my first four pregnancies, I really struggled. I had something called hyperemesis, gravid arm, which I explained to people is like morning sickness on steroids, throwing up multiple times a day in and out the hospital. Long story short, was just not very good at being pregnant. And through that experience, I was with my fourth one, I was kind of out of desperation. Just said, hey, I want to try something completely different. I've gone the medical route and just started looking at natural, natural options for my body, so really focusing on my gut health, vitamins, minerals that I was putting in my body, and had an amazing experience, and really saw that there was a white space for for a brand to come in and really support women at the time, there wasn't a brand specifically focused on women's wellness, and that's what I wanted to do, without any background whatsoever. Decided I was going to do it, and I was going to start right where I was, which was military base in Washington, DC, without any kind of background or business. I went to school for communications. So not really knowing anything, Google was my best friend.
Andrew Maff:Love it. So tell me about, like the product line and kind of how you got to where you're at today, right?
Amy Upchurch:So we started, actually with nine products, which I wouldn't recommend. That's a lot of started with. We have now over 170 different products. So our portfolio is still large. That's and that's a challenge in and of itself. I wouldn't recommend that to anyone, but we started kind of with these core supplements and vitamins that I was originally taking with my pregnancy that was so just like that, aha experience. And from there, it was really a niche space. We were really focusing on morning sickness, so women who were experiencing morning sickness, and over time, we grew with our customer base into now we do every area of women's wellness, from PMS up to menopause, so, but we restarted off in a very niche space of the morning sickness and challenges.
Andrew Maff:And so now you're into how many, you said 100 and what?
Amy Upchurch:Like 170 SKUs righ now we're going realize, yeah, we we typically always try to launch new SKUs we do about three or four a quarter at the same time, we're always reviewing our portfolio to see, you know what SKUs are are not worth keeping in our in our portfolio, but we're always testing the market to see what resonates with women.
Andrew Maff:Yeah. So you've built a pretty impressive business, well into eight figures. That is very, very difficult to do for a lot of E commerce brands. What do you kind of, what do you attest that to is that from, I know there's a big community building aspect, I know you have your own following through a lot of social media channels, what was it that kind of helped you get through those initial phases to where you're at now?
Amy Upchurch:Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I feel like we, the mission of the company is to be able to help women all around the world, and so we've done things a little untraditionally that might not have made sense, because scaling is, you know, people would say, well, that's not the way you're going to be able to scale a business. Yeah. So I would say what has really helped us has been like that core following the fact that we have a lot of raving fans of our brands, we come into a time of a woman's life, typically where she's going through a transitions phase, so she might be trying to conceive, or she might be going through like a postpartum journey, kind of these very vulnerable stages of a woman's life, and we garnish a lot of trust with her, and that's something we don't take lightly, is so when we do things as a brand, it's might not make sense from a business point of view, but we do it from their trusting us with some of their most challenging, intimate, vulnerable phases of their life. So we owe it to them, to you know, go above and beyond what the norm is for businesses. So we'll send flowers. We will write handwritten cards. We respond to any and every message that comes across on our social media platforms. We have a tight knit community group with, you know, right now, I think there's like 5000 members in our and our raving fans group. We have brand ambassadors that we're very generous with. So I think that's what really has allowed us to grow from just that niche. You know, how many percent of women are pregnant, dealing with morning sickness to now women in all phases of life, is because we really pay attention to her and try to go above and beyond, anticipating her needs and making her feel seen and heard and valued.
Andrew Maff:That's awesome. That is, uh, that is customer service at its finest. What? What did it take? So I know, like, you have your own, like, I believe it's a Facebook group, like, you've got a bunch of different areas where you've kind of brought the community together. How did you kind of start that process? I know a lot of brands try it. They go through, like, some do, like, Slack workspaces and things like that. But it's sometimes it's difficult to kind of get that snowball effect going. What was your trick to actually getting that moving?
Amy Upchurch:Um, I think the trick for us was really just making being vulnerable and talking about kind of honest conversations that women were having. So for us again, it was morning sickness and saying, I can't even move. I can't even take care of what we have today, and just being very vulnerable, and we get it. We're women. We're 80% of our staff at Pink Stork are women that have experienced, you know, something along the way. Every every woman gets to experience something. And so I think just being very transparent and vulnerable that we also understand where she's coming from and creating that connection. And other people then will invite their friends and their friends and their friends, or if they say, oh, you know, you're having an issue with postpartum depression, you should join this group. Like this has really helped me and so really kind of taking every interaction to, you know, really appreciate just that organic community that we're building. And I also think meeting women where they are. So not everyone is on Facebook or Instagram, usually they have, like, a preference, and so really showing up across wherever, meeting them where they are, no matter what platform that they're on. So it is kind of a little bit of a challenge, because everyone has their own preferences where they have those communications, but we we do our best to kind of meet them no matter where they are.
Andrew Maff:Yeah, that was great segue, because I was gonna ask you something very similar to that, because I was I saw on your site, you've got certain products that you labels like they went viral and Tiktok, so people can easily find them. So are you basically positioning across all social media channels. And are you trying to, kind of, do you? Do you find that you have to kind of adjust the messaging a little bit depending on which platform you're on?
Amy Upchurch:100% yes, because, um, I think on just to be authentic on Tiktok, it looks really different than to be authentic on Facebook. So you have to think of what they're seeing, what they're viewing, and making sure that it comes across authentic. So if you just take like the same messaging and blanket it across all of your platforms, it's not it might resonate on one, but it's not, definitely not going to hit to the best of its ability on all of them. So you have to make tweaks.
Andrew Maff:Where else are you selling beside your website?
Amy Upchurch:Oh, we sell in target, we sell in Walmart, we sell on Amazon. We're in 25 different countries. We just launched last week in the UAE. So excited to just kind of continue to expand to reach women all around the world.
Andrew Maff:Nice. You had something on your website that really caught my eye that I don't see a lot of brands do. And I was so excited to see this. Oh no. And this is more on the it's kind of more on the marketing side. I really wanted to get your opinion. So on your website, at least under the products I saw, you had an option for people to just go straight to Amazon and purchase from there. So I love that. I'm a huge, huge fan of omni channel marketing approaches and just letting people shop wherever they're most comfortable, however. I know there's issues with, you know how well it tracks, and you know, even a fuse attribution like, it's not perfect. So how do you how do you look at that? How do you track the success of that, because I know you're doing, as we already talked about, you're doing a lot of marketing, driving traffic to your website that could theoretically be leaving and going to Amazon. So how are you tracking all that so that you know your how well your DTC efforts are affecting your Amazon business?
Amy Upchurch:Yeah, the sales team gets really mad at that, because it's not as clear as an acquisition costs as they want it to be. But I think again, it's about our testament to being able to meet women where they are. And I mean, I'm, I kind of use my experience along I'm, I'm a mom of six. I got a special needs child. There's a lot of things I'm doing in my day. I want to be able to shop on Amazon. I want to be able to hold my face up to the phone and make a purchase and get what I need to go on and move throughout my day. And so it really comes like you got to put the customer first, and then we have to do the best that we can on our teams to make those assumptions and kind of look at the data and see where, where, where, where the traffic is coming from. So it's not as clean when they are purchasing on Amazon, for sure, because Amazon owns that data. If you're on our website, we as a brand get to own that data. So when we're pushing them to another platform, we lose a little bit of data that can make it challenging. So we have to kind of make some assumptions there with best guesses and gathering as much data as we can to understand the funnel.
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Andrew Maff:Do you have you thought about doing that for other marketplaces and having the website turn into like a almost like a catalog showcase of all the different places people can shop?
Amy Upchurch:Right. Yeah, that's a good question. We've we're always kind of testing it to see. You know now you have Tiktok shop, Instagram, play to shop for a while. We also are as a brand, just in the wellness supplement space have different restrictions. So you know, on Tiktok, we can't sell our full portfolio, so we have to kind of think through what are the restrictions that we as a brand have to encounter to be able to sell on those platforms. But ultimately, the website is the home of the brand, so we should be showcasing everything and letting the consumer know where she can find all these products to purchase.
Andrew Maff:Yeah, what was your background before all this? Did you have any background in like, supplements or anything like that?
Amy Upchurch:No, not at all. Oh, nothing. Not in supplements. I mean, I've always been into wellness, um, not like, I wouldn't call myself like, oh, I wasn't like, like, I'd go out and eat a cheeseburger and everything. Like, I wasn't, like, very strict. But I've always enjoyed wellness. I was a college athlete, so I was always paying attention to my body and making sure I was feeling it right. But it really wasn't till my pregnancy is where my whole world got rocked and I was like, what my body is not performing. It's acting up. Why isn't it doing what I know it needs to do? So it wasn't to that, but I did just get my health certification. So I've really been trying to just continue to grow and learn. And I think, you know, continuing to be the best that I can be and learn. You know, stay open minded to business, to health, to wellness, to all the things I need to do to be able to continue to lead the company.
Andrew Maff:Yeah, did you, as you got things started? I find least, in my opinion, a lot of, especially e commerce brands, they can do a really good job as kind of a one person show and, like a few contractors, VAs stuff like that, and then they kind of get stuck, and delegating becomes an issue. What? At what point did you start involving like, you know, kind of either like an operational role or a CMO role? Like, at what point did you start bringing in more of a elevating the executive team I guess?
Amy Upchurch:Yeah, no, that's a good question. I've always been a huge fan of delegating. I i pretty early on. I, again, I was on a military base when I started this, so I was hiring women that were, you know, spouses around the country to be able to help. I knew I couldn't do it all. I don't know why, but I that was just very natural for me to be able to hire people and think of, you know, I need to be doing this. Who can I have to do this? I think prioritizing and time management are probably one of my biggest assets, and comes really strong for me. So I started honestly within a few months of things taking off. Also, we launched into Target nationwide about a year into the company, and this was a year into starting the company, and this was still kind of like, is it going to take off? Is it not and then when you go from like, I'm not really sure, to now you're in Target nationwide, like, you need people quickly to to get in there and do what you got to do.
Andrew Maff:Yeah. Are you still heavily involved in the military spouses, like community?
Amy Upchurch:I did a podcast with them yesterday.
Andrew Maff:Oh, really!
Amy Upchurch:Yeah, I did. It was a lot of fun. We do, we do, what is it called Baby operation, baby, we partner with them. So we partner with a lot of give back organizations, and so we send tons of products to all the military bases and spouses around the world just to help support them and give them some free products during you know, I know they've got a lot going on in their lives.
Andrew Maff:Yeah, I love I have a really good friend of mine from high school who started a business, and her husband's in the in the service, and she started a whole, she started a business really focused around spouses in the military, and it's all supporting them and stuff and like, the amount of the way that that community comes together is just amazing to watch, like it's so cool. So it makes a lot of sense that obviously you're involved in that. I love that the pivot, i know i It's my fault. I always talk about marketing stuff, the pivoting a little bit to the operational side, tariffs. Did they become a problem for you? It's always a hot topic. Always a hot topic right now, right?
Amy Upchurch:No, we haven't seen too much of an impact. To be honest, our manufacturers, we've kept in close contact with them, and for the most part, everything's kind of stayed the same, a little bit here and there, but not, I think, like we were preparing when you know initially tariffs were coming to light, so we'll see what happens down the road, though.
Andrew Maff:Yeah, do you are using a 3PL or do you have your own warehouse?
Amy Upchurch:Yeah, again, it's kind of control freak mentality of we want to make sure that the customer is getting the best care that they possibly can. And so for us, we we package everything in house that comes straight from our from our warehouses.
Andrew Maff:That's awesome. Yeah. I mean, if you can do it, that's the way to do it, because then you can, to your point of all the extra stuff that you do for your customers, that's the easiest way to actually be able to facilitate a lot of that stuff. So all right, so you sell on your site, you're on Amazon, you're a bunch of different places. You're in the UAE now, which is awesome. What's the thought going forward? You're at 170 products. Like, where are you thinking about taking the company?
Amy Upchurch:Yeah, so I, I'm definitely want to continue to launch internationally. Um, I think we've shown there's a lot of opportunity out there to be able to reach women all around the world. And so that is still the goal. Well, continuing to launch new SKUs. I'm not interested in selling. I'm not trying to exit like this is, this is kind of my, not. It's not even a baby. But this is my, I guess, vehicle to make an impact in the world. And I really want to be very closely a part of it, you know, just continuing to support women all around the world, however we can, we are going to be working on building out like a practitioners network, which has a team of doctors and experts where people can get support that way. So I think thinking through other vehicles besides just products and service and support, how else can we help women? Is where we're really trying to think and expand to over the next three to five years.
Andrew Maff:Again, a perfect segue. I could tell you've done podcast locks. I was gonna ask you did something with I think it's a fight back award, correct?
Amy Upchurch:Yes, yes, our fight back award.
Andrew Maff:Can you tell me about that?
Amy Upchurch:Yeah. So this is really cool story. Her name was Emma, or her name is Emma Marine, and she was basically, like robbed and robbed and tried to take someone, tried to kidnap her while she was at work. And, um, yeah, it got like, national recognition, like she's this tiny little girl, like 4'11 and she fought off this guy who I think had been wanted in like, a few states as well. He definitely had a history. But hold on one second. Sorry, but so we just wanted to recognize her. I saw a clip from her, I think it was on, like CBS, or it was some on news channel, and she was talking about how she wants to encourage women just to dig down deep and fight. And so I loved her scrappy just, you know, fight mentality. And I feel like it's, I don't know, I just really resonated with sometimes you just have to like fight to be able to get to where you're going. And life can be hard sometimes. And so decided to to come up with this fight back award, to kind of honor her and give her a little recognition and a little bit of money too, just to be able to, I'm sure she, you know, to get to do with it, what she wants, but just kind of, you know, I'm sure that was a traumatic experience. Brands for her, just again, encouraging women looking for opportunities, for the brand to be able to highlight women who are doing amazing things, no matter what those things are.
Andrew Maff:That's awesome. So was that an award that you gave to her as like a one time thing, or is that something that you're planning on doing on a consistent basis?
Amy Upchurch:No, I want to. I want to do it consistently wherever we kind of see that, that mindset in bringing she was just kind of that she was, I guess, the first person, the first started it. So on an annual basis.
Andrew Maff:Yeah, I love the a lot of the, I guess I would say, like outside of the box, thinking for the most part, especially from, you know, I'm gonna cater to all the marketing stuff. That's what I do. But like, it's just, you know, you get the standard stuff of, like, oh, we ran ads, we did this, we did that, and like, blah, blah. But when you start to really think about other ways that you can not only help out your customers, but bring in more awareness, the business is just, I love all that stuff. So cool. What's uh, the it's uh, the women's wellness space is, is wildly interesting. It's not really touched by a lot of brands, but then there are brands that strictly cater to it. So you do have some competition out there. What's, what's kind of your approach to differentiating Pink Stork versus everyone else?
Amy Upchurch:Um, I mean, I think just being authentic to who we are, like you said, like looking for those opportunities to do things differently. A lot of our competition is backed by, you know, VC money. They've got investors that are telling them how to do things. What, you know, it's just, in my opinion, it's added pressure to the business that pulls away from, I don't know, you know what their goals are, but our goals are be able to, you know, support women and help women, and when, when you have that added pressure of, you know, investors or whatever, I think that that could really dilute the mission of what you're trying to do. So this way, we can think outside of the box. We can make pivots really quick and be authentic in a way that you know matters to what we think our customers will care about.
Andrew Maff:Makes sense. Amy, appreciate you having the show. I don't wanna take up too much your time. I know you're super busy. I would love to give you the floor. Tell everyone where they everyone where they can find out more about you, and, of course, more about Pink Stork.
Amy Upchurch:Yes, of course. So you're looking for some wellness supplements for all the female listeners out there, you check us out on Amazon, on our website, pinkstork.com target WalMart. We do international shipping on our website as well. You can follow us on social all the major social channels. You can check my socials out as well. I'm very active on that on Instagram and TikTok. So would love for you to be a part, and obviously, would love for pink, historic to be a part of your wellness journey.
Andrew Maff:Beautiful. Amy, thank you so much for being on the show. Everyone who tuned in, of course, thank you as well. Please make sure you do the usual thing, rate, review, subscribe all that fun stuff on whichever on whichever podcast platform you prefer, or head over to the E comm show to check out all of our previous episodes. But as usual, thank you all for joining us, and we'll see you all next time.
Narrator:Thank you for tuning in to the E comm show. Head over to E comm show.com to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or on the BlueTusker YouTube channel, the E comm show is brought to you by BlueTusker, a full service digital marketing company specifically for E commerce sellers looking to accelerate their growth. Go to bluetuskr.com now for more information, make sure to tune in next week for another amazing episode of the E comm show.
