Year Three and Four of My FBA Journey. The Years Everything Changed

here are moments in business when you can feel the ground shifting beneath your feet. Not dramatically at first. It starts as a quiet rumble. A faint sense that something is brewing behind the curtain. Then, before you know it, the stage lights snap on and you realise you are performing a completely different play from the one you rehearsed.

Years three and four of my FBA journey were exactly that kind of unexpected performance. This period, from September 2019 to September 2021, would prove to be the most dramatic turning point since I started the business back in 2017. It was the era of travel stock, lockdowns, unexpected heroes, government loans, and the slow dawning realisation that I was no longer running a simple solo operation. I was running something that was slowly growing teeth.

Let me take you back to the moment the curtain lifted.

The Month Everything Looked Perfect

February 2020 was a picture of optimism.
I had just taken delivery of a huge shipment of packing cubes for my travel brand, Martian Travel. Bright colours. Neatly stitched. Ready for adventure. Designed for people who were planning holidays, business trips, weekend escapes. People, in other words, who were going somewhere.

Looking at the boxes stacked neatly in the garage, I felt the kind of satisfaction that only an entrepreneur understands. I had invested heavily. About twenty five thousand pounds. A frightening amount of money at the time. But it was all calculated. The product had traction. There was momentum building. Travel demand was steady. Everything made sense.

Then, of course, the universe cleared its throat and said,
“Actually, let us try something different.”

When Travel Stopped And Panic Started

By March, the UK was officially in lockdown. The words stay at home began floating around like an instruction from a mildly irritated parent. Overnight, the travel industry froze. Planes stayed grounded. Suitcases gathered dust. The only travelling most people did was between the sofa and the fridge.

And there I was, sitting in a house full of packing cubes that no one needed.
It felt like the punchline of a joke I had not realised I was telling.

For a brief moment, I thought this was it. The business was about to implode in real time. You cannot exactly pivot a travel product into something else. No one was sitting at home thinking,
“Do you know what would make lockdown more enjoyable? A set of packing cubes.”

It was a bleak moment. One of those times when you catch yourself staring at the ceiling and wondering if it is too late to retrain as a barista.

But here is the strange thing about chaos.
Sometimes it closes one door while flinging another wide open.

The Pillow That Changed Everything

Just two months before all this began, in January 2020, I had launched a brand new pillow. A bamboo hotel style pillow with a cloud like feel. It was the kind of product that made you think of crisp linen, deep sleep, and those rare mornings where you wake up feeling like a functioning human being.

When lockdowns started, something very interesting happened.
The nation collectively decided that home was suddenly the most important place in the world. People began redecorating. Rearranging. Repainting. Decluttering. Reimagining their lives one cushion at a time.

And seemingly overnight, our pillow surged.

It did not just sell.
It lifted off the shelves like a flock of startled birds.

At first I thought it was a fluke. A fortunate coincidence. Then I checked the numbers again. And again. And then I realised this was no accident. This was demand on full throttle.

By June I had already reordered.
By July and August I realised I was going to run out again.
This time, instead of thinking small, I took one of the biggest gambles of the entire business journey. I ordered three full container loads.

Three metal giants of product.
Three vast quantities of inventory.
Three moments where I wondered if I had finally lost my mind.

Looking back, this was the first time I saw the true entrepreneurial paradox in myself. Equal parts fear and fire.

The Government Loan That Fuelled The Leap

Around this time, the UK Government released the Bounce Back Loans scheme. I still remember reading the details and blinking twice. It felt almost too good to be true. Lending at two point five percent interest. Ten years to repay. No personal guarantee. It was a rare moment in history where borrowing felt less like a financial contract and more like someone handing you a polite invitation to grow.

I took the maximum fifty thousand pounds.
It was one of the most important decisions of those two years.

With that money I could support the explosive pillow demand, rebuild the business structure, and prevent cash flow from suffocating under the rapid growth.

Meanwhile, the packing cubes sat there in the garage, untouched. A bittersweet reminder of how quickly the world can reshape the value of your decisions. I eventually discontinued the product. I made a loss overall. But the pillow growth more than compensated for the collapse of the travel category. In fact, it became the defining product of the brand.

The Subtle Shift From Doing To Managing

Yet beneath the success was something quieter and more personal.
A realisation that crept in slowly but firmly.

As the pillow range grew, every part of the business grew with it.

Customer service grew.
Inventory management grew.
Storage costs grew.
Marketing requirements grew.
Cash flow complexity grew.
The emotional burden grew too.

What began as a solo operation where I handled everything in a single human brain was now starting to split into multiple roles. Each part of the business felt like a job in itself. There were days I looked at my workload and wondered whether I had signed up to run a business or accidentally adopted several small pets that all needed feeding at different times.

It was still manageable in these years. Just. But I could feel the undertone. A subtle whisper telling me that everything was about to get bigger, more complicated, and far less tolerant of casual decision making.

These years were not just about selling more pillows.
They were about learning how to become the kind of person who could run a growing company.

The Hidden Lesson That Changed Me

Looking back, years three and four taught me a single, powerful truth.

Sometimes the thing you fear becomes the thing that transforms you.
Sometimes disaster quietly disguises itself as a teacher.
And sometimes the best product in your entire business arrives in the same year everything else falls apart.

Had travel not collapsed, I might never have discovered the full potential of the pillow range. I might never have taken the financial risks required to grow. I might never have learned what it feels like to ride the edge of uncertainty and come out stronger.

In many ways, these were the years I stopped running a small operation and started building something more professional. Something more resilient. Something that would soon require deeper financial strategy, bigger thinking, and a whole new level of mindset.

That next evolution, however, belongs to years five and six.
The era where levelling up becomes unavoidable.

For now, years three and four remain unforgettable.
The years everything changed.
The years that tested me.
The years that revealed the future of the company, even when it looked like the end.

Sometimes opportunity arrives disguised as chaos.
And sometimes it arrives disguised as a container full of pillows.