When Julian Miller and his husband, David McGranaghan, founded McMiller Games — maker of the viral It’s Bananas game — it was simply a side hustle. Both were professional actors who had initially created different board games as multi-generational entertainment for their families. They soon saw an opportunity to create and distribute their games more widely, but immediately faced their first challenge: getting them into stores.
Within a year, they began selling in Amazon’s store because of the convenience and tools it provided. “We just didn’t have the bandwidth to launch our own website,” says Miller, who serves as the company’s operations manager. “Getting set up [with Amazon] was really straightforward and made it possible to just start selling within a day.”
McMiller Games is one of millions of companies that have sold products in Amazon’s store since it opened to independent sellers in 2000. “When Amazon opened our store to independent sellers, it was a controversial decision,” notes Piyush Saraogi, vice president of fulfillment by Amazon. “But our customer obsession drove us forward — we knew it would unlock the products customers would love.”
Since then, independent sellers have generated more than $2.5 trillion in sales in Amazon’s store. In fact, more than 60% of Amazon’s sales come from independent sellers, most of which are small and medium-sized businesses. “They shouldn’t have to become supply chain experts on top of everything else,” says Saraogi. “That’s why we take on that work — so they can continue inventing amazing brands and products that customers want.”
Going from a garage to global logistics
While selling in Amazon’s store made life easier for Miller and McGranaghan, the founders faced other challenges early on. Their initial inventory of about 2,000 games was stored in McGranaghan’s mother’s garage. She became their de facto fulfillment center, making daily trips to the post office. “We want to relieve David’s mom and sell more than 50 games a day,” Miller recalls thinking at the time.
But they faced a dilemma: invest in warehouse space and hire staff — capital they didn’t have — or find a solution that could scale with them, like Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), which stores, picks, packs, and ships a company’s products to more than 100 countries and regions, while also handling customer service and returns. The impact was immediate. FBA simplified their operations, and they saw a boost in conversion and sales.
McMiller Games
Today, McMiller Games is a $7 million business and a full-time job for both Miller and McGranaghan. But as they scaled globally, they faced significant operational headaches in their upstream supply chain. They had to coordinate factory pickups, book ocean freight, manage customs documentation across fragmented systems, and juggle multiple logistics partners. If one link broke — a customs delay, a missed pickup — the whole chain fell apart.
That’s when they turned to Supply Chain by Amazon, an end-to-end, automated set of supply chain services that includes manufacturing pickup, customs management, freight and logistics, global warehousing, bulk inventory, and fulfillment. Sellers can pick and choose from the services provided or choose to opt into the fully managed option, which McMiller Games now uses to help move hundreds of thousands of units.
“Most sellers juggle five or six logistics partners just to move products globally,” says Apoorva Prasad, vice president of global logistics at Amazon. “We’ve eliminated that complexity with one integrated system so they can spend time creating, not coordinating.”
That has certainly been the case for McMiller Games. “We never really see our products,” says Miller — they move from the factory through transportation, customs, warehousing, and fulfillment without the team ever touching them.
Managing spikes in sales with ease
As of 2025, independent sellers move 5 billion products annually through Amazon’s network of global logistics, domestic freight, and bulk warehousing. But the real test of any supply chain comes during demand spikes, and McMiller Games has faced several: viral TikTok videos, a “Shark Tank” appearance that brought national exposure, and the annual Q4 holiday rush, where they sell 150,000 to 200,000 units in just two months.
McMiller Games tripled its sales the day the “Shark Tank” episode aired, but Miller says through its partnership with Amazon, he was able to enjoy that spike rather than panic because “with Amazon supply chain logistics already in place, we were able to deal with that quite easily.” Amazon helps the company meet that surge in demand without worrying about customer service and returns, which are handled through Fulfillment by Amazon.
While 80% of McMiller Games’ sales come through Amazon, the company has also begun selling through its own website, using Amazon’s Multi-Channel Fulfillment (MCF) to handle those orders. With MCF, Amazon manages picking, packing, and delivery of orders across all sales channels (beyond Amazon) from a single inventory pool. Because the games are often impulse buys, customers want them quickly, and Miller says, “the speed of delivery Amazon provides can’t be beat.”
Another advantage during peak sales periods is the flexibility built into Fulfillment by Amazon. Miller can request additional space in the fulfillment centers to accommodate higher volumes. And because McMiller Games also uses Amazon Warehousing and Distribution (AWD), they can access flexible storage capacity that scales with business needs.
“We always have [AWD] as a backup so that we can pivot really quickly and start shipping that stock into FBA,” he says. “Even if you sell out on FBA, the stock will always show as being available because you have that surplus stock sitting in the other warehouse.”
Perhaps most importantly, Supply Chain by Amazon frees up the founders’ time to focus on other areas of the business.
“What we’re good at is creating products, and that’s where we should focus our time,” Miller says. “The more products we can create and the more we can improve our products, the more we can sell and the more we can grow our business. Since Amazon takes so much work out of our hands, it allows us to focus on all these other parts. We always say to each other we wouldn’t have a business if Amazon wasn’t here.”
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This post was created by Insider Studios with Amazon.
