How Ideal Direct lost 50% of sales on a 2 "simple" best-sellers

About

Ideal Direct is a UK consumer‑goods company with roots going back to 1977 and annual turnover “pushing 10 million.” Decades of experience and long‑standing factory relationships helped them scale best‑sellers across categories—from kitchenware to accessories.

Despite the track record, two painful episodes—one on a breakout butter dish, another on a wooden shoe stretcher they’d produced for nearly 20 years—made one reality crystal clear: it’s not “if” a bad order happens, but “when”.

The Challenge

1) The very simple butter dish that “couldn’t go wrong”—until it did.

One of Ideal Direct’s top products was a butter dish. It was the #1 best-selling product in it’s category on Amazon UK. As products go, it was fairly simple:

"It’s like you can't get any more simple than a butter dish. Which is why we weren’t doing any repeat inspections.” - Gavin Odd

After multiple clean reorders over 4 years, a new batch arrived with mold, mis‑cut lids that didn’t seat correctly, rough edges that could splinter, and seals that stuck.

"Whatever could be wrong with it is actually wrong with it. We obviously can't sell that product at all. We're talking like tens of thousands of this butter dish we sold. So we've had like plenty of reorders with the company, then all of a sudden we had this one bad batch come in" - Gavin Odd

This wasn’t a brand‑new supplier: the relationship was ~4 years old, and the listing had held a 4.5‑star average. Despite this, it wasn’t the smoothest process to resolve the issues.

"We had a lot of back and forth with the supplier and a lot of arguing over whose fault it was. In the end, we're going down to the warehouse, we're bringing down pallets of these butter dishes and literally just opening up random boxes in front of them on the video, just pulling some out. It doesn't matter which one you pull out, it's going to have to have these faults.” - Gavin Odd

2) A 20‑year best-seller undone by a single part change

Ideal Direct’s other best-seller on Amazon UK and other outlet was a wooden shoe stretcher they’d purchased from the same supplier for 15–20 years. A fairly simple product. The factory quietly changed a washer. Under load, the washer collapsed—leading to bad reviews and returns.

“We'd ordered off this company, you know, we're talking dozens and dozens of times over the years, and then all of a sudden they just changed that washer and it's like that whole batch is like, you know, obviously we're trying to send them out, we're getting bad reviews, customers are not happy." - Gavin Odd

The Result: 50% of sales permanently lost

Across both best-sellers, Ideal Direct was unable to ship bad product to Amazon’s warehouses and went out-of-stock, resulting in huge amounts of lost sales and permanent listing damage.

"Being out of stock alone on a product is literally like the end of the world on Amazon. So that alone is, yeah, very costly." - Gavin Odd

Even after getting the product back in-stock, Ideal Direct saw a 50% decline in sales, setting their product back years!

"To actually recover it’s not just as simple as bringing in the correct product. You've then got to spend a lot of money on advertising, and get yourself back up there. You've got to get rid of all the bad reviews by getting good reviews to push them back out of the way. The damage can be like put your product years really!" - Gavin Odd

Solution: OpsNinja Inspections on ALL orders moving forwards

Given how simple the butter dish and shoe stretcher were, Ideal Direct was not doing inspections on batches. It’s almost impossible for the supplier to mess it up, right?! Wrong.

"You can't get any more simple than a butter dish which is why we weren’t doing any repeat inspections. We was only inspecting really on the first orders. Once you find everything's fine, we, we thought we'd be okay going forward and they're not going to cut any corners. But obviously then a few orders down the line we got this really bad order come in which yeah, was not a good experience." - Gavin Odd

Why it’s important to do inspections on all batches

Just like any other business, your supplier is always changing.

• Employee turnover: Workers are constantly changing, being trained, and managers often turnover.
• Raw material changes: Suppliers routinely change their procurement as prices change and different suppliers go out of stock.
• Machines drift: Equipment must be constantly calibrated and it’s easy for some machines to be put aside, or not maintained properly.
• Incentives misalign: Tight deadlines, margin squeezes, or a bad employee can easily lead to corner-cutting.

Bottom line: Trust the relationship, but verify every order. Quality is a moving target.

"The cost to the business is like, huge compared to the cost of inspection. It's like, I don't even know, 50x, you know for what the small amount of inspection costs.” - Gavin Odd

Just look at the math. A bad order of even just $5,000 USD can easily pay for 25 inspections at $200, or 6+ years worth if you order every few months. And way more for larger orders, not to even including the cost of bad reviews and returns.

Why Ideal Direct Works With OpsNinja

OpsNinja helped Ideal Direct establish comprehensive checklists for all their products. For the butter dish, OpsNinja includes standard testing such as humidity testing against mold, color, material, shape, and more.

"That’s one of the things I like is that I don’t have to really give you a full checklist. You guys are the ones that come up with it which is brilliant. And we come back with this full report. It just a shame we didn't do it on that order." - Gavin Odd

We pride ourselves in doing one of the most thorough inspections in the industry for inspection we do. Ideal Direct worked with a number of other vendors including sourcing agents for inspections before choosing OpsNinja.

"There's been like a couple recently where we've used like a sourcing agent. The report is nowhere near as full. It's very basic and quite brief. It's hard to know how much you trust that. Whereas like a OpsNinja one is literally, I mean, you don't miss anything out. It's like literally every angle of the product. There's just so much content in there." - Gavin Odd

OpsNinja is the only modern tech-enabled inspections company with an Amazon storefront integration to sync your product catalog and returns. We’re the only 3rd party inspection vendor with digital reports that show you real-time AI-monitoring of the inspector on-site to give you confidence the inspection was done thoroughly and up to standards.