What Running 10 Brands Taught Us About Focus

A friend recently asked me how many brands Boxiki Group operates. When I started counting on my fingers and ran out of fingers, she laughed. "That's either impressive or insane," she said. Some days, I'm not sure which.

As of mid-2024, our portfolio includes Boxiki Kitchen, Boxiki Travel, Boxiki Kids, Boxiki Kitchen, Stone & Clark, Sharp Brain Zone, and several others across home, kitchen, personal care, and lifestyle categories. Each brand has its own identity, its own customer base, and its own demands on our attention.

Here's what running all of them has taught me about focus — and why the lessons were harder to learn than I expected.

The Attention Trap

When you have one brand, focus is easy. All your energy goes into one thing. You know every product, every review, every supplier by name. When you have three brands, it's still manageable — you can hold three brand identities in your head and switch between them throughout the day.

But somewhere around five or six brands, something breaks. You can't maintain deep knowledge of everything anymore. Details slip through cracks. A product listing that needs updating gets forgotten. A supplier relationship that needs nurturing goes quiet. You're not neglecting anything deliberately — there's just too much to hold.

I hit this wall in late 2023, and I'll be honest: it was humbling. I'd built this portfolio of brands thinking I could oversee all of them personally, and the reality was that I couldn't. No one person could.

The Brand Manager Model

The solution, once I got over my ego, was obvious: hire specialists. Not generalists who could bounce between brands, but dedicated people who would own specific brands or brand clusters completely.

We implemented a brand manager model where each person or small team is responsible for the end-to-end performance of their assigned brands. They own the product development, listing optimization, inventory planning, marketing, and customer service for their brands. They're the experts. They know every SKU, every review trend, every seasonal pattern.

My role shifted from doing everything to setting direction and removing obstacles. I still have opinions about every brand (ask my team — they'll confirm I share those opinions freely), but I no longer try to make every decision. The brand managers are closer to the details, and in most cases, their judgment is better than mine would be.

What Focus Actually Means

Here's the counterintuitive lesson: having ten brands actually improved our focus, because it forced us to build systems that a one-brand company never would have needed.

When I was managing everything myself, "focus" meant whatever I happened to be looking at that day. It was reactive. With brand managers, each brand gets consistent, dedicated attention from someone whose job is to think about nothing else. That's not less focus — it's more focus, just distributed.

We also got better at saying no. When you have ten brands, every new product idea or market opportunity is competing against nine other brands' needs for the same resources. That scarcity forces prioritization in a way that abundance never does. Our product launch success rate has actually improved since we expanded the portfolio, because every launch now has to survive a much higher bar of scrutiny.

The Honest Truth

Do I sometimes miss the simplicity of running one brand? Absolutely. There's a romantic appeal to the focused founder, doing one thing and doing it brilliantly. But that's not our story. Our story is building a family of brands that share common values — quality, sustainability, giving back — while each serving their unique customer base.

It's messier than a single-brand narrative. It requires more trust, more delegation, and more organizational discipline. But it also creates more impact. More products in more categories reaching more customers in more countries. More charitable donations across more communities. More carbon offsets through more certified items.

Ten brands taught us that focus isn't about doing less. It's about having the right people do the right things. I wish I'd learned that lesson sooner, but I'm glad I learned it at all.