How Sarah Wells Bags Uses AI to Compete With Bigger Brands
Sarah Wells, Founder, Sarah Wells Bags | Fairfax, VA
In 2011, after the birth of my first daughter, I needed a functional and stylish bag for carrying a breast-pump and keeping milk fresh. To my surprise, no such bag existed. Realizing that millions of other moms had the same need, I decided to launch my own business, Sarah Wells Bags, in 2013.
Fast-forward to 2026, and I’ve built a thriving e-commerce business offering dozens of high-quality breastfeeding products along with a wide range of signature bags. My business has just four employees, but we annually generate millions in sales. We offer our products on many digital platforms — including Amazon, Target, Walmart, Babylist, and our own Shopify-powered website — reaching customers in all 50 states and around the world.
AI-powered tools are imperative to my business’s success, allowing us to grow and thrive in today’s complex, chaotic global marketplace. For example, we use an AI-powered financial management tool called Finaloop. It’s integrated with our sales platforms, and it handles our bookkeeping, manages our balance sheet, tracks and inputs shifting tariff-related costs, watches our margins, monitors our inventory, and offers sales projections. It’s like having a world-class finance team led by an incredibly smart, knowledgeable CFO. My small business couldn’t possibly afford to hire a team of financial experts — but Finaloop costs 90% less than what I used to pay just for bookkeeping services.
We also use an AI-powered marketing tool called Blaze.ai to help with our creative work. We gave it 14 years of our photos and written material and trained it to write in our voice and incorporate our messaging. Now it helps us draft a huge portion of our social media content. We still set the strategy, define the voice, and make the final decisions — but AI dramatically increases our production capacity. It adds a lot of creative horsepower to our small team without adding much overhead; it costs about $70 a month.
In addition, on Amazon, where we do the bulk of our sales, AI-powered tools help us monitor performance, manage ads, and optimize listings across dozens of SKUs. That helps us turn an overwhelming amount of platform-data into clear, actionable insights — allowing our four-person team to operate with enterprise-level sophistication.
For small businesses like mine, the real value of AI-powered tools goes far beyond efficiency or savings. What AI-powered tools really do is empower us to sell our products on a level playing field with much bigger companies. Today, the smallest and biggest businesses share a crowded space side-by-side on the same platforms. Until now, big businesses’ financial resources have allowed them to dominate capabilities like advertising optimization and content testing. But AI is rapidly closing that gap.
I know that AI-powered technologies come with risks and downsides, and that AI needs guardrails. But AI applications like the ones I use are incredibly empowering. For small businesses, AI isn’t an external bad actor, or something that’s being inflicted on us. For years, small businesses have been asking for tools that level the playing field, make financial compliance easier, help us process data, and allow us to really compete. Now, finally, those tools are here.
