🥷 How Mini Katana Became a $10M+ Brand Without Ads

In an ecommerce world obsessed with ad hacks and funnel tweaks, Mini Katana carved its own path. Literally.

Banned from running paid ads, founder Isaac Medeiros didn’t pivot, he doubled down. On content. On community. On building a brand that people wanted to talk about before they bought anything. I keep talking about the idea that you can build an ecommerce brand where ‘buy into you’ before they ‘buy from you’. That simple idea sits central to your content-first growth strategy. Back to MiniKatana…

Today, Mini Katana is a multi-eight-figure business. Their main YouTube channel has over 20 million subscribers. They’re pulling in hundreds of millions of organic video views per month. And they’ve turned that attention into consistent product sales (no paid traffic necessary).

So… how exactly did they do it?

Here’s the breakdown.

1. A Founder Who Turned Constraints into a Growth Advantage

Isaac Medeiros didn’t set out to build a sword empire. Mini Katana was actually his eighth attempt at launching a business. The first seven failed.

When he finally found product-market fit with replica katanas, the next roadblock hit: he couldn’t run Facebook or Instagram ads. Weapon-like products violated ad policies.

Rather than fight it, he built something different … a media company disguised as an ecommerce brand.

2. YouTube and TikTok as the New Customer Funnel

Isaac and his team shifted focus from acquisition to attention. Their formula was simple but relentless:

• Daily content (3–20 videos/day across platforms)

• Weekly long-form YouTube videos

• Product-focused Shorts and TikToks (slicing fruit, destroying bullets, ASMR steel sharpening)

• Always on-brand with anime, samurai, and otaku aesthetics

What happened next?

• YouTube exploded: From 0 to 20.9M subscribers and 14B+ total views

• Organic content drove $1.5M in sales in just 90 days

• YouTube Shorts helped them hack the algorithm for maximum discoverability

And best of all: YouTube became its own profit centre, likely generating up to $230K/month in revenue.

3. Building a Brand People Care About

Mini Katana isn’t just a Shopify store selling swords. It’s a cultural brand.

Their videos tap into anime fandoms, historical fascination, and a deep internet love of “cool stuff that cuts things.” But it goes beyond entertainment. Isaac built:

• Deep community engagement through comments, polls, and replies

• Consistent, memeable (if that’s not a word it should be) content formats that fans return for

• High product quality that over-delivers (carbon steel, sharpened edges, full tang)

That’s what makes people buy… not because of an offer or discount, but because they want to belong to the world Mini Katana has created.

4. Operational Excellence Behind the Scenes

Most viral brands can’t scale. Mini Katana can.

• They moved from a garage to co-warehousing at ReadySpaces

• Built their own warehouse infrastructure to support rapid growth

• Integrated CX tools like Wonderment to reduce support tickets and boost post-purchase experience

• Use direct mail postcards and email retargeting to close customers from content views

The takeaway? They invested in backend infrastructure to match the front-end hype.

5. Rinse, Repeat, Expand: The Kanpai Foods Playbook

What happens when you have a content engine that prints reach?

You use it to launch more brands.

Isaac’s next move: Kanpai Foods, a freeze-dried candy business now pushing 400K YouTube subscribers off the same content model.

It’s proof that this isn’t a one-product wonder, it’s a repeatable, scalable, vertical-agnostic strategy.

Here’s The Mini Katana Playbook

Final Thoughts: What Ecommerce Brands Can Learn

Mini Katana proves that in 2025, owning attention is more valuable than renting reach.

Isaac didn’t scale by chasing media buying hacks. He built content people wanted to watch, then made it easy for those people to buy.

If you’re stuck trying to outbid competitors on Meta or Google, take a lesson from the blade: sharpen your storytelling, not just your CPMs. You don’t have to run your business where growth is shackled to ad spend. You can grow Beyond Just Ads.