Brand Story — the cross-brand strip that frames every A+ project.

Brand Story is a separate A+ surface from standard A+ Content. In Seller Central it sits in the same A+ Content Manager, but it has its own project type, its own moderation pass, and — most importantly — its own propagation model. One Brand Story project is mapped to a brand and then renders, automatically, above the standard A+ block on every ASIN in that brand's catalogue. Build it once, and it frames the whole brand.

What it actually looks like on the PDP

Brand Story renders as a horizontal carousel that sits above the standard A+ Content block on desktop and mobile. The first card is the brand background; the subsequent cards are user-chosen sub-modules. The shopper swipes (mobile) or arrow-clicks (desktop) through them. Each card is a self-contained image-plus-text panel; the carousel format encourages quick scan-through rather than long reading.

The four sub-modules that build it

1. Brand Story Background — the first card and the only mandatory one. A 1464 × 625 px hero image with the brand mark, a short brand headline, and 135 characters of brand-positioning copy. This card is the "who is this brand" answer for a shopper landing on the PDP cold.
2. ASIN Store Showcase — a card that surfaces up to four ASINs from the brand's catalogue, each with image and short label, deep-linked to those PDPs. The cross-sell card. The single highest-leverage Brand Story sub-module for brands with more than one SKU.
3. Q&A — a card with three short questions and answers about the brand (origin, materials, manufacturing, sustainability, warranty). Reads as the brand's "About" page condensed into a card.
4. Image-with-Text — a flexible card with a 463 × 625 px image and 400 characters of body text. The story-telling card; usually used for founder narrative, design philosophy, or the brand's "why".

Carousel total: up to seven sub-module cards stacked behind the background, in any order. The order is set once in the project and the carousel renders that order on every ASIN it's mapped to.

The brand-wide reuse model

Unlike standard A+ — which is authored per-listing and mapped per-ASIN — Brand Story is authored per-brand and applied wholesale. Two practical consequences:

• One change propagates everywhere. Edit the Background card, resubmit, and after the moderation pass the new version renders on every ASIN in the brand within roughly 24 hours. This is the single biggest reason Brand Story is the right place to put cross-cutting brand messaging (sustainability commitments, certifications, warranty changes) rather than copying it into every standard A+ project.
• One mistake propagates everywhere too. A typo, a retired SKU in the ASIN Store Showcase, an outdated promotional claim — they all render on every PDP simultaneously. Brand Story changes deserve a tighter review process than per-listing A+ edits.

The image-spec envelope

• Brand Story Background hero: 1464 × 625 px, RGB JPG or PNG, sRGB profile.
• Brand logo on background: 463 × 625 px, transparent PNG. Sits on the left of the background card.
• Image-with-Text card image: 463 × 625 px, RGB JPG or PNG.
• ASIN Store Showcase images: auto-pulled from each linked ASIN's main image — nothing to upload, but it means the main image of every linked ASIN is now also a Brand Story asset and should be on-spec for that role.
• Universal rules: no promotional pricing, no third-party retailer references, no claims that aren't substantiated on the brand's destination pages. Same moderation rules as standard A+.

The carousel order that converts

Across audited brand pages, a consistent order outperforms ad-hoc carousels:

1. Background (mandatory first card) — "who we are" in three seconds.
2. ASIN Store Showcase — immediate cross-sell into the rest of the range while shopper attention is fresh.
3. Image-with-Text — the founder / philosophy / materials story for the shoppers who linger.
4. Q&A — pre-empts the three questions that drive returns or pre-purchase support tickets.
5. Second ASIN Store Showcase (if the range is large enough) — a second slot tuned to a different shopper intent.

Why Brand Story is the A+ Premium gate

At least one approved Brand Story project is one of the three eligibility conditions Amazon uses to unlock A+ Premium (covered in Episode 14). The reasoning is operational rather than commercial: Brand Story forces the brand to articulate, in moderated copy and approved imagery, that it actually is a brand — not a reseller, not a private-label drop-ship, not a generic catalogue. Premium then unlocks for brands that have cleared that bar.

Brand Story vs the Brand Storefront

These are two different surfaces and they're easy to confuse. The Brand Storefront is the brand's micro-site on Amazon (a multi-page hub at amazon.com/stores/[brand]), authored in Stores manager. Brand Story is the carousel module that lives inside each PDP. The two are linked — Brand Story usually links shoppers to the Storefront — but they are authored separately, moderated separately, and one is not a substitute for the other. A brand with a beautiful Storefront and no Brand Story is invisible on the PDP itself, where most of the buying decisions happen.

What this hands off to the next episode

Standard A+, A+ Premium, and Brand Story together cover the brand-controlled visual content surface on a Seller-Central listing. The next episode handles the moderation playbook — the rejection reasons that recur across A+ and Brand Story projects, and the rebuild discipline that keeps the queue moving.