Prepare for Retail Success

How to Prepare for Retail Success

The biggest mistake that I see when working with a new supplier that's going into retail is that they don't prepare for success. Now, this is whether you are successful in retail by happenstance or you've been successful before, you might need a refresher. But the main thing that you need to do first is develop a retail strategy that will take you into the big box buyer meeting, into a meeting with any distributor, into a meeting with anybody that's looking to buy your product, whether that be a consumer, a store owner, or the president of Walmart. You need to know your retail strategy and that revolves around the four P's. The best way to remember this is product, price, place, and promotion.

Let's go through these one by one to make sure that we understand the ins and outs. When we're talking about product, it's not necessarily all about the features of your product or what makes you better than the competitor. At the end of the day, that doesn't really matter to the person who's buying your product besides the consumer. It matters that, how many units are going to sell. And if you're competing against 5-hour ENERGY and you have an energy shot, or you're competing against Red Bull and you have a beverage, when you put your product up against another product, even though yours may be better in every way, the products that move off the shelf are gonna get placed more often. So, knowing your product and knowing how fast it's gonna move off the shelf, having a strategy behind advertising it, will be the best bet to get you retail placement. Always test before you invest.

Second is gonna be price. And it's not just retail price and the discount schedule that you need to know. You also need to know your lowest price that you're willing to accept from a retail buyer. If you go into a retail meeting and you negotiate and you take your retail price from $5 to $4, fine. If you take your wholesale price down to $2, you can live with that. But what happens when you take it down to $1.80 because you're gonna get a huge purchase order, and you leave yourself such a slim margin, that when you account for fees, shipping, distribution, any point of purchase materials, any placement fees, you get squeezed out. And sometimes, people are willing to accept a lower price because they're so excited about getting a purchase order, they don't realize that at the end of the day, they're paying to have their product on the shelf and they're not making any money.

At the end of the day, it's all about the product on the shelf being bought by the consumer that doesn't know who you are. So if you don't have a promotion schedule in place where you need to promote your product and get consumers in the store to buy your product, then you're not gonna make a great splash with the retail buyer. It might go for three months, you might get good results, and then you'll get a lot of lip service, and they won't look for it. But knowing how to promote your product besides social media is very important. Social media can be a huge catalyst but it's not going to move products flying off the shelf at a major retailer or independent stores.

The last thing that I wanna cover is placement. The placement in the store is very important and a lot of retail negotiation is all about placement. If you are a Clip Strip product, if you can hang in the store, that would give you a lot more wiggle room on where you get placed. But if you need to be in the pharmacy, and the pharmacy is full up, you're not taking any more products for the pharmacy, but they're willing to place you in the kitchen aisle, it's better sometimes not to take that placement because you get one shot at proving your product's value. And if you get placed in the kitchen aisle and it doesn't sell through and it doesn't meet expectations, they're not gonna move you to the pharmacy section just because it should've been there. That was your test. And moving on from that is sometimes impossible with that individual retailer. So when you sit in with a retailer, any kind of buyer, you need to know the four P's, product, price, promotion, and place.