1797 – The Key to Retail Success with Bryan Alston

0:28Hey there, thoughtful listener. million in revenue. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments. You can even chat with me live and I'll see and reply to your messages. Also, don't forget, the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for guests. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We'd love to have you.

0:59with us right now it's brian alston brian you are the co-founder and managing partner of brand castle growth partners you're found on the web at brandcastle.co brian thank you so much for joining us yeah thank you so much for having me all right yeah give us an overview of what what Brandcastle is. Yeah, sure. So essentially Brandcastle is focused on helping e-commerce brands not only succeed online, but to become omnichannel by succeeding in stores. And we not only facilitate the entire process for getting you into as many doors as possible, but more importantly, we help with the branding and the marketing required for you to actually succeed when you're in 1 ,000, 2 ,000 plus doors.

1:47That's the Cliff Notes version of Grand Castle, but there's a lot of minutiae that we focus on that we think gives us our secret sauce. Yeah. How is it different for someone who says, well, I'm going to start selling in e-com versus, well, I'm going to start selling on store shelves. It's kind of a little bit of a different journey for each, I believe. Yeah, totally. So I'll start with the store shelves group first and sort of what I've seen in the 12 years I've been doing this in the space, which is a lot of brands might have an excellent product and maybe they had a really good meeting with their buyer.

2:26They have a product that if people bought it, they would most likely enjoy it. But if you think about the massive amount of competition you have on shelf in the store and really how passive it is. Like, you don't know who's exactly walking down that aisle at any given day. And like, why would they choose you over one of the leading brands? It just sort of puts a lot of fate in other people's hands, like versus the brands who have started online first, like some of the past clients I've worked with, like Magic Spoon or Our Place or some of these other e-commerce brands that used online, plus Amazon, to grow their brand, to really get a massive email and SMS list.

3:09They were able to have a bunch of hype on social media, which not only gave them a lot of poker chips needed to go into the meetings with Target and Whole Foods and whoever it is, to negotiate fewer or no spotting fees, to not have to pay them for as much advertising through their own internal networks, et cetera. But more importantly, they were also able to negotiate really prime placement in the stores. Because if you think about it, brick and mortar is a real estate play. And there might only be like six to 12 inches of space on a shelf where there's room for a new brand to play. And if you're a buyer who has to fill that space with a hot brand, you're going to be far more likely to take a brand that's already showing signs of hype and growth online.

3:56and in addition to that has really good on like repeat purchase rates, has a really good marketing funnel that they've been able to show works online and on Amazon, et cetera. It just sort of de-risks it for the buyer. And again, when you're already on shelf in the store, you're going to have more levers to pull as a brand to actually sell the units needed when you're on shelf at Target, which for some reason doesn't really get thought about. A lot of brands are like, hey, we're in target. We're in all these doors. And then six months later, those doors go down because they aren't able to get as much foot traffic or unit sales as needed to stay there.

4:38Yeah. Well, that's got to be... And I want to give you a shout out for some of the brands that you've worked with because I'm familiar with some of them. You'd mentioned Magic Spoon. That is a great cereal brand for those who want to kind of cut down on the sugar and the carbs, I believe, right? Right. Yeah. Also a lot of the Quest Nutrition, Celsius, Clove, I've seen Four Sigmatic. So this is kind of interesting and you're absolutely right. Like if I'm a buyer for Target and I have someone that comes in, they're like, yeah, we've already been selling for years and we have a devoted following.

5:16And guess what? They're coming into your store looking for our product and they can't find it. That's kind of coming in from a pretty strong negotiation standpoint. A hundred percent. And that's exactly what happened with Quest Nutrition. So my co-founder at Brandcastle, like Yemeni Mesa, he was the former chief sales officer for Quest, joined them when they were doing about$20 million through 500 million. And that's exactly what happened with them. They had offers to go into stores for many years that they intentionally turned down because they wanted to build this brand and build this critical mass online.

5:53And then when they did go into stores with, again, this huge business that was in demand, customers were asking the retailers for these bars that were so delicious. They were able to say, hey, we want to be on this shelf right here. We want this end cap display. We don't want to pay slotting fees. We want to partner with you on exclusive seasonal flavors, et cetera. They were able to sort of go in and provide value and provide a lot of strong business for the buyer versus the other way around, which is just being one of many bars that is hoping to use the massive distribution that let's say a target has to sell their product.

6:38when in reality, it's going to be very difficult to do if you don't have any sort of online presence or sort of what I call a canon that you can use to drive the foot traffic and drive the demand if needed to the stores and how that manifest depends on the product. It could be your email list. It could be you constantly going viral on TikTok. It could be other things. Yeah. Yeah. And share just a little bit about timing, Brian. When is too early and when is kind of just right for someone that's already doing well on e-com to start having those conversations with the stores? It's a great question.

7:20And I don't know if there's sort of a one-size-fits-all time. I always like to look at brands that I've audited and just looked at their analytics to say, okay, one, is your business profitable? If you're going to go into stores, which is going to be a massive purchase order, it's going to totally change the cash cycles of your business, et cetera, is this going to do what's called growing broke? Which is you are technically growing your top line revenue when you're getting tons of new customers and tons of distribution. But if each of those POs that you are signing are going to put you deeper in the hole financially, then that's not a good time to go into stores for obvious reasons.

8:02Plus, there's also a lot of examples, and this could perhaps be its own episode, about a lot of brands not knowing who their customers really are. And if I had to zoom out and look at my entire career, all the brands I've worked with, the ones who have done the best, not only online, but as an omni-channel brand, are ones who have a very, very clear and intimate understanding of exactly who their customers are, not just in terms of their demographics, but what are the other items in their house that they're purchasing outside of your category? How do you fit into their daily life? What are some of the publications or Instagram followers or influencers, et cetera, that they follow?

8:46So that way, again, you have a more well-rounded picture of the lifestyle of your target customer and the levers you can pull as the brand to help them be better people with your product, of course. And what I've noticed, a lot of the brands that we've talked to since we started Brandcastle who are looking to go into stores don't know that information. They might not know exactly who their customer is. They just know, well, it's a woman who does yoga. That's not specific enough. Nice try. I mean, that's great. You don't need to be a little bit more specific. Exactly. And again, just think about this from a 30 ,000 foot view.

9:26If you know exactly who your customer is, you might know like, hey, she or he is more likely to shop at this specific chain of stores than the Target or the Walmart or the Whole Foods, sort of like the A-list stores that everyone wants. Hey, perhaps our customers tend to be more geographically clustered. Perhaps there's a more local or regional store chain that we can start with that may not report their unit sales to spins or to some of these other platforms. And the reason I say that is because, again, say that you are an up-and-coming brand and you're just getting your feet wet. Maybe you're doing a few hundred thousand dollars a year and you go into Target without the production capacity, without the cash on hand needed to make all of those units and get them actually shipped to Target on time and all of that, and you don't have the marketing engine to drive the unit sales you need, it's not over for your business if it doesn't work, but it's going to be very difficult versus if you, let's say, started at a more regional retailer that maybe has a few hundred doors in a part of the country.

10:40And you're able to sort of use that almost as the training wheels retailer, where they probably aren't going to have the same sort of like slotting fees or things that are going to come into your margin that a big retailer will. But you're going to be able to, again, use that as a case study to be like, hey, we were able to send an email out to all of our customers in this region. And we saw this impact to our unit sales in the store. Hey, we were able to do X, Y, and Z, like guerrilla marketing tactics in order to win here. Again, when you go to Target or to one of the bigger retailers with those case studies in mind, you're going to have far more poker chips at the table versus if you went to a retailer that reported your unit sales to Spind or to some of these other platforms, Target's going to know, hey, you're only selling two units a week.

11:30Yeah, sorry, that's a little light. So again, it's sort of like thinking about how you can craft the biggest and best success story, not only for your business, but also for these retailers and using e-commerce when possible to facilitate that process. Yeah. And I would imagine, Brian, a lot of, let's say you have someone coming through the door and they're like, hey, we're doing about a half a million right now in annual sales and e-com. I would imagine like the initial engagement is probably going to be a lot around, are you ready? And kind of this deep assessment of what's going on operationally, you know, what kind of work they've done on understanding their USP.

12:15Like, right. I would imagine like that's got to be kind of a, I don't want to say fun process, but, you know, at least a pretty systemic process of, of kind of going through that checklist to kind of this almost like retail readiness test. A hundred percent. And that's something that we have, like we do have sort of our, our checklist or audit, whatever you want to call it in order to like really figure out if you're ready. It's worth pointing out that we don't wait until we're finished with that to get the of ball rolling because it can take many months before you actually get in front of a buyer.

12:50So for us, we like to start that process as early as possible while we're also working on getting the business completely set up and ready. And there are some instances where some of our clients just really aren't ready at all to be put in front of a buyer. There might be some issues with their product formula. There might be like, again, they might not have the capacity with their current manufacturer to even make enough units of their product for a purchase order, etc. So, again, we try to be as mindful of the business's needs as possible. And I mean, just being totally frank, given the state of funding for consumer businesses right now, a lot of brands needs to go into retail.

13:35They need to prove that they can be omnichannel. So we just like work alongside them with that process. But the problem with a lot of these other retail brokers out there is they will literally just be like, okay, we don't really need to know any of that stuff. We're just going to put you on shelf in as many stores as possible. And that's it. And like what my co-founder noticed when he was a retail broker himself before Quest is it just wasn't enough. Like they would get on the shelf and then some of these brands that again had really passionate founders and really excellent products within six to 12 months were gone because there wasn't enough of that assessment done beforehand, nor was there enough marketing done after they were on shelf to really make them succeed.

14:23So for us, we're just like seeing this problem happen to so many founders and retailers or retail startups. So we just wanted to actually, you know, join forces and like figure out how we can help these companies avoid the wrong type of bin for their business. Yeah. Well, you seem like a really, really great partner to come along at the right time for a particular type of, you know, again, for a particular type of e-com leader. So someone that's might be listening to our conversation right now, any other indications that maybe someone they know might be perfectly ready for you? And then I guess, what would those first steps be for that person that's kind of ripe and ready for you?

15:10Yeah, that's a great question. I would say it's someone who has already launched their business online. Maybe they're doing like, let's say$100 ,000 a year. So it doesn't have to be huge, but they have like really good feedback for their product. They have perhaps a decent sized like email and SMS list. You know, they have like pretty good social following. and again, these numbers don't have to be huge. It could be, we have 10 ,000 followers, but they are really engaged people. There's clearly some sort of a niche there. And then like for us, what we would do is we would just like run our respective assessment.

15:48Mine would be more on the marketing and the customer and the branding side. And Yemenis would be more on the product and the retail readiness side. Because again, one other thing to point out is, these buyers are also susceptible to trends, just like the consumers are. So they're always looking for, okay, if we have this opening in our shelf space, what are the up and coming trends in the next 12 to 24 months that consumers might like? And are there any brands, even if they're super small, that might fit into that where we can give them some shelf space? So again, we want to think about, is this product something that could be marketed not only to the consumer, but to the buyer to fill that lane?

16:32And Yemeni is extremely in tune with sort of like what the needs are of these retail partners. And then from there, we would just like run our assessment and then we would craft a completely tailored expansion plan for this business, not only for the brick and mortar expansion, but also for their online business. My whole career has primarily been spent in e-commerce. And there are so many brands we've come across who are leaving hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars on the table by frankly ignoring e-commerce. I think it's become sort of a bad word in the past two years. And I think that there's a way to do e-commerce and Amazon and online retail right so that it can be profitable, it can be cashflow positive, and more importantly, it can have the type of marketing funnel that attracts retainable customers into your branch who are going to be activated as fans, as people who are going to be the ones who are going to write the fan mail that you can show to the buyer, that are going to be the ones who can be your local community ambassadors when you're in some of these regional retailers and really build that community.

17:44So yeah, for us, we have sort of our playbook in mind, but we always customize it to the individual brand's needs and where they're at. Yeah. Again, Brian Alston, co-founder and managing partner of Brandcastle Growth Partners, your website, brandcastle.co. When somebody goes there, Brian, what should they click on? What do they do? So they can book a free consult in the upper corner and talk to myself as well as my co-founder. We would love to learn more about their business, learn more about what their goals are. It's also worth pointing out that we have a pretty extensive network of other retail experts.

18:23So there are times where, hey, like you need something very specific before we feel you're ready. Instead of sending you on your way, we're like, hey, you should talk to this person and then come back to us maybe in a few months. And, you know, that's exactly what happened with Magic Spoon back when I worked with them. They were going to be called something totally different. They were going to be called discos. It looks like, frankly, like your sort of Trader Joe's. Yeah. And we sent them away. We were like, look, our research says that you need something a bit more colorful, maybe something a little bit more nostalgic.

18:58If you're customer-based or people who don't eat cereal and haven't eaten cereal since they were children. Yes. So we didn't come up with Magic Spoon, but we basically gave them, again, the prescriptive homework, I guess, if you want to call it that. And then four months later, they came back to the agency I was at with what we now know of as Magic Spoon. And we were able to launch them and run all their marketing for the first 12 months because they avoided a lot of the mistakes that a lot of brands would have made had they not had that sort of just like expert guidance. And that's the same kind of hands-on value add that at Brandcastle, we aim to give to all of our clients.

19:40Yeah, I love it. All right. Again, Brian Nelson, thank you so much for joining us. Co-founder, managing partner, Brandcastle, growth partners on the web at brandcastle.co. Brian, thank you so much. Yeah, thank you so much. I appreciate it.

19:59Thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit upmyinfluence.com slash guest. If you're a listener, I'd love to shout out your business to our whole audience for free. You can do that by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or join our listener Facebook group. Just search for The Thoughtful Entrepreneur in Facebook. I'd love even if you just stopped by to say hi. I'd love to meet you. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. We love our community who listens and shares our program every day.

20:44Together, we are empowering one another as thoughtful entrepreneurs. Hit subscribe so that tomorrow morning, that's right, seven days a week, you are going to be inspired and motivated to succeed. I promise to bring positivity and inspiration to you for around 15 minutes each day. Thanks for listening and thank you for being a part of the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Movement.