How DTC Brands Conquer Retail | Michael Esposito

The Unexpected Detour if you're going to go retail I do not recommend just targeting one or two big boxes a it's going to be very hard to get in b even if you get in you introduce that kind of risk um so you can hedge your risk by being in a lot of retail the other piece is you should be really proactively trying to not get kicked out um and that's where people you know when they say it's a relationships business I think this is what they mean where you need to have a relationship with your buyer you're watching Marketing Misfits with Norm Ferrar and Kevin [Music] K all right we are back another Misfit Banter & Corrupting Influences marketing misfit episode that's right how you doing Norm good to see you again yeah you too it's uh it's getting warm out there it's almost cigar season every time I go out there I freeze my butt off and then I have to uh uh you know wait 3 or 4 days before I could even check it out or even maybe go out well you you know you've corrupted me you you've been a bad influence on me i was I was this very healthy overweight guy that never that never drank or never smoked by himself and I take a trip a few weeks ago to St barts and they have Cubans real Cuban cigars that you can't get in the United States and I smoke five cigars by myself without you without anybody else i've never done that i've never smoking cigars by myself i have what $20,000 of cigars in my house i've never smoking one on my balcony without it being a social thing but you've corrupted me you You've forever ever corrupted me now I can't go back see now I feel like you've cheated on me oh I I have cuz I had Cubans i I leveled up i level I leveled up with a hotter chick oh man with a hotter smoke yeah okay all right i remember that but I in fairness they had Year of the Dragons and the Cuban Year of the Dragons we we both really like uh the the Year of the Dragons or the Nicaraguan that we've been getting or whatever they um these are Cuban ones they're smaller so they're not the the bigger they're the smaller ones but yeah I did uh somehow I forgot and I and two of them somehow mysteriously made it into my my my briefcase when I was coming back and they so I have them here for us for the next time we're together oh perfect okay I can't wait The E-commerce & Retail Marriage speaking of together I mean you know one thing that goes together really really well is e-commerce and retail but a lot of people I know you've been working on this and you got some projects going that are are trying to marry these two but a lot of people that are in e-commerce they get into it because technically in theory they think it's easier and they think that well I can just I don't have uh you know it's not as much cost upfront not as much uh things to do it's a little bit easier it's a little bit sexier i guess it's the hot thing but retail hasn't gone away i mean retail is still depending on whose numbers you look at 80 to 85% of all sales even if you take out gas and whatever the figures they do it's still a hefty hefty percentage of all sales people still buy retail and e-commerce is a great proving ground to prove a concept on something but then going to retail is where you can blow it up i remember we had a guy at the billion dollar seller summit back in April that's doing like uh hundred and something million dollars a year uh and he sells on Amazon and he sells on Walmart.com but he uses walmart.com as his proving ground cuz now the buyers are paying attention to that and he's bl he's in 4,000 Walmart stores and just crushing it and he talks about that whole process so that's what our guest today is that's what he specializes in he specializes in helping e-commerce especially Amazon brands make that transition make that step over over to going retail and I know you're doing that uh with with you have a you guys have a course or something that does retail secrets yeah retail secrets that does that so it's going to be interesting to see uh some of combine some of your strategies with see what this guy has to offer uh today Mike Esposito uh we met him at an Amazon event in Vegas sharp guy so it's going to be uh some cool stuff and a little bit different and give some people a different perspective on things that I think both of you guys will be able to add to we'll bring him on welcome Mike Welcoming the Retail Navigator how you doing Mike hello good how are you guys good live and live and kicking live and live and kicking i'm wondering why I didn't get the invite to the cigar podcast i feel like I'm on the wrong one well well you're not because you see we Norm and I do an event called Collective Mind Society or we call it CMS for short and in in uh November we're actually doing an event in Tampa Florida uh because that's the Sakara capital of the US not Miami like a lot of people think and we're actually inviting out about 16 people there's uh entrepreneurs just for the weekend and we just hang out eat good food go to good cigars eat drink uh smoke good cigars have uh those that drink might have a little uh adult beverage or two and just have a good time so you're definitely welcome to come out to that um be happy to let you know it's it's we've done two of these uh in the past and they're a lot of fun and a lot of good networking and connections that that come out of that say no more say no more i picked up cigars in uh in 2020 i was living in Manhattan during CO and I thought I need a new vice and uh it's it's I I've I've bought some online and now I get cold calls from the salespeople at cigars.com like like hey we got money Christos 40% off and I'm just like okay keep talking that's that's awesome um have you do are there any cigar bars or lounges that you go to uh in the San Diego area or are you just smoke basically at home or There's a couple downtown that I've tried out um they're just a little hard for me to get to i mostly smoke on the golf course cuz I I was smoking on my patio a lot then I moved and I can't really smoke on my new patio it like kind of blows inside so so all golf so I'm playing more golf actually it's really helped my game cigars have helped your golf game that's That's funny so tell us a little bit about yourself uh people that don't know what's your background what's your what's your history in this ecom retail world yeah yeah I'll go back somewhat far um it's funny i my degree is actually in marine biology and then I left school and realized marine biology doesn't pay too well so um I kind of found myself in the startup scene in Boston Massachusetts eventually worked my way into a uh digital marketing company um and it was really kind of bottom of the barrel stuff like wait don't go you know pop-up ads on the screen and um card abandonment emails um but I kind of learned the ecom space from that and then I ended up just falling into this position working for a greeting card company called Love Pop they make these 3D pop-up greeting cards they were on Shark Tank i mean it's a it's really kind of a hot company at the time um and they hired me to build their retail wholesale i I don't know why they did i didn't know how to do it at all but I guess they just believed in me so um there was there was another guy there who's kind of above me great mentor um and we took their their business from zero in in retail to about 4.5 million over the three and a half years I worked there i did that by building an inside sales team starting with mom and pops and kind of growing out from there to the bigger chains and then um then I went to Thrazio the big Amazon aggregator which you know we could have a whole separate hourlong conversation about Thrazio but um my job there was to take their brands into retail and they had as you're probably aware hundreds of brands um many of which were good retail fits some of which weren't so I just kind of ended up running this process over and over and over again of how to evaluate if a brand makes sense from retail for retail how to understand what success on Amazon translates into retail and what doesn't how to leverage your Amazon standing to sell into buyers and then really where where all the you know where the rubber met the road was operationally like how do you actually execute how do you go from a brand that's built for e-commerce to actually selling in stores and selling successfully because pitching was not hard if we had a dominant Amazon product but actually executing and succeeding that was hard so we went from you know nothing to over 45 million in sales um in retail in the 5 years I was at Thrazio and that was over you know about a dozen brands with you know three or four of them kind of doing the bulk of that so after I left Thazzio sorry go ahead is that Angry Orange doing a lot of that oh yeah that was I was there from the beginning with Angry Orange um learned a lot of great lessons from that um that's a great brand but yeah so so I I left Thrazio last year and I kind of had a hunch that there were a lot of other Amazon brands you know either larger or smaller operators that thought retail expansion would be good for them there'd be good reasons to go to retail and so I started a consulting business to help those brands make the leap and I really focus on a kind of helping them assess the market their viability and all that but then actually executing it you know working as like their fractional VP of sales and marketing and help helping them instill these these plans we've created in this this road map so what about these uh Amazon brands What Makes a Retail Brand ‘Retail Ready’? what or what type of brands what niches should even be trying to explore this um I think it's pretty broad i mean the way I look at it is is really like category dominance and then differentiation within the category so you could be in a very uh commoditized category like spatulas um right but are you at the top of your category because you're just super efficient at PPC and you just got better you know you're just better at spreadsheeting than you know the big brands that are selling spatulas or does your spatula have you know unique color unique branding or maybe it has some add-on or a little bit of intellectual property that differentiates it just enough because all these things are going to be sold in stores no matter what but you're going against the establishment so um in a highly comm commoditized category if you're dominant that's that's number one like bestseller badges top rankings you know 4.7 stars with 50,000 reviews things like that those are all a lot of credibility but then if you have a little point of differentiation even in something very simple then usually you that's a good indicator it it it's not a slam dunk that you'd be viable in retail but that's where I start looking and does price point have anything to do with it like there's such a huge price range with every category do you have to be at the bottom with the bottom feeders uh in the middle at the top does that even make a is it even uh does it does it even matter yes yeah it's foundational to what you're doing but you can exist in all of those you can exist at the bottom if you can win on price great that's usually going to be your easiest to be the lowest price um but you can also win in the premium category that's what we did with Angry Orange we were double the price of everything else but we showed more value we looked more premium we had a better bottle we had a new scent we you know signaled that we were a natural product right so we went top of the market and then you can go middle of the market as well you can go value you know bang for your buck it it's really any strategy can work because if you go look at shelves they all have other brands executing those strategies so it can work for you but you kind of have to start with your thesis where do I fit what makes sense for me and then work backwards from there you don't want to try to force yourself into kind of one of those slots if it's not right for you hey what's up everybody kevin and Norm here with a quick word from one of our sponsors 8 fig let me tell you about a platform that's changing the game for Amazon sellers that's right it's called 8Fig on average sellers working with 8ig grow up to 400% in less than a year 8fig offers both funding and free tools for e-commerce growth and cash flow management and here's how it works 8fig provides flexible data-driven funding tailored to your exact needs you know they can fund anywhere from up to $50,000 all the way up to 10 million 8fig gives you free tools to forecast demand manage inventory and analyze cash flow visit 8fig.co that's 8fig.co co to learn more or check the link in the show notes below just mention marketing misfits and get 25% off your cost that's 8fig.co 8fig.co see you on the other side Outshining the Competition, On-Shelf and Online but on the spatula if if you have 4.7 rating and 50,000 reviews and a decent price still to get into retail and to get into a Walmart uh shelf someone has to come out so you got to be replacing someone so how do you justify or how do you show that you get how do you take out another spatula to to put yours in its place i mean what what do you got to show is that special just waning in sales or getting a lot of returns and so you just have an opportunity where you can jump in and you're the best qualified because of these reviews and ratings or is it what if that specialist is doing well uh already and they're doing good how do you come in and say look we can do better yeah there's a lot of ways to go about that um it's going to depend on the retailer i'd say you know if they have one spatula and that spatula is flying off the shelves you're probably not going to knock them out you should go play somewhere else where you have a better chance um but generally speaking the truth is these buyers are always there's always something not doing well enough on their shelves there's always a weakest item if they have four items so those are the ones they're always going to be willing to swap out and experiment with so you can show them your value in a number of ways you can you can kind of do a grounds up um sales approach where you work with smaller mom and pops or regional chains and you build up a little sales data there and you say we're doing this many units per store per week and places with this much foot traffic and your store it might translate to this you could go headtohead and you know if that spatula you think might be weak on the shelf is on Amazon you could show you better reviews better listing lower return rate whatever um there's a number of ways to really go about it um you could show your marketing i mean they really like if you've got any kind of brand whatsoever especially any sort of influencer traction or something that indicates to a buyer that you might be able to drive um drive traffic to their store that can be a differentiator for you in a commodity category where you've got a very similar product but maybe you just got a better Tik Tok and then you're going to say "Hey we're going to Target we'll announce you on our TikTok and we'll have our two influencers do twice a year that might be enough um to edge out you know their lowest performing competitor what about the flip side of that where I'm the fourth there's four specialists i'm number four and I'm in all 4,000 Walmart stores and they're they're doing $4 million in POS with me a year and then I get kicked out and that 4 million I'm doing 2 million on Amazon I'm doing 4 million in Walmart i get kicked out because some other dude comes in takes my place and now I just lost $4 million in POS and I'm like freaking out what am I going to do that just went two-thirds of my business uh and so how how do you counter how do you deal with that versus on Amazon amazon you know I mean as you know Amazon can do what they want anytime they want you could lose your listing but at least you have a sense of feeling that you're more in control so how do you how do you handle that kind of thing yeah there's there's kind of two aspects of that really one one thing you're Retailer Roulette: Don’t Let One Buyer Make or Break You talking about is having a lot of risk being centralized at one big retailer if you're doing 4 million in Walmart you are at risk of Walmart kicking you out they won't even allow you to do it if you're the only uh if you're the only if if you're just going to one big box they'll ask you right on the application what percentage are we of your sales so that will even help protect you well I know Costco does that costco won't be more than what is it 20% of your sales or 20% yeah yeah they don't like to they don't like to roll the dice and have you become insolvent you know they're trying to protect themselves too they don't want you to be performing well and then suddenly you drop off because you let the rest of your business you know collapse right so you certainly take a risk when you take on a big account if it becomes too big of a a proportion so going to multiple accounts I mean if you're going to go retail I do not recommend just targeting one or two big boxes a it's going to be very hard to get in b even if you get in you introduce that kind of risk um so you can hedge your risk by being in a lot of retail um much like you you know you might hedge your risk with Amazon with multiple SKs or different PPC strategies right like the same kind of principles apply um so hedging by going in multiple retailers is one the other piece is you should be really proactively trying to not get kicked out um and that's where people you know when they say it's a relationships business I think this is what they mean where you need to have a relationship with your buyer and it's not a relationship where you know Norm's handing them the nicest cigar you know and they're like "Well I guess I like Norm i'll keep his Yeah yeah it doesn't work anymore there's too much data now um it certainly doesn't hurt to you know smoke a cigar with them but the relationship is an information relationship like what can your buyer tell you about your performance not in your annual line review because by then it's probably too late but you know are you finding out that you are actually missing sales because you're out of stock a lot and you're looking at the data and they're not getting out on the shelf and so you're communicating that to your planner and your buyer and you're doing their job for them telling them "Hey if we were in stock we'd probably increase sales." Maybe they get out there and fix it maybe you need to hire some you know um some contractors to go out and put your stuff out sometimes that's worth it um you are you launch a new skew it's struggling you think maybe it's the packaging cuz you had a departure so you design two new bottles for whatever you're selling and you you share that with your buyer you say "Hey what do you think?" You get feedback they know a lot i mean it's a it's a useful relationship but the more you're engaged with them and actively tinkering at their store and trying different marketing things whether it be you know stuff you're spending on that's their proprietary marketing or merchandising or packaging or prices or promotions just constant experimentation like like you do on Amazon a you're going to sell better and then when you sell better you've insulated yourself and then if you have a good relationship with the buyer usually if you start to flag they'll come to you long before you're in the in the danger zone and they'll tell you you know you need to step it up and here's what you can do so um that would be my my kind of approach to avoiding that $4 million suddenly going away is hedge and hedge with other retailers and um get close with the buyer and and be proactive in staying on the shelf it can still happen to you you can do everything right and get unlucky but um if you if you do it the right way you're you're usually going to survive something like that i like to add that it's very similar to your Amazon listing so if you have a new order and it's starting to fail you got to check out your reviews you got to be proactive is it the packaging like you were saying there's something that people don't like about it and it's not converting so you've got to take it back and you either when you reorder uh change the game uh repackage maybe the quality but whatever your negative reviews or your positive reviews are saying then you've got to address that it might even be the color of the bloody box you know just that it is it often is the color of the box yeah yeah which is crazy but uh one of the things I wanted to uh talk to you about is people don't realize that when you're selling on Amazon it's completely different than selling in retail and I'm talking about retail the packaging of it getting it onto a shelf it's not retail ready and you'll hear um buyers talking about this retail ready or you'll hear that expression can you get into that what is retail ready and what do ecom uh or any online seller have to do to become retail ready yeah yeah from a very basic standpoint Packaging That Pops (Even At a ‘Brisk’ Pace) it means can your product convey what it is efficiently and effectively on a shelf so can a person who is walking by at a brisk pace with relatively poor eyesight read your label um does it stand out you don't have your giant PDP page you don't have you know your engineered SEO you know 2,000 words to describe what is what is that thing you're selling you don't have a nice video you just have a box and the context of what's around it so um people usually build for Amazon based on you know the size qualification of Amazon so they they get the correct fees right and that's it's not a terrible thing to do um but a brown box that just says you know barware is not going to sell on the shelf because why does that brown box of bar wear cost me $34 i don't even know what's in it right it just says bar and maybe on the back it has little you know it has a list of what's in it but that's not enough um that doesn't convey value to a consumer and of course you need things like you need like a UPCA barcode on there um you know if you have batteries or something you need compliant packaging for that but in terms of retail ready it's it's boil down the essential of what you would put on a listing to convey your value and how do you put that on a box and it's not just a bunch of words it's it's really this is you know I I recommend paying someone who really knows how to design packaging like it's words it's image it's color it's font it's flow um this stuff has to work very quickly um people you're spending half a second looking at you on the shelf so what draws their attention why might they pick you up that the real the real thing with Angry Orange where we kind of took off with that brand honestly was kind of dumb luck we had an orange bottle every single other bottle was right we had an orange bottle and an orange scent and then Peak Pull picked it up and it smelled orange and it looked orange and it worked great and we had a white bottle for one of our other SKs and we switched the we just redesigned that bottle to be orange and overnight 43% sales increase which is you don't get that a lot but and that was with that and that the cannibalization with the other skew was only 5% so net we were way up um but it was all just the color of the bottle it it just we're you know we're an orange product have an orange bottle everyone else was white so we stood out so that's that could be a strategy just go the other direction um but you know if you're a premium product maybe the minimalist sleek looking packaging is the right thing for you if you're the value product and maybe you just want to put a tag with a flashy word on it that says value or you know costefficient or whatever so that's how I think about it i mean would you uh would you add anything to that Norm just one thing and this is just a basic tip if you're planning to go into retail walk into a Shoppers Drug Mart here in Canada CVS in the States go down the aisle see where your products would be and see how you'd stand out sit there and see well who your competition is and what you have to do just like you said for that color how will you stand out in that group of competition and that's just a simple way of doing a like a just a a quick um some basic research and you can ask friends to do it too what do they see in that aisle that the other people the other buyers would see what would attract them you know Mr beast Mr beast actually with his beastables the the the feast of whatever it's called the chocolates uh I know when he goes to masterminds or when he travels he always stops at uh at Walmarts and I think they're Targets too but uh or whichever one it is Walmart or Target or maybe it's both and he actually always drags everybody with him and they go in and they look at the the chocolate bars in the candy aisle and see how they're merchandised and see how they're doing and and sometimes he'll readjust stuff like you know and straighten it up and readjust it but he just wants to see from because from store to store I used to have a buddy that actually did stuff for Mars where his job was to literally he had like 46 grocery stores and 200 convenience stores and his job was to go in and hit those at least once a quarter and actually or some of them more often and check the check the shelving to make sure the Walmart guy stuff wasn't sitting in a pallet in the back and never got put out or the the M&M's guys didn't move over uh and take away the Reese's spot or or whatever whatever it was you know and they're encroaching on them and straighten it all up but another thing that on the retail ready I think that's important is compliance on e-commerce you can get away with bloody murder on compliance you don't have to have UL certification you can say it you can say my flashlight does 1 million lumens when such a thing doesn't exist and sell that on Amazon as a Chinese seller but you can't do that when it comes to retail so compliance is something that the retail retail takes super serious uh right when it comes to certifications and and everything is um and so that's a different animal than when a lot of ecom sellers aren't prepared for that yeah absolutely and I mean if you the the beauty of it is though if you get compliant with the top dogs like a Walmart or a Costco everyone else will accept your compliance and there's um there's like third party compliance systems like Works where you can become generally compliant and then you're kind of you've proven yourself to the retailers but Walmart has like their own labs um so that's something you know it's it's a it can be a headache to try to do yourself i usually recommend outsourcing that to someone who knows how to do it um it's just kind of a kind of a toll you have to pay but it you know you can feed it back into your your other systems and and use those certifications for further credibility on Amazon or your DTOC so it's not it's you know there's there's extra benefits to it and and just real quick to add on the merchandising thing Norm you know we're really talking about packaging but I think it's helpful for people to think about merchandising as far as product presentation in the like you were saying in the context of other products like you walk out there what if everyone is selling singles maybe there's room for a two pack maybe you realize on Amazon people buy your product twice or they like your bundle but you don't see any bundles on the shelves right That's where you can have an edge and you could go to a buyer and you can tell them "I have this data and everybody likes two packs so I made a two pack for you to put on your shelf and I bet you it's going to outsell or out margin those one packs you're selling." Yeah very good yeah what about on on retailers that want something different The Secrets of Price Points, Bundling & Shelf Survival than what's online a lot of retailers they don't want price comparison or arbitrage stuff going on so they'll say "Okay if you're selling a a six-pack of protein bars on Amazon and Walmart you got to do a fourack or a five pack uh or or something like that." Do you see a lot of that kind of stuff happening too where you need to actually differentiate it a little slightly or maybe they're different it to actually just meet a price point they're like "We'll sell your protein bars but a box can't go over $4.99 so the only way for you to get that and make the margins is cut it from six to five." But what do you see along those lines yes it it can go either direction sometimes they want exactly what you have on Amazon because they know that's the proven product and they don't want to take a risk with something that's too much of a variation but with what you're talking about like something that's a fluid or just like a multiack of units um yeah that'll happen and it's usually to get to a price point the thing you just and I usually recommend differentiation to minimize your chance of Amazon scraping your skew on because you're always going to go on those retailers websites and what you have to be careful of and you can you can guard against it with like good long-term planning um you have to be careful of a retailer dropping price for some sort of promotion which you need to negotiate all that upfront but let's say they do it either by accident or on purpose amazon scrapes that price drop you're now no longer the lowest price availability for that item on the internet you'll lose your buy box and I mean we had this happen at Thrazio all the time we had days when we would lose six figures of revenue in like hours because somebody violated our agreement and scraped so that's where you want to differentiate um because you know how you uh prevent that there's a way to prevent that you actually need to have buy with prime so if you're in the buy with Prime program on your own like uh Shopify site they will not penalize you for that that's a hack that's a little workaround amazon will not penalize you for lower prices if you're in the Buy with Prime program on your own website that's straight from Buy with Prime that's not uh secondhand that's straight from the person Lisa that actually handles buy with Prime so that that's that's a way around that but it it is a problem even even if you're on a a third party beyond Shopify if you're okay that's good to know as long as you're in the buy program and registered properly with buy Prime good good to know buy where Prime is right you uh where you allow Amazon checkout on your on your own website yep yep okay yeah yeah yeah I mean that's that'll make sense for a lot of brands not everybody but um and you know there is there is the the um the issue with scraping where if you go to a different size or different unit count it doesn't matter that you change the UPC and the skew Amazon can still scrape that um so you do have to be careful with differentiating it enough usually it can be as simple as like adding on a little just a little you know let's say you have cleaning product in your fourpack you include a little microfiber towel right and maybe you're just writing that cost off but now you fully fully differentiated from your Amazon skew because you don't have the microfiber towel on Amazon right so that that those are some ways to kind of hack around it but generally I recommend differentiation because you can protect your Amazon pricing flexibility because if you give the same skew to Walmart they're not going to like it if you're opportunistically discounting on Amazon but not giving them the chance to match the price or to discount so um you do have to be aware of that and plan ahead now a quick word from our sponsor Lavanta hey Kevin tell us a little bit about it that's right Amazon sellers do you want to skyrocket your sales and boost your organic rankings meet Levant Norman and I's secret weapon for driving highquality external traffic straight to our Amazon storefronts using affiliate marketing that's right it's achieved through direct partnerships with leading media outlets like CNN Wire Cutter and Buzzfeed just to name a few as well as top affiliates influencers bloggers and media buyers all in Lvanta's marketplace which is home to over 5,000 different creators that you get to choose from so are you ready to elevate your business visit get.lavanta.io/misfits that's get.lav lavanta l van n t a.io/misfits and book a call and you'll get up to 20% off Lavanta's gold plan today that's get.lavont.io/misfits let's talk about the catalog and the communication amazon sellers aren't used How To Nail Your First Retail Catalog & Pitch to that buyers need a catalog to choose the products from can you give any advice on that yeah I would say avoid the paradox of choice if you have 200 SKs do not bring them 200 SKs bring them three SKs or two um you they like to be told what's going to work within reason you know you don't tell them how to do their jobs but you say "This is the research I did on your retailer here's everything you've got on the shelf here's my Amazon stats this is where we think we fit in here are four items just narrow it down for them if you give them too much to choose from they won't choose anything so um now that can be different for different categories like I worked in greeting cards we did have to give people 200 skew cataloges and even then we'd still say these are the 36 best sellers these are your 12 best Christmas cards this is our number one birthday within that we would still qualify what the best stuff is so um go really targeted and go with a limited skew count and show that you did your homework and that's that's going to be better off and and when you get into any actual pitch of like what do I need to show price volume dimensions whatever um usually they'll have some sort of template for submission so you'll know what like data you need to give them or if you're working with a broker rep they'll they'll guide you through this and leave the pages of ego out of the catalog yes yes i always say try to make it collaborative from the start solicit feedback maybe you give them four items but they actually have a better idea of what's going to fit in their store you know be open to that um if they're engaging with you and suggesting things that means they probably like you and want to carry you so I would I would run with that and not fight it can you talk The Hidden Costs of Doing Business in Brick & Mortar about the addedon fees so you might a lot of people don't realize when you go to retail there's shared markdowns there's advertising co-op fees there's uh if you didn't put the label uh 6 cm from the lower right corner of the left side of the box there's a $100 fee uh can you can you talk about some of those things that might surprise people when they're coming from the ecom world yeah so there's two categories of that one is your allowances which is like your built-in stuff they're just going to deduct off your invoice so that can be your marketing co-op maybe 5% maybe 3% your damage return allowance call that 2% um and they'll just throw on random fees they're like the cell phone company it's like what is this 2% that's just on my thing but all those things will be explicitly stated upfront and those tend to be consistent um but you know once a year they'll come back and they'll ask for another half a point or whatever so what you want to do with those is just price those in to their cost um a pricing model that's that's worked for me in the past is you essentially show them their base cost and then you tell them this is what we will we will charge you for the product if we don't do any allowances cuz these are all ultimately negotiable um and then they'll come back and say well we need the allowance then you show them you know it's 32 cents more per unit if we put this you know 15% you want back in there so you're netting out evenly ultimately you're going to end up negotiating a little probably but you're going to you're going to come from a position of strength when you when you start the dialogue this is your base price if you introduce allowances it goes up that just gives you negotiating leverage then the um the other one you're talking about is like your warehouse penalties um your when whenever you mess up something they want you know part of their procedures so they all have very intricate stickering labeling advanced shipping notification EDI system requirements to receive POS acknowledge them pack them send them to the right places invoice all that and these uh distribution centers they have are they're profit centers they make money off of this so they are out looking to get you on this um so you need a really good 3PL partner um you need one that will like ideally has worked with that retailer or worked with a number of retailers before i do not recommend using your drop ship DTOC provider as a as to fulfill Walmart they will they will promise you they can do it and then you will go out of business so I go with someone that really knows what they're doing um and then you know with in the 3PL contract you have to work it in that if they make a mistake they have to reimburse you for those fees um you know if it's your mistake because you didn't supply them with the right you know enough goods and you're late on the the PO or whatever that's on you but um you want to be reimbursed you you want to meet with your 3PL constantly and like hammer out systematic issues and then the the sad reality is a lot of these uh charges these chargebacks you get are erroneous um so you have to be able to go and challenge them and fight them um and there's some there's some softwares out there that are working on doing that um I've spoken to some people in the space that um I recommend clients to so um or you can do it manually i mean it depends on your resources how much time you have and how much you're getting charged but I mean there's there's stuff where if you acknowledge a PO and you don't ship it to like target that's $5,000 um most of them are more like a 100 200 300 but it's death by a,000 cuts so you just have to be on top of it and it's it's a cost of doing business but you can keep it pretty minimal you can keep it to 1 to 2% if you're on top of it what about on the financing side i just Show Me the Money: Financing Your First Big Retail Order got a order from Walmart for $2 million and I'm like "Holy cow I don't have $2 million sitting around and I don't have the history with my local bank." Uh but I need to I want to ship this order i got this big PO can you talk about what some of the options are on when it comes to factoring cuz Walmart's not going to pay me they're going to say net 60 or net 90 and it might be 170 days before I actually get the check cuz they pay you whenever the hell they want to um most of these big retailers do and they they they don't they don't honor any schedules uh the VA I mean some do that's not fair some of them actually are very prompt but the vast majority pay you when they feel like it um and so how do I finance that if I just got a $2 million order for my spatulas for Walmart what are my options to actually make this happen yeah there's a few ways to go about it i mean a good relationship with your supplier is number one you know if you can do a reasonable down payment and get some net terms there just to to bridge that gap a little bit but that's not going to solve any everything so usually you can finance your purchase orders and there's all sorts of capital providers out there that will do that and you know you might finance them at 1 2 3% which is not great but you have the paper from Walmart so it's pretty solid for them um and you're going to be able to turn it around and ideally you'll have net 60 maybe you'll have net 90 but um even I I believe Walmart still finances i know I know they they did that for a very long time like they'll you know they're the they're like the lone sharks they're like "Yeah we'll buy your good and we'll give you a loan to sell it to us." So um it's like Amazon Amazon lending is like the same thing but yeah usually those are like what's that old thing a lot of times it's 210 net 30 you know if you pay in 10 days you get a 2% discount um but the whole thing's doing 30 all those old those accounting terms that's that kind of stuff you still seeing those kind of things exist yeah that default chewy will do that on the e-commerce side um yeah that's still the default i mean you always want to go for net 30 no discounts you're never going to get it but that's where you start the I mean you will get it for honestly the medium-sized players especially if you are a big brand and they're coming to you but um if you can get net 60 or net 62% at a Walmart especially when you're starting out that's not bad but yeah they're they're always looking for the nickels and dimes what about like looking at Walmart on a test so I got Walmart just I I just showed them my 4 star rating and 50,000 reviews they're like "All right Kevin this this special look looks good." Most likely they're not going to take me and put me in 4,000 plus stores they're going to say "Hey we got 50 stores over here 100 stores over here." And they're going to put me in there for a little test what can I do to help influence that test if assuming I have a customer list and assuming I don't have a customer list yeah yeah you can uh well number one is to you're right they're going to do a test almost always a a out of the gate chain roll chain wide roll out is extremely rare um so a couple ways to go about it one you got to make sure your product gets on the shelf especially if you're doing something like a sidekick or an endcap or something that's a little more elaborate even if you're going to hurt your margin a little bit it's probably worth it to hire contractors to go out there and go in the back and make sure it gets out there especially if you're doing like let's say a six-month test and everything's been delivered and it's showing out of stock for twothirds of the stores then go and go and get that out there because you're you're better off you're going to lose the money anyway if you don't sell it right so you're better off getting it out there um and as far as marketing goes I mean definitely leverage your own your own list if you have it tell people you're in Walmart what zip codes they're in um you know you can also do targeted uh social media ads and this is this has been pretty successful in the past for us um like going zip code targeted on Facebook Meta um you know now available in Walmart come check us out see if you can um it can be tough with a test but sometimes you can get them to to do participate in promo codes with you where you can promote um and you know give these codes out through social media or your email list or whatever um but yeah I think the most important thing is make sure you execute getting it on the shelf because that is where everybody thinks about the high-minded marketing stuff which is useful and you want to experiment and try different stuff there's there's some nano influencer groups that are kind of popping up where they'll send people with like 5,000 followers but they'll send 20 of them you know to go in the store and check it out those are all useful i would experiment i would encourage people to experiment with those see what makes sense see what has good ROI but where everybody can get tripped up that you don't really think about is you go "Okay I'm shipping it to Walmart it's going to get on the shelf." But often times it never makes it to the shelf so make make sure you have contingency plans if they're just not loading it out there because then you're doomed from the start um that would that would be my my kind of first place to start from an advice standpoint so what do you do when it's not on the shelf you go into the local Walmart and it's like I know they they got delivery here do you go talk to that store manager say "Hey they'll let you in the back they'll let you in the back they will Okay they'll let you in the back you go put it out yourself you're not gonna be able to get to every Walmart though so you're going to want to tell your buyer your planner they're going to be less sympathetic than you expect them to be um but yeah you can you can send just your friends out yourself or you can hire some people and they'll you just tell I've done this plenty of times you walk in I say "I'm with this brand we shipped you this." Um and they'll go look in the bag or if they don't feel like it they'll be like "Why don't you go look through the boxes?" And then you go look at the boxes you go "Oh I see why you couldn't find it." Um one little trick actually this is a good one is um if you're shipping to Walmart if they'll allow it make sure you read the compliance and everything but can you make your box your cardboard box stand out especially if you're doing like a promotional test let's say you're doing 600 stores and you have a sidekick can you make your box bright red so it's super easy to find again I would check with their compliance standards on their shipping so you don't get charged back from that but that's a technique we used with uh with Angry Orange and configure the box and the product in the box to the pallet get as much as you can on there uh all right so when you're thinking so most of the people listening right now are probably thinking we're talking about Trade Shows & The Power of Going Local Costco we're talking about Walmart we're talking about all these big box stores well there's hundreds of thousands of medium to independent like if I go I live in a small town maybe 9,000 people and I can go downtown and I'm going to find an independent pet store or hardware store or and those people there if you've got cash flow problems or you're worried about that find those people across America like let's say it's a spa for example you can sell soap you can sell lotions you can sell whatever to these spas they'll buy a case or whatever you know it could be one case it could be two cases it's it's minimum uh you know they that's their your minimum order quantity and you get paid upfront they're going to pay you on a credit card you grab it so it doesn't necessarily have to be this crazy expensive um issue with cash flow if you want to start off small and see if you are ready for retail or if you want to expand your market uh you can do that but if you want to go into like we we had a company we were working with had 10 million in sales uh off of their website went into retail in one year in one and a half years it went to 45 you know it's it's great if if you can uh swing the cash but I just want to bring out the point that there's hundreds of thousands of independent stores out there that you could work with yeah can we talk about them for a little bit the the mom and pop i I advise I I'd say I would advise more than half my clients to go mom and pop first for the reasons you outlined one is just the capital intensity is is much lower um it scales very linearly so you can grow it very slowly but your risk is also mitigated so if you if you have a 100 accounts and you lose one you lose 1% of your business whereas if you have Walmart and Target and you lose Walmart you lose 50% of your business so um but I think the real value of it is you learn you learn how to all the things we've talked about like how do you merchandise how do you package how do you operationally execute you can learn it in a much safer lower stakes environment whenever you make a mistake you don't get charged a $5,000 charge back from Walmart because you ship the wrong box you just call the store owner and you say "Hey sorry." And I'll send you a box for free and it's you know it's a $40 mistake instead of a instead of a $5,000 mistake right so there there is a there's a science you know there's a science to all this and how how you merchandise and how you um how you present your product and stuff but I always feel it really starts with like the art like you start qualitative like you're you're in 20 shops around your community and you just talk to the store owners the managers what do people say about this are they buying it do they take it to the front and they say "Oh that cost too much." And they leave it at the at the front desk and they don't want to buy it or are they just ignoring it is it sitting next to the right thing in the shelf and you can hang out in a store for 3 hours and watch people walk by your product a million times or to pick it up and things like that and so that's like the lab that's where you figure out the kind of basics of all right this is an obvious issue you know this issue people can't tell what this is or it's more expensive or nobody wants the four pack they keep telling the manager that's too much can I can I buy they keep asking if I sell these in singles or something like that then you know once you've been in I don't know 200 to a thousand stores now you've really started to learn some things you've probably got a few hundred thousand to a million plus in very high margin good cash flow income cuz you are getting these upfront payments most of the time um and now you can go you can go to these big retailers and be a little more confident and you can say "This is how much I sell these are the stores I perform best in these are our best sellers." because you actually know what your best sellers are not your Amazon bestsellers your retail bests sellers and then if you do get a test at you know a large grocery chain and it doesn't work out you're not going to go broke because you've got a good healthy business underneath it are you looking to quickly boost new Amazon product launches or scale up existing listings to reach first page positioning the influencer platform Stack Influence can help that's right stack Influence pushes high volume external traffic sales straight to Amazon listings using micro influencers that you only have to pay with your products they've helped upandcoming brands like Magic Spoon compete with Cheerios for top category positioning while also helping Fortune 500 brands like Unilver launch their new products right now is one of the best times to get started with Stack Influence you can sign up at stackinfluence.com or click the link in this video down in the description notes below and mention Misfits that's misfi to get 10% off your first campaign stackinfluence.com how do you find these guys is it fair.com is it independent distributors is it just working the phones and uh how how do you find these smaller guys all the above um I mean honestly from the very start I say just walk in the stores in your community that's the that's the best place to start but you're only going to get like three four five accounts from that but you will get some good relationships and you'll kind of you'll learn a lot of very basic stuff very quickly um and then I try to kind of work work in to out right like fair can be very efficient um but I would say unless you're really spending a lot of money in marketing you're not going to get a huge boom from fair but fair is good like there's no reason not to put yourself up there right because you'll get some passive leads but you're not going to suddenly wake up and have 300 new doors you know the next day you you get a few trickling in and then you can use that as your order system if you don't want to build it up operationally yourself you don't want to use Spotify you know wholesale or whatever sorry Shopify i've always listened to two up i can't I can't imagine I'm the only one who does that but um yeah if you don't want to build your own systems go to Fair but I really like the independent trade shows um those are really good because they're order writing shows you go there and you can write 50 orders and you can break even on your expense or maybe you don't break even but you know you know these people are going to order two or three more times throughout the rest of the year so over the course of the year I'm actually going to come out well ahead because I wrote 25 orders and 22 of them will reorder at least x amount of times plus you get feedback and you learn and you make connections in the industry so there's like the big ones that are like America's Mart in Atlanta and the Las Vegas market um th those do January and July shows and they're just big you know all these independent gift stores come in and they just buy general merchandise for those then you can get more targeted um I've done UPS store shows I've done Wild Birds Unlimited um there's grocery shows there's pharmacy um so I I would say find one or two trade shows that fit in your niche fit your budget and go to them and go to them consistently go every year because the more you're there the more they kind of recognize you as a brand they trust that you're not going away but um it's you can make money off these shows you can you can be prepared to write orders offer discounts have your bestseller bundle have a little iPad where you take the information and the credit card right there so they don't you know they don't go home and think about they're paying you up front mostly these smaller guys are paying you up front so you're not having to cash flow most of these guys usually credit card yeah most of the time i mean they'll ask for net30 and then you know I'd say hey your credit card's giving you net 30 um so that almost always works but um but yeah they'll pay upfront because it's not that much money i mean your your your mom and pop order is going to be like $200 to $500 right for for intro order not tens of thousands but maybe you're a really seasonal product and they've had you a couple years and they love you and then all of a sudden your Q4 order is 2500 right so um yeah they they they tend to pay upfront yeah and you can also go to your local um retailer as well a lot of the times uh even here we've got um mid to large grocery stores big box stores close by you could go in there and sometimes they'll allow you to bring in a local product and you can expand out from there walmart has that too they have that with their store managers they're allowed to bring in a certain x they have some sort of uh leniency in what they can bring in let's like a local barbecue sauce or something like that costco does i mean there's a lot of companies like that the other question I The Great Distributor Debate: When & Why have for you is uh about distributors so a lot of people want to do this on their own they want to do it on the cheap you know just small brands they might be selling quite a bit on Amazon but they want to do it directly when would you bring in a distributor um it depends on Yeah there's there's a lot of factors i think it's really category dependent um if you're in food usually distribution is is kind of the only path to scale or can be it It's just going to make a lot of sense cuz these grocery distributors are really well established and they have the people to do the stocking on the shelves um because you really need to be you know merchandising constantly when you're talking about perishable goods especially frozen foods um but I I think there's a misconception about distributors they're not like a magical panacea where you're like "All right here you go distributor grow my grow my retail business to 7 million they're you they you kind of get out what you put in they're going to want you to go to their trade shows they have their own trade shows and they're going to you're going to have to train their sales team and you're still going to have to market and you're still going to have to kind of be on top of things so the the trade-off you get is you have a little less operational burden but you have a little less control and you're probably a little less um you're less efficient at like an account level but you cover more ground if that makes sense like you you have to remember any broker rep or distributor they have you and they have a bunch of other products they're selling so if they go in and they sell and that buyer's interested in everything else they're not going to push yours whereas if you're selling you're the one who's selling like it's just about your product so you have to kind of sell the distributor or the rep you're working with to be enthusiastic about your product constantly you It's not a set and forget you still have to manage them and what's that going to cost them it it depends i mean it can be you know 15 or 20% right but if you've got the margin there then you're not dealing with um you know the allowances and the chargebacks um you know you think of it more of like an FOB type of thing like you're all right I'm making a smaller margin um but I can do more volume and I can avoid kind of all the fees and all the headaches right but my growth is going to be only as good as like the enthusiasm and the effort these distributors put in which is again I'm not trying to totally knock it it can make a lot of sense for the right brands but I would just say go in with your eyes wide open it's not a magical solution to suddenly be in retail you still have to like be thinking about how you're solving retail constantly and how you're selling what are the biggest mistakes you're seeing um sellers Amazon sellers trying Common Mistakes Brand Owners Make in Retail to do or what are the biggest mistakes sellers are making trying to get into retail right now um yeah i think we kind of covered it earlier a little bit like rushing to be in the big stores like when they're really not ready um because sometimes this happens i mean you can be a dominant Amazon product and a Walmart buyer comes to you maybe you were you got on Walmart Plus and you did really well and they say "I want to bring you in." Say "All right I can get into Walmart let's do this." Um but then you introduce all that risk we talked about it's going to be very capital intensive and you can read everything and you can study their manual and you can check everything but you just don't know what you don't know and if you go in and you fail um it can be very costly maybe it won't bankrupt your business but you're probably never getting in Walmart again where maybe it would have made sense for you to that buyer comes to you in Walmart you talk to them you start a relationship with them you spend a year and a half in mom and pops and some regional chains kind of building up and learning how to package and everything and then you go back to that buyer so I I guess speed and and understanding that that it does take years amazon is beautiful because you can spin up a product in a couple weeks couple months and really start that thing and start spitting off cash but in retail it's it's a slower kind of farming like it takes time but you ultimately get more margin in the long run you don't have to spend on PPC you know once you're kind of in the shelf you're pretty secure you usually have a good year you know every time you successfully get renewed you you've got a good year of stability that you can kind of plan around so longer upfront or harder upfront but um you know sort of more secure over the long run in my opinion because um you know you were saying Kevin you feel like you have a lot of control on Amazon but they could always pull the plug on you um and you could always you got a new fee for another 1% well there goes 1% of your margin right so um and you'll you know you'll always be crafty and and work your way around it find workarounds but um the retail stuff happens so slow that it it can feel very secure because you know you know changes aren't coming for at least a year especially with the big ones i've heard though a lot of buyers a lot of turnover in buyers i I was speaking with someone a few this year four or five years ago that it helps people get to retail and she said yeah buyers typically don't last more than six months so it's hard to build relationships at the big brands uh at the big you know the Walmarts and they they tend to have high turnover is that still true yeah yeah i'd say so i I don't know about six months um I maybe maybe in some specific cases that seems a little fast but it's you know instead they used to be buyers for 10 15 years in one category and now it's two three four five and then they move them around and I think that's probably to avoid you know me and Norm giving them cigars and becoming their best buddy and getting to stay in even if we're not perform performing well it probably keeps it probably keeps them honest because they're you know they're they got to be more data driven when you come in and it does create risk yeah if they come in and you know they don't know you you're not there you know it's like in in like football the new GM comes in he's like "Well he's not my coach i don't care if he went 10 and six." Like I fire him right so um it's the it can be the same but you just have to be vigilant and if if you're selling well you're usually going to be safe and then if you sell well you can you can build a relationship with a new buyer but it's constant work it's constant you're out there in the field just pulling weeds and watering everything and fertilizing um there is no set and forget The Long Game: Managing Expectations for Retail Success well to sum this up can we just talk about managing expectations so many people think that once they get into retail it's going to be their exit they're going to do a h 100red million what What can you tell us about managing expectations i would say those are those are not bad goals to have just be realistic about the timeline um you're probably not going to have any significant retail sales for at least a year at the fastest probably more like two years um but then it can start start to snowball pretty quickly and by year five you might have 15 million in retail but you've also got all this data you've gotten from these big proprietary systems from like Walmart and Home Depot you fed that back into Amazon and your Amazon's improved right and you've got more named search so your cost of acquisition's gone down because people are searching for your brand name because they saw it in Home Depot and they want to get get it on Amazon now you got subscribe and save whatever so um you get more enterprise value and you know I I work with brands to help them exit um you know I have relationship with an M&A firm and brands that are omni channel one to 2x higher multiple than brands that are purely Amazon or purely online so I actually think that's a perfectly reasonable hope to I want to be a I want to go I think of Amazon when you're doing well I think of it as a product and then when you want to be a brand like with a capital B you have to be everywhere you have to be everywhere the consumer is so yeah it's that's a good dream that's one of the good reasons to do it is go for the nine figure sales and the big exit but just know it's going to take years it's not going to be and not not like two years it's going to take like four five six seven eight even 10 years but um you know you you just put yourself in the position to get lucky and do everything right and before you know it you start to snowball your your your economies of scale are up so your margins are up and you know you str you have a bad Amazon quarter it suddenly doesn't hurt as bad because you're more diversified um there are a lot of benefits to it but patience i would pre preach patience hey Kevin King and Norm Ferrar here if you've been enjoying this episode of Marketing Misfits thanks for listening this far continue listening we got some more valuable stuff coming up be sure to hit that subscribe button if you're listening to this on your favorite podcast player or if you're watching this on YouTube or Spotify make sure you subscribe to our channel because you don't want to miss a single episode of The Marketing Misfits have you subscribed yet Norm well this is an old guy alert should I subscribe to my own podcast yeah but what if you forget to show up one time it's just me on here you're not going to know what I say i'll I'll buy you a beard and you can sit in my chair too we'll just You can go back and forth with one another yikes but that being said don't forget to subscribe share it oh and if you really like this content somewhere up there there's a banner click on it and you'll go to another episode of The Marketing Misfits make sure you don't miss a single episode because you don't want to be like Norm Real Connections, Real Growth: Omnichannel & Beyond so if I'm an Amazon seller and I'm I'm interested in getting retail and I come to you to help me out how how does that work do you take a percentage you take a flat fee uh what do how does that work yeah usually you know sometimes it's just advice i give advice for free that's that's you you get at least an hour but um usually I help them assess i I'll do like a market scoping project like does it even make sense for you to go to retail like we talked at the very beginning like what are the attributes of your product are you differentiated i'm going to go in all these stores and take pictures and take all this data down and share it with you and show you where I where I think you fit and if it looks viable then then usually I'll I'll help outline a sales plan and a forecast and a model of like all right if we went after these five retailers or we went mom and pops like after year one we might see this much in revenue at this much margin and here's how we'd grow and then um you know if people want to go forward then they can they can retain me you know monthly fee on um as like their fractional VP of sales and marketing essentially what are all the things you need operationally to execute to actually get to market to get my packaging right get my 3PL setup and everything and I'll come in and I'll I'll do that for them or whatever they need some of them have resources for it so they say "All right I only need you for these three projects so we'll do 3 months." Or they say "Mike I don't have anybody i need you to do everything stay with me for a year and just get me get me going get my first sales get me equipped get me all the relationships with brokers help me hire a salesperson on your way out." So I'll work with people that way as well very good awesome well I think we're at the top of the hour and well let me talk to our misfit at the end of every podcast we always ask our misfit do they know a misfit i do yeah I know a guy his name's Sean Perry uh worked with him at Thrazio he's he's a mad marketing genius he's got a uh he's got a um social media marketing company called Launch Wild now you're definitely going to want to talk to this guy perfect all right how do And how do people find out about you at Crossover Strategies what do What do they do uh you can go to my website crossstratincc.com you can follow me on LinkedIn i'm always posting into the void with retail tips maybe someone will read them one day um but yeah you can find me on LinkedIn go to my website uh crossstratincc.com um and yeah feel free to reach out my number email's on there i'm I'm happy to talk to anyone who's interested in retail and we'll make sure that that gets into the show notes as well all right Mike well thanks for coming on the show today we really appreciate it i hope everybody learned a little bit more about retail it's not dead it might smell a little funny but it's there and you can make a lot of money with it right it's not going anywhere it's It's changing it'll It'll keep changing but uh people like to leave their house still so there will be there will be stores yep all right Mike well I'll talk to you soon yeah thanks guys i did did my job again you hit the button you're getting really good at this you're getting a You got a new job i I know you can put that on your LinkedIn profile now yes button pusher button pusher streamyard button pusher um you know when I was a a kid in kindergarten they asked me what I wanted to do for you know the rest of my Unlikely Dreams & Why Retail Never Dies life and I said uh I wanted to be the person that stuffed olives with pimentos oh man i probably said something like I want to be the guy that's the taste tester in the chocolate factory or something like that um or the ice cream store or something i I don't know now we're talking yeah but uh you know retail is is is something I think a lot of people overlook it it is a different animal it's a different beast you know you got to get your mindset a little bit differently and that's I think why I think two I think two things scare people is one is that mindset and one is that that is the money i think those absolutely the two things that actually scare off people that are doing e-commerce from actually dabbling and like I mean he gave some really good Mike said really good you know a lot of people think of it as I need to get in Walmart and Target and you hear these big glamour stories of people going in there and and crushing it but doing going small going local like you said just go down to get three or four i remember I did this with my my dog bowls my slow feed dog bowls i went to three pet stores here locally and actually got them to carry them i just gave them to them on consignment i didn't even tell them that you got to pay me for them uh I said "Let me give you five of them let's see what happens." Uh and then then as soon as they sell you know you you can pay me and I went into a pet uh boarding facility and did the same thing uh with them and just and you get feedback and you get ideas and you you see how it works and start there and then grow up uh into to the big retailers i think that's a really smart strategy uh and really really good advice from Mike yeah abs absolutely it's just trying to convince the brands or the micro brands on Amazon that it's a it's viable like you can do it but uh I think that's it for today my friend uh I think so and just one other thing on that I just thought about local influencers you know a lot of us on Amazon we're trying to get these bigger influencers that are are going out on TikTok all over the place but there's a lot of local newsletters local influencers local people that if they will recommend you like "Hey did you know that uh Tom's Tom's Market over here is carrying this this lip balm now that's amazing i went in there and did this." And you can start with little PR press releases aimed locally where they're they're starving for this kind of stuff and then just snowball that up so lot lots of uh good ideas out of this but that's why we do this Marketing Misfits podcast cuz we try to help you like share our experiences Norman and I's experiences uh cuz we're old guys and we've done a few of these things uh as well as bring on amazing guests like uh Mike today to actually share their expertise and and with you if you like this episode be sure to forward it to someone maybe you know somebody that's got wants to get into retail send them a link to this episode so they can uh check it out uh or go watch it yourself on YouTube or Spotify or Apple Podcast or wherever you like it to listen to podcast because every single Tuesday Norm and I are right here for you actually delivering you another amazing episode of MarketingMisfits you can always find out what's going on at marketingmisfits.co marketingmisfits.co and we have a new channel now doing some sort of like really short if you just got a few seconds you just want to get some really cool actionable tactics how do they do that Norm all they have to do is go to marketing misfits clips and they'll get uh a series of nuggets just like 2 3 minutes max and we take them out of every uh episode like this one here you'll probably have four or five tips that you can check out if you just want to go there and quickly grab some information the other thing we should talk about Kevin just quickly is we've got an incredible event coming up in Tampa it's uh if you want to check more information it's on Collective Minds with an as society collectivemindsocciety.com and we've got a bunch of people on the waiting list all you have to do is check it out if you're interested in coming coming out to the CMS3 it's a cigar event uh in Tampa Florida uh you can join us all you have to do is click the wait list and give us your email that's right and otherwise if we don't see you there uh come November more information on that coming soon uh we'll see you again next Tuesday and I'll see you again next Tuesday Norm i guess you will i got to see you again damn yep bring me cookies i'll I'll bring cookies and ice cream all right see you everybody take care bye [Music]