Home / What we do / Retail distribution & buyers
Category buyers at national and regional chains, in scheduled meetings, with a presentation built to their criteria rather than yours — then the account work that keeps the listing once it is won.
The problem
Category buyers at national chains receive more approaches than they can read. They do not evaluate on the qualities a founder is proudest of. They evaluate on category gap, margin, velocity elsewhere, supply reliability, promotional support and how much of their time the vendor is going to cost them.
The second failure is subtler and more common. A brand secures a listing with a national wholesaler, sees its own item number, and reports to its board that it has U.S. distribution. It has availability. Nothing has been sold. A wholesaler is a logistics route, not a demand engine, and the shelf still has to be won store by store, chain by chain.
The third is timing. Category reviews run on a calendar that has nothing to do with your launch date. Miss a review window and the honest answer is not no, it is next year.
What we do
A ranked target list built from where your product actually fits — national chains, regional grocery, specialty, drug, club and e-commerce — rather than an alphabetical list of everyone with shelves.
The sell sheet, the deck and the numbers built to the buyer's evaluation criteria: category gap, margin, velocity evidence, promotional plan and supply capability.
Meetings with the category buyer who owns the decision, including ECRM programs where the meetings are pre-arranged rather than pursued. We have attended these programs every year since 2009.
Wholesaler listings set up correctly and then actually worked, with the broker network managed rather than left to manage itself.
Vendor setup, routing guides, carton marking, ASN requirements and the paperwork that causes first-order rejections when nobody has done it before.
Planogram work, promotional calendars, category reviews and the ongoing servicing that decides whether the line survives its first year on shelf.
How it works
The first three are what most brands imagine buying. The fourth is what determines whether the first three were worth anything.
Account list built and ranked, review calendars mapped, and the order of approach set so the accounts that matter most aren't approached before the brand is ready for them.
Qualified presentations to category buyers, reported monthly by account, date and outcome, including the reasons behind a no.
Terms negotiated, vendor onboarding completed, first purchase order shipped to retailer specification.
Sell-through monitored, promotions run, resets worked and the account defended at the next category review.
Who this is for
Your product is compliant, priced for the U.S. chain, in stock, and you can supply a national order if one lands. Those are the conditions under which buyer access is worth having.
The regulatory and pricing work isn't done yet. Putting an unready brand in front of a buyer spends a relationship that took years to build and cannot be spent twice. We sequence those first for that reason.
Third-party validation
TruLife has represented supplier brands at ECRM programmes every year since 2009. This is Brian’s 2020 interview with Joseph Tarnowski of ECRM — which is worth more than us describing the relationship ourselves.
A single programme can mean forty to fifty pre-scheduled meetings with category buyers in a week. It is the most reliable route we know for a brand without existing relationships.
Watch · Brian Gould × Joseph Tarnowski, ECRM
Interviewed by Joseph Tarnowski, ECRM · September 2020 · plays from YouTube, nothing loads until you press play
Go deeper
How distribution actually works here, and how buyer access fits inside it.
Read the guide →Guides, articles and answers on wholesalers, brokers, buyers and category reviews.
Browse the hub →A West-Coast-first expansion, with the team on camera.
Read →Documented launches, the channels they ran through, and what happened next.
Read the case studies →In their words
“Brian has been attending ECRM Programs every year since 2009 to help his suppliers grow sales and expand distribution. He is focused on how to help his brands — getting the right appointments, preparing for meetings and promoting their offerings and capabilities.”Sarah DavidsonVP, ECRM / RangeMe
Questions
U.S. Market Assessment
Send us your product and your numbers. We'll come back with a written assessment of what entering U.S. retail would require and what it would realistically return.
