How to prepare your brand for retail

The most useful reframe available to a brand preparing for retail is this: a buyer is not assessing your product on its merits in isolation. They are deciding whether replacing an existing line with yours will grow the category, and whether your business can supply reliably enough to make that a low-risk decision.

Almost everything about how a submission should be built follows from that.

What a buyer is actually weighing

• Does this grow the category, or just move volume between products already on shelf?
• Is there evidence of demand, or is this a projection?
• Can they supply consistently, at the volumes required, including at promotional peaks?
• Is the margin structure workable once promotional activity is accounted for?
• Is the compliance and labelling position clean?
• Will this brand support the listing, or expect us to do the work?

Notice how few of these are about the product itself. Product quality is close to table stakes; the differentiating factors are commercial and operational.

Evidence beats projection

The single most persuasive thing in a submission is evidence of rate of sale somewhere else, in your home market, in another retailer, in online channels. It converts your claim from a forecast into an observation.

This is the practical argument for online or specialty retail before approaching a major chain. It is not a lesser channel; it is how you generate the evidence that makes the major approach credible.

A projection says what you believe will happen. Rate of sale data says what did happen. Buyers have seen a great many projections.

The unglamorous things that stop listings

Most failed submissions do not fail on strategy. They fail on operational detail that could have been resolved months earlier.

• Barcodes not registered correctly, or not registered to your business
• Carton dimensions that palletise inefficiently, raising the retailer's handling cost
• Shelf life that does not survive the supply chain with the required remaining life on arrival
• Labelling that does not meet destination requirements
• Production capacity that cannot absorb a promotional spike without disrupting existing customers
• Lead times that do not fit the retailer's replenishment cycle
• No clear answer on who funds promotional activity

None of these are interesting. All of them are cheaper to fix before a submission than after a listing has been won and a delivery window has been missed.

Build the commercial pack properly

What a submission should contain varies by retailer and category, but the underlying components are consistent.

Understand trade terms before you agree to them

List price is not realised margin. Settlement terms, rebates, promotional funding, listing fees and returns provisions all sit between the two, and they can differ substantially from what a brand expects.

Model this before you negotiate. A margin structure that looks healthy on list price and unworkable after trade terms is a common and avoidable discovery to make after signing.

Plan to the range review calendar

Major retailers review categories on a calendar, often only once or twice a year. That makes retail approach a planning exercise rather than an opportunistic one: identify the next review window for your category, and work backwards from it.

In practice this usually means starting earlier than brands expect, because the compliance, evidence and operational work that a submission depends on takes longer than the submission itself.

Winning the listing is the start

A listing that underperforms in its first review cycle is generally ranged out, and re-entry is harder than entry was. The work after a listing, rate of sale, replenishment reliability, promotional planning, regular reporting, is what determines whether you keep it.

Brands that treat the listing as the finish line tend to lose it. Brands that treat it as the start of a channel relationship tend to build on it.