Getting your beauty brand stocked in great skincare retailers isn’t as hard as you might think (even without a large or established brand). Retailers are looking for a brand like yours.
Before we get into how to get your beauty brand stocked in your ideal skincare retailers, let’s look at why it’s the main strategy which will grow your brand into the financially successful business you want!
Imagine you are finding and serving every single one of your customers yourself.
How many new customers (people actually buying your products) do you think you could recruit through your own efforts each and every month?
How many orders do you think you could send out yourself in a month?
When you’re dealing with every customer yourself, you are limited (by your time and energy) on how many customers you can serve, how many products you can sell and of course how much money you can make.
Now, imagine your brand is stocked in just five skincare retailers, with each shop (online or physical) attracting an average of 10,000 unique customers per month. That’s 50,000 customers per month that could see and potentially buy your products.
Working 1-2-1, ie Direct to Customer (D2C) is totally inefficient and ineffective. You have to do all the hard work, generate all the traffic to you, do all the marketing, recruit all the customers, plus your product costs will remain high due to always making only small batches.
It will only get you so far.
Working with skincare or lifestyle retailers gives you access to so many more customers, gives you a much bigger reach, gives you more sales with a lot less work, will help you gain economies of scale (so, the more you produce the lower the individual product cost will be) and will get your brand seen by a lot more people; bloggers, magazines, other retailers and of course, customers!
Now you know why its critical to your success, let’s get to the how…
Working with skincare retailers is not as difficult as you may think. There are retailers who actively want to stock unique brands like yours (even if you only have a capsule range of 3+ products).
The six steps to success:
1) Identify potential retailers. Research the best skincare or lifestyle retailers for your brand whose values and principles match yours.
2) Start with online retailers. This is where the growth is and you will definitely find online retailers will be more open to smaller brands like yours with a strong USP.
3) Keep track of your communication. List all the retailers you want to target, find out who the correct person is (the Buyer, usually) and keep a spreadsheet of who and when you communicate with them.
4) Send target retailers a professional presentation. You need to include nice images, information about you and your brand, the brand’s values, your mission plus details on the products and prices. Send this to all retailers on your shortlist and follow up with them afterwards.
5) Make sure you have everything in place. Retailers will expect you to have at least the following ready: a consistent product supply, ability to deliver within 3-5 days from them placing an order, your products complying with local legislation, an understanding of margins, your business terms and conditions, systems for delivery and invoicing, a marketing plan, collateral (aka sales support material) and professional photography.
6) Prepare for retailer meetings. Get as many meetings as you can with the target retailers you’ve identified and do as much preparation as you can so you can get a YES to being stocked! Make sure you: know what the maximum percentage margin is you can agree to, understand the retailer’s marketing opportunities, think about what the retailers expect and want from you.
Retailers are made up of people, just like you, so working with retailers is about building relationships and long-term partnerships through offering them something they want.
Over to you
So, take the first step, do some research and identify your shortlist. Please share in the comments below who your top three skincare retailers are, that you’d absolutely love to see your brand stocked in and why.
