Retailers

“No matter how many times the retailers go through this, no matter how many times I went through this, everybody's thinking to themselves, this time is different. Like, this time, it's gonna sell a million a month for the next three years, and they can't even j…”

“One of our biggest obstacles in the early years was retailers afraid to put our product on shelves. Cause they didn't want to trade the customer down. If they're selling a six dollar lip gloss and I'm selling a dollar lip gloss and they customer buys mine over…”

“Retailers, what they sell really is real estate. So the more you can turn product into less space, the more they like you.”

“We maintained something like a 96% fill rate when competition was happy to be at 80.”

“Retailers don't have patents. We couldn't patent a natural food supermarket. We couldn't patent our product mix. We couldn't patent our marketing. We couldn't patent our service levels.”

“Retailers, Spent 5.8 billion on digital ads in the U.S. From November first to November seventh, a four percent increase from last year.”

“If you really boil it down, the Coca-Cola company in a nutshell, it is figuring out how to incentivize partners to sell your product. And everyone is incentivized. The bottlers are massively incentivized. The retailers, there's great margin there for you. The …”

“The other retailers want to use the house brand brand name to signal to customers this is the same product at a cheaper price. Trader Joe's Wants to signal to customers with all of their products, this is an N of one product.”

“Many have carried a heavy debt load pushed on them by their private equity owners, firms that use these stores and that debt to pay themselves. When you're leveraged up like that and have significant interest payments to make, you're not as nimble when things …”

“No matter how many times the retailers go through this, no matter how many times I went through this, everybody's thinking to themselves, this time is different. Like this time it's going to sell a million a month for the next three years. And they can't even …”

“If you go to someone with information proactively before they come to you, you're a partner. You've given them great insights. You're a partner. If somebody comes to you and says, Hey, this is not working. You're a loser. That difference between a partner and …”

“Because payroll and benefits represent approximately 80% of a retailer's cost of operations, pricing advantage follows labor productivity.”

“And these tariffs are not going to be paid by the toy companies or any company. They're not going to be paid by retailers. They're going to be paid by the consumers.”

“And in all of these different layers of distribution, you would end up with a markup of 1200% At minimum on that product. So something that is manufactured for five dollars would retail for 60 at minimum because the retailer themselves are taking at least half…”

“In the physical world, retailers will continue to use technology to reduce costs, but not to transform the customer experience.”

“Most of the retailers wanted 50 points on the product and there just wasn't a way that we could Provide that. We were maybe making 30 points at most on the product at the time.”

“No, no retailer really understands like much at all about their customers. Because how could they? All of the data is trapped within the big five banks.”

“I don't actually think it is clear that you can go direct to consumer. Like I think that happens in some cases when brands have leverage. I think when brands don't have leverage or when they're just starting out, it's kind of The retailers, I think, dictate a …”

“My hypothesis is there aren't a ton of retailers and brands that derive more than one percent of their revenue via this channel.”

“Our platform helps those retailers save, you know, six months and nearly 250,000 dollars.”

“Two percent of retailers have mobile applications right now.”

“If you are a retailer and you want to build a mobile app, in the case of a smaller retailer who's generating a million dollars or more in revenue. That retailer is spending a quarter of a million dollars the first year to build that mobile application.”

“But this was the craziest thing that struck me is the retailer is the brand on the watch at this point in time.”

“In the grocery space, every, almost every retailer donates food in massive quantities. In the restaurant space, same thing happens”

“And so what I've learned is for big companies, especially retailers, they only have so many, literally every year they do future planning where there's like, these are the five critical things we're working on. And maybe there's one or two innovations or three…”

“Great retailers have more in common with P.T. Barnum than poor retailers.”

“I realized there was this huge problem impacting military families where the whole country kind of wanted to wrap their arms around the military, whether it was retailers or nonprofit government programs. And obviously military families wanted to access those …”

“And most brands, virtually all of them, and most retailers are not in that business. They are in the purchase order writing business. And so you have to become a manufacturer again, the way they all were. You know, they all were manufactured businesses, 20, 30…”

“Probably policymakers number one probably retailers number two and brands number Three, and then consumers, I think, are fourth and the least important, because I think consumers have got to act rationally, and they should.”

“Personal services, personal care services is the new retails. If you go to the shopping center, you'll see, You know, place after place after place that is personal services because so many retailers have gone out.”

“You selling to the retailer and getting out on the shelf is the easy part. That's when the work starts.”

“And these, you know, retailers, most of them, they make more, more money from slotting fees than they do from actually selling products.”

“80% of global trade goes from a manufacturer through middle parties like distributors, buying groups, retailers. Contractors, and then eventually to the end customer. That's 80% of trade. There's very, very little that goes direct from a manufacturer to an end…”

“By focusing on it, we could actually do it really well in a way that was sort of profitable, and, you know, a solid business, and the basis of an amazing customer relationship, where, yes, a bunch of other companies could and do sell and A basic white t-shirt …”

“Even large retailers that run at pretty thin margins, it is often the case that their EBITDA is the same size as their card processing fees.”

“And it's a perfect example for retailers and store managers, all right? Is that you might have a store that's in a good location and it's not performing and you know the store manager needs to be replaced and you bring in a new store manager and who's really, …”

“The fundamental difference of the business of a retailer and a restaurant is that for a retailer, when they buy a product, if it's more expensive, then that actually means that there's more profit for them when they sell it. The opposite is really true with a …”

“Those meetings for the ice cream category happen once a year, and they happen September through November or early December”

“Frozen and dairy are two of the most expensive spaces in the store because they require electricity”

“There were actually laws on the books in the U.S. At the time that manufacturers of goods could set a minimum selling price for retail, and it was actually illegal for retailers to offer products below that price to the general public.”

“Retailers don't like that. I didn't really spend enough time understanding where they were coming from, and I would inflict them with new designs maybe every year, and that would obsolete their inventories.”

“In 1995, the web attracted more than 100,000 retailers. Which I would not have guessed that happened until, like, Shopify, but apparently that happened in 1985, with some spending more than a million dollars each on eye-popping sites. Yet worldwide retail sale…”

“There's another point, which is one I've made in a different context, which is, yes, but as a brand or retailer, now you're looking at your ad budget as interchangeable with your rent. So you're asking the question, should we rent more stores, or should we run…”

“90% of our products went through a retailer.”

“When we launched the brand, right. We actually went to offline initially, and we were rejected by, obviously, almost 90% of the retailers out there that you will keep your product, which is a typical story”

“Retailers experience literally in some cases, tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars a year in accident costs in their stores and distribution centers.”

“10 years ago, it was hard. It was really hard to get a retailer to A, want to invest more in the associate that they knew was only going to stick around for a short time, and B, think about doing it differently than just in a classroom or on a laptop.”

“We found with retailers that the engagement and the motivation of the store manager was highly dependent on, or we were highly dependent on that store manager to drive the daily adoption and then ongoing participation of the people in that particular store.”

“The trade show solved like a really fundamental problem for retailers, which is when they are placing an order for a product, they need to know that it's going to sell. If it doesn't sell, they could go out of business. And so there's all this anxiety that's w…”

“Moving that online, people had tried it. Like Etsy tried this. There was this other website called Bonagora a while back that tried it. Everyone who tried it Would get a bunch of brands signed up, but then they couldn't get the retailers to order.”

“And so we realized in that moment, that was the core problem that we had to solve. And that's how we ended up launching fair with free returns, net 60 payment terms, basically like try before you buy.”

“You know, return rates on apparel are 40%.”

“So the idea that you know my body dimensions and use artificial intelligence to know the inside dimensions of the garment to see exactly how it's going to lay in my body without having to try it on, to cut down return rates dramatically. There's billions of do…”

“We are having over you know, 50,000 retailers on our platform”

“When we had gone into the retailers, and this was where Joanne had come in, she was pretty knowledgeable about what margins look like for retailers, and at the time she said, if we come in and we give them a margin that's a little bit bigger than what they're …”

“Amazon doing private label, like, yo, that's how retails work for the last hundred years. Like every retailer is 20% private label, but on the web somehow it's evil.”

“No retailer will ever admit to us that you did this, right? Like, because if they do that, it's negotiating leverage.”

“And it's expensive to launch a new product. It's really expensive to discontinue. Because when you see something on shelf that's being discounted for the store to get rid of it, the manufacturer is funding it.”

“Technical onboarding takes anything from an hour to a couple of weeks, depending on the size of the retailer. So it can be very quick to get a retailer live and they're transactional within the first month.”

“Brand will give you stronger unit economics, but brands will have very high, ah, cost of customer acquisition and repeat rates. So very quickly you will find that if you have very high cost of customer acquisitions, Then you can't be a single product company. …”