Getting Stocked Isn’t the Finish Line, It’s the Start Line

You’ve landed your dream retailer. Your products are on the shelf. Now what?
 Most brands think their job is done once they’ve been stocked, but that’s just the beginning. In this episode, I break down the three stages of post-delivery success that turn a one-off wholesale order into consistent reorders (and loyal retail partners who sell your products for you).

You’ll Learn:
✨ Why getting stocked is just the start line, not the finish line
✨ How to support your retailers with marketing assets, education, and storytelling tools
✨ Simple ways to drive foot traffic and visibility for your stockists (without hurting your own online sales)
✨ How to build lasting relationships with buyers and retail staff that lead to repeat orders
✨ Why scarcity thinking is holding your brand back and how abundance thinking grows both sides

Mentioned in this Episode:

• Transform Your Wholesale Program: Learn how to get stocked (and stay stocked!) → thelotco.com.au/wholesale
  
  
• Free Wholesale Guide: Download your free copy →here https://thelotco.myflodesk.com/wholesaletips
  
  
• Book Mentioned: Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara

Roadmap to Profit Program waitlist is here.

Join my Product Business Growth Club here.

Transcript

Thank you so much for joining me here today. My name's Melissa Robbins. I am a product based business coach, let's get straight into it.  You've done it, you finally got stocked on the retailer's shelf of your dreams. But here's the truth that most brands don't realize. Your job doesn't stop there. That's when the real work actually begins. Getting stocked is the start line, not the finish line. We really wanna support your retailers.

We want to encourage the sell through. We want to send people to, to let people know that they've got that product. We wanna encourage people to go into store and buy from their retailers. Just because you're doing that, it doesn't mean that you are gonna have less sales on your website

'cause often the people that are going to buy in store are very different to the people buying online. And what you'll find is that people experience your product differently when they're touching and feeling that product as well.  All right, , there's three stages for that post delivery success. Let's get into it.

  .  Number one is to support your store.

What that means? Sending marketing assets, making it easy for them to actually upload the products quickly. How do you send your imagery, make sure that you group your imagery into folders to make it easy for someone who has no idea about your product to find it. So for example, you may have a folder that is, let's just say that you have homewares.

It might be the folder is vases the folder. Then within that is lifestyle shots. Then it's also product shots, or maybe it's categorized in folders by product. Depends on how many products you have. If it's a product name, you would name the product. And then each image would be named with what it actually is as well.

To make it easy to find that image, do not send your images to your stockists with the code IMG 7 87. Actually name it with what it is. So the name of the product, your brand name in there as well, and then the type of shot it is. So is it a lifestyle shot? Is it a side view shot?

Is it the product shot or ghosted or whatever it might be. Help your stores and help the people who are loading that product onto their own e-commerce site to get it up and find it as quickly as possible. Send a card or send a little postcard with what your product's all about. The person who's buying the products might not be the person selling the product, so they might not have any idea.

The more you can give, and this obviously comes back to whether you've got good packaging as well, and whether the packaging's selling the product for you as well. It always helps for staff to know more about your product, and so giving them some information, whether it's a little postcard, whether that is a YouTube QR code, that they can go and watch some information.

What are some talking points or selling points about your product? Help them out. Maybe you can offer some in, maybe you can also offer training. Whether that is in store, you can come and explain the product, whether it's a little YouTube videos I just talked about, whether you have a special night where you go through the range.

All those things are possible too, whether it's to the staff or whether it's also to the customers too. Maybe you've see even just a little PDF and it's just to showcases you know, everything about your product and the features and benefits of your product. You wanna make it easy for them to tell your story too.

The more individual, the more unique, the more elements that they have to be able to tell your story to their end customer. The, easier it is for them to sell and the easier it is for them to move that product because they've got something to communicate to their customer about your product as well.

Number two is you wanna drive foot traffic. As I mentioned before, some people don't do this because they're so scared of losing sales on their own online store. And what that comes down back to is having a scarcity mindset. So if you have a scarcity mindset that you think there's not enough customers, there's only a limited amount of customers, for me, I'm gonna shoot myself in the foot by promoting other stores instead of actually getting people to my own website.

You're coming in with the wrong attitude. The physical store is supporting your sales. Often you'll find that people go into stores and find a product and then they come to their, then they may go and buy more product from that same store online, so they become an online customer potentially of yours anyway.

Driving foot traffic into these stores is only gonna help people reorder and reorder. The faster that they sell through the products, the faster they're gonna reorder. And it definitely is way easier for you to send out 50 of some one product to one customer than it is to send 50 individual orders to an individual, direct to consumer customer.

So just think about them as separate almost, that just because you're driving foot traffic to a particular store doesn't mean that they're, you're taking away from your own online sales. All right? , You should . Whether you drop off your order, I would be doing like little story highlights, telling the story of where those stockists are.

I would be doing stockists features on your own website, tagging them back, linking them, connecting those things as well. Ideally, you always have a stockists list on your own website because then people can access it quickly. If someone wants to buy something and they're looking for a particular product, they wanna be able to get it quickly.

There's nothing that gets my goat more than going onto a website to try and find a product. And then they say, contact me for stockists list. And again, it comes back to a scarcity mindset that you're so worried about your competitors, finding out where your stockists are, that you're not really concerned about your customers.

They're the ones who wanna know where your product is and where they can get it quickly. Maybe they wanna buy a birthday present, maybe they wanna, access it quickly 'cause they've run out of something and they wanna go to a physical store and they don't wanna wait to get the product. Let them do that.

Let them be able to get that product quickly and know where, where your product is stocked as close to them as possible. It's only gonna help your sales. You could run activations or giveaways with your store, to send customers into store. I talked with one of my clients the other day in my product business growth club about she wanted to do a special giveaway for creating custom cards.

And I talked about, you know, maybe you could do, this is something you could do with your stockist. It's so, it becomes an activation for them. It gets people excited about it. It gets people to learn about it, and then you can use that content and images to then share that you're gonna do it online as well.

So that can be just a great way to get to know your real customers, end customer, get in front of them, have some fun with the activation, and build relationships with your stores as well. And when you send people to them. They'll send people back to you too, because potentially they don't have a certain color or they're never gonna order that size range, so then they send people to you too.

So having physical stores, , having stockists of your product builds your direct to consumer brand as well. And it's definitely builds brand awareness about who you are and what your product is. So many more people are gonna discover you that if you just had direct to consumer alone.

Number three is to really build relationships with your stores, really build relationships with your buyers and the stores and the staff in the stores. Check in often. And I don't mean text 'em every two days, but check in regularly, whether it's every month, every quarter, maybe you send an email every month and it's got your stock availability list, it's got your new releases, it's got your new developments that you've got going on.

So really have regular check in as well as individually customized check-ins too. Don't ghost them after the first order, and don't assume that just because they haven't reordered if.

It is because they don't want your product. Most of the time it is because they have not had time and they are so busy. Maybe they've got 60, 80, a hundred suppliers. They don't necessarily have time to get back to you individually, so they may have run out of a product or it might be selling through really quickly, but they just haven't reordered yet.

So do them a service and help them out by contacting them and to find out if they need any more stock or if they wanna refill. And then also ask for feedback. What is selling quickly, it may surprise you what's actually working in their store, and find out what doesn't, what they need.

Do they need a point of sale? Do they need to have better packaging? Do they need to swap out some colors? Like what is it, what's going on for them? And how can you drive traffic to them to help them sell through that product faster as well? It benefits everyone. The more that people promote the physical retail stores or online stores, if they're selling them as well, then it's better for everyone in the economy.

So the more we can drive traffic, the longer these stores will stay around, the more likely they are to reorder and build that experience that someone has as well. And definitely reward. Reward your best customers. . Reward reorders with special perks. Or maybe they get. A giveaway for their staff.

Maybe they get exclusive previews or small thank you little perks like gifts as well. Surpris and delight your customers all the time, and you go above and beyond. If you haven't read it or seen the book, unreasonable Hospitality, go and check it out. I just actually jumped up to grab this, and this is featured in the Bear as well, and they talk about this in the Bear

It's about the remarkable power of giving people more than they expect. How can you do that? Whether it's your direct to consumer customer, whether it's your wholesale customer, how can you go above and beyond? What can you do that's unexpected servicing your customers, allowing reorders, allowing repeat buys?

You may have heard me tell a story before when I used to buy the saltwater sandals. And when I had that in store, I would start with a bulk order and I'd do, you know, two to $3,000 of stock to kick my season off. But then I would reorder every week based on orders that I took from my customers. 'cause I would take deposits and I would order the stock every week.

So they were amazing for servicing me and allowing me to do that. Sometimes it might've been a $500 order, other times it might've been a $3,000 order. Again, it was always different, but it was a regular order. Some people might have. Looked at that and gone, no, you have to order a minimum amount. This is what it is, and it's only do it every month because it annoyed them potentially.

But I was ordering every week from them, and so what started out as maybe a $3,000 order became a $25,000 order that year that I bought from them. So how can you service your customer in a way that treats them as though they are a long-term customer and that they are a customer who's spending more money with you than maybe that potential first minimum order is your stockists are your best sales reps.

They're doing the selling for you. How can you help them do that? You've gotta equip them to be able to sell it. And that comes back to your packaging, the way that your product is packaged, your point of sale, if you have testers or samplers, if it's required, or if that suits your product the way that your story is told, whether it's through the packaging, whether it's through the hang tag, whether it's through the signage that you use as well, whether you inform the staff who are selling that product.

The more they know about your product, the more they understand about your product. The more they love your product, the more they're going to sell. It's not just getting into the stores, it's staying in the stores and driving traffic to those stores. The more support you give, the more sales you're gonna get.

So if you're ready to build stronger wholesale systems and you wanna keep, getting your product onto shelves again and again, then join my Transform Your Wholesale program. Or download my free wholesale guide, which is gonna be in the show notes. I will share a special link with you to get access to that.

I am so passionate about how to help more people, get more products into stores, give them the confidence to really make sure that they're putting their best foot forward. And that's one big thing that I notice with a lot of my clients who first come on board inside that program. They just have no idea where to get started and no idea if they're approaching people in the right way or approaching people with the right confidence as well, and the right know-how.

So that is something I'm super passionate about and super excited about, as well as being, as you well know, um, I'm very multi-passionate. I love e-commerce too. I love being able to build the foundations of a product business and helping guide you on what those foundational things you need in place to be able to scale.

And, , I work with clients from startup very, very beginning to, , four or $5 million in sales in their business annually. So that's a sort of range of customers I work with, whether you are just starting out to give you that kickoff. And I have things like the Product Business Growth Club, which is my monthly membership to help guide and support and give inspiration and ideas for how to get started.

I have my Transform Your Wholesale program, which I just talked about. I have my Roadmap to Profit program, which is my foundational program to help you scale from that. Zero to that one sort of helps you get to about



Four to 500,000 per year. 

After that. I have another level where I work with clients one-on-one or I have a mastermind, which is gonna be kicking off in 2026.

And super excited to share actually that I'm gonna be adding some in-person retreats into those two and just putting it out there. The first one I'm looking at is New York. So. If you're interested in that, and if that sounds appealing to you. That's for those clients who are just, who are over the first two, 300 k and sort of trying to scale to that million dollar amount.

Like what does that look like for you? How do you get there? That's what we're gonna be doing all year in the 2026 Mastermind as well. What else have I got?, There's always other little things that I have going on too, like my add to cart accelerator or my.

Get more sales bundle, which includes your email marketing. As I said, I'm multi passionate about lots of things, and I've been doing this for so long that all the things I've developed have been a need for what my customers have needed to get to that next stage. So , that's what I get so excited to share and help you with as well.

Let me know if you aren't sure which one is the right one for you, you can book a call with me to find out or DM me on Instagram and I'll point you in the right direction. I look forward to sharing more with you next week, and I'll speak to you soon. Bye.