Getting Your Products Into Retail Stores: Riley and Nathan Judd

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Hey everybody. Ryan, Daniel Moran here. Welcome to Freedom Fast Lane. Today I'm going to be joined by two of our retail partners, Riley and Nathan Judd. We originally met these guys a couple of years ago when we were thinking about going into retail with one of our physical products brands and they were like, you're doing things a little bit wrong. Tweak this, this and this. And going through the process and realizing we were sitting on a massive amount of growth due to the fact that we were selling well on Amazon. We had a good brand store, we had a list of customers and that has been scaled since then. And we've operated with a much bigger mindset since then. We're now listed in retail stores and we actually have a full time person who manages that channel for us. So I wanted to bring on Riley and Nathan and talk about the process for getting into retail, what it looks like in order to pivot to be ready for that channel, what the profit margins look like, who should avoid going into retail, how you stand out from all of the other noise. And you will be amazed at the parallels between the two different verticals, meaning the online side and the retail side. If you're doing the online side well, you can be sitting on a gold mine by using all of those assets as leverage and into the retail side of things. Because most people get in there naked, meaning they have no assets, they have no way of making it profitable for the retailers and they certainly don't know how to market themselves well. They spend a whole lot of money trying to get retail profitable and so many of them fail. Whereas on the online side, we have things already dialed in and profitable. So we can afford to take some risks, we can afford to do do it right through retail. So I asked Riley and Nathan to come on to share some of that experience. We're also doing a training module together inside of the Breakthrough Business Bootcamp which is open@freedomfastlane.com tribe. If you're selling anything online or you need a kick in the pants to see how your business can go bigger than it currently is, you're really going to enjoy this chat with the Judd brothers. One thing to keep in mind, there were three of us on this call, so the only way we could do this was Skype. So the audio isn't the best on this, but you'll still get a lot out of the crux of what we discuss in this chat with Riley and Nathan Judd.

Nathan, Riley, welcome to Freedom Fast Lane. Thanks for hanging out with me today.

Thanks for having us.

So I Want to kick things off. I know you guys are fairly humble dudes, and you don't like to talk about yourselves, but you're kind of a big deal. So I would like to take 60 to 90 seconds and hear about some of your background that you've had in retail, some of the brands you've launched. Because you have. You have. I mean, the brands that you've touched have probably impacted a billion people or so. So would you tell us a little bit about your background and some of the cool stuff you've done up to this point?

You bet. You know, like you said, I think we're only right by Ron Burgundy. But.

No, we. Nathan and I have been in this space for. Probably, When I say this space, the retail space for about 16, 17 years now. We started with. When we started, we were in Utah with a small company.

At the time was a small company, and we were only in the health food store channels, and it was a growing business. When we left, we were actually. Nathan was the vice president of sales for one of the large. For the largest skin care company in the world, and I was overseeing the vitamin and supplement channel. So through that, we created a lot of good contacts. We came down to Vegas. We were recruited down here by a company called Zajience, that was an energy drink company. We knew nothing about energy drinks, but we were looking for a new opportunity. So we came down to Vegas and got into the world of energy drinks. We were the major sponsor of the Ultimate Fighting Competition, the ufc. So that took us around the country.

Hung out with a lot of the fighters, which was an interesting story all in itself. And we actually secured about 40,000 doors of distribution in one year. From there, we went to help Cott Beverage, who's the fourth largest beverage manufacturer in the world, behind Coke, Pepsi, and Cadbury. We helped them establish their distribution model. Nathan traveled the country by car while I was setting up appointments from Vegas and had him running all over from state to state, back and forth. And then we decided we wanted to, you know, go back to our roots and get in the supplement in the skincare world. And from there, we've launched.

A lot of brands. We've helped companies small and large get distribution from Macy's, Bloomingdale's to GNC to 7 11.

I think you are underselling yourself, because from my memory, you were involved in some of Trump's products. You were involved in Five Hour Energy. You were involved in a lot of, like, stuff that we see a lot of infomercials for. Is my memory Serving me correctly, we.

Did, we did get into the celebrity space a little bit. We did launch Melania Trump's skin care product line. We launched $0.50 fragrance line. We launched Kim Kardashian's fragrance with Sephora. We also launched all the Sisters tanning line. So celebrity is always fun, but it's always a weird one at the same time.

Yeah, I imagine that's, that's the case.

Oh, we did Lindsay Lohan. That was like that, that was the last one we did before we're like, all right, we're out of the celebrity world.

I imagine there's some great stories there and that's probably a podcast for another day. But you've been, you've been involved in not just, you know, just little businesses getting some exposure. You've been a part of some pretty large brands. So would you talk a little bit about what makes the difference between a product that succeeds in retail and a product that fails? Because you've had some, you've had some celebrity backed products kind of epically fail, and then you've had some small products that on the surface didn't look like they had a lot going for them and they were a huge success. So what was the difference between the big successes and the big failures?

Nathan, you want to.

Why don't you go in and I'll add to it?

You know, it's always hard. I mean, it's always. People come to us all the time. And, you know, we probably get 50 to 100 brands coming to us a month or they're sending samples into our office and you know, and sometimes it's the mom and dad or the husband and wife sitting at home. They have no employees, but they've got this amazing product, you know, and you know that there's a need for it. There's a blank space in the categories. And that's what the department stores or any store is really looking for, is something that's new and not just taking business from another brand that's already out there. And so when you can find something that's new with a new story, with a new message and.

Filling a need, I mean, that's gonna be the most successful brand. If you're just going in there and I'm not gonna say like which celebrity it was, but you know, one that came in and just wanted to piggyback off of other people's success and just pretend like they were doing the exact same thing, it was an utter failure. I mean, millions of dollars lost. Where you have another celebrity who came in and.

Did like 26 personal appearances, really got behind her brand and she was the biggest launch ever in that retailer. So, you know, just there's so many variables that it's hard to say that this is, you know, me and Riley were talking about this when we first started talking to you, talking about what we're going to talk about today. It's so hard to say what is just one cookie cutter approach to being successful.

What about proven concepts? I mean, a lot of people listening have products they've been selling for a couple of years successfully through other channels, either their own website or they have Kickstarters behind them or they're selling on Amazon.com does that help? I mean, you mentioned it's got to be new and fulfill a need. So does having sales history from Amazon or an infomercial or Kickstarter or a website, does that help or does that hurt the success of a brand in retail?

It absolutely helps. I mean, it can't hurt. But, you know, it also depends on, let's say, Amazon, you know, Amazon supplement. World's really big on Amazon. And let's say you're talking about, let's go back to the old days when Dr. Oz was out there promoting crap everywhere. You had Garcinia Cambogia and you had some companies on Amazon selling hundreds of thousands of bottles every week, but yet GNC had 32 Garcinia Cambogias on their shelf. It didn't really matter. There was already so many. It was just totally.

Failed category.

But that's, that's, that's a trend, right? I mean, we all knew that was gonna end at some point. And, and I also like how you say the old days because that was like a year ago, back in the olden days in 2015.

Gotta think about that, though, because in a lot of our retailers, I mean, like, let's take my world right now, I'm starting Christmas for next year. Even though we just finished it, my entire Christmas setup is gonna be done. Catalogs are booked, photography is done in June. So we start so far out that, yeah, a year ago was really two years in our planning.

I see.

Okay. So I understand why something like a Garcinia Cambogia wouldn't do well in retail because it's not really differentiated. It's not, it's not really. It's a me too product. You're just taking advantage of a trend. So we have kind of talked about among the three of us about the importance of a brand story, about really setting your product or your business apart. From everybody else. Would you talk a little bit about that? Because I know from talking with the two of you that one of the ways that you can kind of make a product that may not be all that different in the marketplace, but make it appear different enough to be successful in a retail environment is having that brand story. Would you talk about crafting that or what types of stories help brand stand out when it's on the shelf?

Yeah. I think that's the most critical point to us. And when we look at a brand.

When the brands come to us, one, first thing we look at is the packaging. Is the packaging going to be a retail friendly packaging? Your packaging that you guys sell on Amazon is completely separate than what should be on the shelf. You guys get the opportunity to build a story below the product and to kind of tell it. What we try to do is consolidate that story on the packaging so when the consumer walks by, they're as quick as possible within like 10 seconds, understand what the product is and then again it goes on to that story. How is your product differentiated from the other thing out there? Now there's 10 different Garcinias on the shelf and one of them is a top seller. Why is it the top seller? And usually it's the brands that understand how to tell the story the best are the ones that are going to win. They're the ones that are going to be able to tell the story that this product had a study behind it, dummy down that study so the average consumer can walk in, understand what was said, what was conducted in that study, resonate that story to themselves and win. The ones that fail are the ones that come into us and say, hey, look, we have the same product as X product over here. However, we're going to come in at $10 cheaper.

That's the biggest, that's the biggest turnout for Nathan and I. We'll usually turn those guys away pretty quick just because one, the category manager on the shelf isn't going to want to trade down dollars. Two, if your marketing approach and your story approach is that we're a cheaper alternative to a product that's already selling, it's a failed and flawed strategy.

And that story with the study and.

As you put it, the dumbed down story to make it appear different, that can often raise the price in a retail environment rather than drive it down and make it sell more. Right? Like sell more at a higher price. Am I understanding that correctly?

Absolutely. Absolutely.

That's different than how most people think in the Internet world, where we kind of fear the driving down of prices, the.

Competition that has me too, products everywhere and driving down prices.

Encouraging to hear that that type of story can elevate the margins that are seen. So what would you say makes a good brand story? Or what would you say makes a product stand out from the shelf by leveraging certain differentiating factors. What pieces need to be on that packaging that allow us to charge higher prices and sell more and stand out from all the other copycat products?

The number one thing that someone needs to do when they're making their packaging, and this is the biggest mistake everybody makes. Everybody, when we go to their office and they call us in there and they've got this amazing box and they sit it on their desk and they've got a black desktop. Everything looks amazing on a black desktop. Go take it into the retail. Like, if you're going after Sephora, you're going after gnc, you want to go after Walmart, whoever you want to go after, walk it into that store and just say, hey, I've got a meeting with this retailer. Can I take a picture of it on your shelf? Because it's a whole lot different when you're in a store that's all white glass shelves, fluorescent lighting, and you've got a white box with metallic silver writing on it. You can't reach anything on it.

The number one problem people make is their boxes. They're not retail compatible. They look great on their desktop, but they look horrible. A shelf.

And to add to that too, make sure that you're understanding what the product is. We've had a couple products that were probably the best products that we've ever seen, but you had no clue when you got the box what it was. We would look at it and say, the box looks amazing, but what is it? And they would tell you what it is. You're like, well, okay, well, where am I seeing that on this carton? And that's the biggest thing too, is.

Every product out there, the reason why the brand owner did it has some kind of thing that compelled them to make that product? What was the reason behind it? And put it on the carton. You can add it. I mean, not every carton has to look the same. But I'm always a big fan of putting the story on the side of the carton. The first person's going to grab the box if they like the look of it and they're going to turn it around. And you want, when they turn that box around to look at it. You want that story, that carton. So one, they're going to take the first 10 second impression or the two second impression. They see the carton, now you've got their attention. They turn the carton over. Now you've got the story. That's your true opportunity to really tell your story to that consumer. Why they need your product, why it's going to resonate with them. And then you kind of expand on that throughout the other panels on the carton.

The example I like to use is Clif Bar. Clif Bar on every package tells the story about the founder going on a long bike ride, pulling out a power bar and saying, I cannot take one more bite of this damn power bar. I need something that, that tastes better. And he went home and created his family recipe. And by connecting that story, you all of a sudden widen the base of people that would be attracted to the product. It's no longer just in endurance athletes, it's people who just want a tasty meal bar. We've now psychologically positioned the product and the reason why it exists and given it to a wider base. Riley, would, would you tell the story about the product? I think it was a supplement that increased oxygen flow or something and you have no idea what it did, but the story worked really well. That's kind of a classic story that I think of when, when we're talking about this.

It's actually one of my favorite products. And again, and I don't know why it was one of my favorite products, but I took it religiously just because of the story. The product was, it was a oxygenator. It allowed more oxygen into your muscle tissue in your blood. So it was a great for endurance athletes. Not that it was the first or unique product on the market that claimed to do this, but the story behind it was that when China was going to war with Tibet, they weren't able to overcome Tibet because of the high altitude levels. However, the Chinese government concocted this amazing formula that allowed more oxygen to absorb into the muscle tissue in the bloodstream, that when they climbed the mountains, they were able to have more stamina and overtake the Tibetan people. Now, it's not the greatest story, but however, people were able to identify it with immediately the skiers, the triathletes, the runners, and said, oh, that makes sense. And so through that story.

To be honest with you, Ryan, I never felt a difference on that product. However, I never did a day. I never went a day without taking it just because I believed in the story so much.

Stories get past our BS meter, right?

Even if it's a BS product.

Not saying your product should be saying it was a bs but I'm just saying I didn't feel anything on it. However, I always took it. So.

Yeah, so stories are not just your brand story in the sense of why you made a product or why your product is different, but it can also be borrowed from stories in history or current events or common things that everybody knows. It doesn't necessarily have to be the story of your own brand is what you're saying, right?

And it has to just resonate. I mean, and you have to take that story and somehow apply it to the market. And that market was a bodybuilding and an athlete market. And however they were able to take that story, resonate it or tell it to that athlete to where they understood and said, oh yeah, this is going to be a product great for me to take.

Let's talk about pricing and let's talk about retail margins. Because most of those who listen to Freedom Fast Lane are used to Internet margins. And there's basically two approaches to taking sales online. There's the video sales letter approach where you have to price your product high enough to pay for all of your traffic and the whole point is to get them into an upsell so you can sell them more stuff. And then there's the Amazon approach which is we look, we see prices as the first, first thing that in reviews. So it tends to be very price competitive and margins tend to be 30, 40%, 50% if you're in a very high margin space. So what does it look like in retail? How much does needs to be left on the bone for retailers? What makes it attractive for a retailer to pick up? What do those margins look like?

Well, I think the, if you don't mind, I'd like to back up just a little bit before we go into margins because it plays into part where you need to understand your product and where it fits in the marketplace. Because, and I say that because each channel of distribution has different margin requirements. And so if I say, you know, Walmart only requires a 40% and GNC requires a 60, people are like, well, let's just bypass Walmart or GNC and go straight to Walmart where the margin requirements are a lot less. However, I think the biggest mistake companies make is not understanding their product rollout strategy. This is the number one most critical thing a new company can do is when they sit down and say here's our product. Where do we see this going and how do we get there? And there should be a rollout strategy because Your margin requirements are going to be a lot steeper at the front end. But as it goes down, the product life strategy, the product life cycle, it gets better. So if it's a supplement, I always like to start in the specialty side. Start in the health food stores, then your specialty GNCs and build up that message, build up that brand awareness to where the consumer is aware of it. And then when you go into Walmart or Target or Food Drug Mass, you already have that brand awareness and then you can kind of play around with the margins and the sizing to make the product life last longer.

So an example that comes to mind for me would be Hydroxycut. Hydroxycut did a whole bunch of TV advertising and you could only find them in gnc. And for a couple of years I think they were kind of in the specialty stores until they had enough brand awareness to where they could make a smaller bottle for Walmart and it would be cheaper but they could still maintain their margins. And then they had the mass market appeal to fly in Walmart or Target or one of those major retailers. Is that the type of example that you're thinking of when you're looking at a Life?

Exactly, yeah. So they came out with a, let's say it was a 90 count for $49 and the margin requirements were, let's say about 60% margins. Once they decided to make the transition to the next channel, you know, they went from a 90 count to a 45 count. So the perception was that it was a lot cheaper. However, it was just a smaller count size. So they didn't hurt their specialty store sales. They were still able to offer them something unique. The pricing per cap was pretty similar, but it still gave that perception that it was a value added product by going into Food drug Mass and then they were able to fit their margins. Now the reason I say that is let's say you wanted to go into Walmart. You can't launch at Walmart and then go backwards and get into the specialty because you kind of one, the specialty accounts will look at it and say, I'm sorry, we're not.

Not taking on a mass brand. So it's very important to understand your product. Now your product may bypass the whole specialty or it may just go straight into a 711 or it may just go straight into a Nordstrom or Sephora. But it's understanding your product and where it fits and how to get the most out of it through that product life cycle.

How do you then actually get into the stores once you've Identified which ones are the best fit. You know, if you're gonna go specialty or you're gonna go mass market. What's the process for actually getting in? The perception that most of us have is the scene from the movie Guilt Trip with Barbra Streisand and Seth Rogen where he's selling SIO clean and he just travels the country going door to door, knocking on on big retail stores, trying to sell his organic cleaner. I just call up Riley Judd. So what is the actual process for getting into retail? Because that's a big, I think, roadblock that most people have from thinking that it's an actual viable approach.

That's because the retailers hide. There's no phone numbers posted for retailers. You can't just call up Macy's and say, hey, who do I talk to? I mean, it's such a hidden thing. It is hard. There's so many different ways you can go through it. You can go the really long and slow way by going to trade shows and hoping that they stop by and watching every single nametag that walks by, hoping you can nab them right there in the aisle. Luckily, we've been around long enough. We have the phone numbers or the connections to every retailer out there. But for a regular person, it's hard. They've got to do the trade shows, they've got to sit and send packages and samples. It can take forever.

And one of the things, too, that we get a lot is when people come to us and say, hey.

We went to their website and it says, send in samples and fill out this form. And we've never heard back from them because it just goes into the black hole. And it's just some random spot. It just goes to a permanent deleted thing.

Especially people from Amazon, because it's so easy for Amazon sellers. They can just go and put it up and they're there, they're selling. You know, it's not. That's not how easy it is on our side.

And what we do is we've been around long enough that Nathan can tell you almost immediately. Like, let's say you have a skincare. Nathan handles the prestige side of our business and I handle more the vitamin and specialty of our business.

I still don't understand Nathan's world, nor do I want to. And so I don't get involved in it. But in my world, I know exactly what GNC or a Walmart or a Walgreens or a vitamin shop are going to look for. So when accounts come to us, they'll say, hey, I sent this into it. And I'll say, well, it's because look at your packaging, you know, or look at this, let's change this, let's change your presentation so you know you're putting your best foot forward. And so what we'll do is we'll work with the brands now. We like to work with the smaller brands that are more flexible, that are hungrier and that it's kind of the David versus Goliath approach. We love going in there and building up these brands with them. But when you do a presentation, we know what are the buzzwords and the words that gets the retailers excited. And so if you miss those, you are going to go into that black hole of abyss and never be heard of again. So going forward, doing that presentation is critical. And so we really help the company set up and do that. Right.

It kind of the story you're telling kind of reminds me of my attempt to get on Survivor. I've been applying forever and it just goes into a black box somewhere. And what I really need is like a contact at cbs. So if you're listening, you've got a contact at cbs.

Nathan, I think you know somebody, right?

I don't know anybody at cbs. Who's, who's the casting group? Though I do know a couple of the casting groups. Do you know who they use?

You know, I don't, I don't. But if you meet any of them, I've been a finalist on Big Brother. I was a finalist for a crappy show on Fox called Utopia and just never, never got the final call. So apparently I just need to know somebody.

So, you know, and that's the thing. It's all about knowing people. And especially since, I mean, you look at the industry 15 years ago, you know, just, let's take the department store world for a minute. You used to have just within federated and may company 15 different divisions. So you could go around. If you got declined by one, you could go to another buyer, you know, go to Macy's east, go to Macy's west, go to Macy's south, go to Filings, go to Hex, go to Foley's. You know, they've all gone down and now there's just six buyers that control the entire department store world, you know, and so you have to know them and you have to smile and you have to.

Play the game.

Play the game.

It's, it's interesting. We, we tend to think that it's all about quality or it's all about branding and those things matter. But at the end of the day, your foot in the door is really who you know. And it's getting in front of those people, which all comes down to relationships. Which makes it a lot simpler because what. When we met the two of you, we realize, oh, my goodness, our products are already better than 75% of the ones on shelves. Our marketing and our branding is already better than most of the ones on the shelves. We've just never met somebody who could get us.

In the door. And you said, change this, change this, change this. And we went back to the drawing board and changed our branding, changed our strategy so that we'd really pop on the shelf. And it's made all of the difference. And my guess is that that happens a lot. That it's. You'll find these small brands that are already better than the competition, they just need to change their approach, change their packaging, develop a good brand story and know somebody. And you can open a lot of doors that way.

Right? And one of the things, too, just kind of expanding on what you just said. You know, even if you get into these retailers, it's not a home run. And that's why the prep work is so critical at the front end of everything. So if you go in and.

Get on the shelf, let's say you go straight to Walmart and you get on there and then all of a sudden throw the company party that you're in Walmart, six months later, you guys are closing the door and shutting the lights because you didn't do it right. There's a lot of horror stories out there. However, there's a lot of success stories and it's all about that prep work at the front end. Like you mentioned, your marketing is way better than everybody else's. But are you marketing to that group? Are you marketing driving people to the retail side? Have you been able to figure that out? And those are the things that you need to figure out. What might be working on Amazon or what might be working at GNC might not work over here. And so the strategy and that product rollout, the product rollout strategy and that life cycle is critical per channel that you make. And so that's one of the things that we do as well, is we help you avoid those pitfalls and mistakes that a lot of companies make.

What assets make it easier to get into and be successful on one of these retail channels? And by assets, I mean, do customer lists help? Do number of reviews help on Amazon? Does a sales history help? Does a social media presence help? What assets that might exist in an Internet brand would dictate the possible or improve the possible chances of success in a retail environment?

I would say yes to all of that, but I think the biggest thing has to be some creativity. I see a lot of people will be like, hey, this brand. I just read an article that they just went from 0 to 100 million by only doing Instagram. So we're going to follow that exact same approach and expect the same results.

When people say, what do we do? I always say, yes, but what creativity? Like you mentioned the very first, how do you differentiate yourself from your competition? Just following somebody else's business model might get you in the door. But what is your true goal on this and how do you get your message out? And so take a step back and say, if we were working on a blank canvas right now and this had never been done before, how do we do this? And you know, you be the same creativity, you have that same creativity in retail. Say, you know what, this has never been done before, but let's go ask and see if we can get X, Y and Z. They may come back and say no, but they may give you Y and turn down X and Z. So the creativity part of it is really important. Just be aggressive, use your assets to it, but think of what nobody else has done and be like, you know, come. I always love when accounts come to me with wild ideas and say, hey, what if we put a 10 foot box in the front of every store? You know, might not happen, but you know, what if it does? You got a 10 foot box in every front of every store. So assets like, you know, and that's another thing that you guys have. And I was so blown away by the impact of Amazon that when you started open my eyes to the world of it. You guys are sitting on.

So much assets with your list and your customer database and how you can retarget to them. A lot of people in retail don't have that and don't have those assets. And so that could be your point of difference from them is, you know what, we've got a list of 10,000 people. That one we can drive a coupon or do something or some kind of unique thing and come out of the gates and be the top seller. And now all of a sudden you're a winner at these retail outlets.

And also it helps us like we know that there's customer demand because sometimes we're a little bit traditional retailers are a little bit more behind than online. So when some of the companies come from us, from Amazon, they'll bring up a product and they're like, this is really hot right now. I'm like, what the hell is it? No, I haven't even heard of it yet. Because we're still in the traditional retailer mindset that trickles down a little bit later than what you guys are seeing.

When you say creativity is really important, do you mean on the marketing side? Do you mean on the product positioning side, on the product packaging side, on what's in the product, what creativity actually stands out?

Yes, fair enough.

It really is. I mean, honestly, the accounts that Nathan and I pass, like you mentioned, we'll get anywhere from 50 to 100 brands a month. Contact us. And the ones that we, excuse me, the ones that we pass on are really the Me too brands or the hey, we're going to knock off this. They'd be a lot cheaper. You can see when a brand or an owner has really been passionate about his brand, and it might just be another Green Coffee Bean or it might just be this, but the way that they've positioned their product or positioned their look or positioned their marketing message.

If you look on the shelves of GNC or every retailer, you got six or seven of the same product, but there's one that's always the number one seller. And why is it. And it's not always because who spends the most. I can tell you that it's the accounts that go in there and are very creative, figure out how to differentiate themselves from the other six products that they're sitting next to, whether that be packaging, whether that be the brand message, whether that be a social media angle that they've got a niche on or a marketing angle. But it's ones that are doing more than just the me too. The ones that just say, hey, I see this company doing an Instagram post. Let's hurry and do an Instagram just like it.

It's funny, but it's true. How many of these companies really do it and think that they're going to succeed and follow that same success line?

Well, and you have to follow it all the way to the floor of the store. So, I mean, even in some of Riley's retailers and all of my retailers, you're dependent on a sales rep actually helping the consumer that you're hoping that they actually take the time, especially in the department store world, you're hoping they take the time to go and read all of your information, your literature, so that if someone comes up to them, they actually have an answer on your product. And so you have to incentivize those people, whether it's a commission, a double commission, running triple commissions, doing. Sending a Louis Vuitton handbag into every store so that whoever gets the most sales in that month gets a handbag. You know, those are the kind of things that you have to get all the people that are around your brand to pay attention to your brand. Because if someone walks up to, let's say your Estee Lauder and you're sitting there selling Estee Lauder all day long, but someone's over there looking at a hair dryer, your hair dryer, and they don't know anything about it. They're just going to stand there and stare at that customer. They're not going to go over there and look stupid in front of them.

Yeah.

So you have to incentivize them to actually take the time to learn about your product.

I like to go into retail stores that sell competitors or similar products to mine and just see what they sell me and hear how they describe it. And it's always eye opening because the conversations that they're having with me are the same conversations they're having with other customers. And the mindset is so completely different than an online shopper. And it shocks me every time I hear. I mean, I like to tell the story of a retail salesperson going to the bottom shelf, pulling this thing out. And he's like, yeah, this thing is great because it's new. And he, and he just kept saying that, like, yeah, just. And he kept saying, just look at it. And it did have fantastic packaging. And he kept saying, yeah, just look at it. And it was a completely different mindset than the person who's doing their own research. And that helped me learn that what works online can be leveraged for retail.

That could be the brand's fault too, not just his. They probably followed through by doing the extra commission or whatever else, but they didn't follow through by getting him the sell sheet, to reaching out, to making sure that he understood the product. So, I mean, you have to do a full, rounded approach to it. You just can't pick one thing and say, hey, I'm going to do a double commission and hope that they, you still have to send them all the information on it. When you're doing any of these promotions, you've got to make sure that you're following through from A to Z, making sure that you're crossing every T, dotting every I, so that the entire event is successful. And especially on launches, that's what I always tell people. You only get to Launch your product into a retailer once. Once. Once you're in there, you're in there. You only get to launch once, make it successful.

What does a retailer look for when it's deciding what to carry? When I go into these stores and, you know, we talked about there's six. Six products on the shelf that are exactly the same. What does a retailer want to see in order to decide if they're going to give you shelf life or not? I remember a conversation we had once where we were comparing one of our competitors to one of our brands, and their online presence did not exist. I mean, they just. They had like 10,000 likes on Facebook and that was about it. Their website was crap. I have no idea what got them into the store. And when I look at our online presence, it's huge. And we said, well, we can leverage that as a comparison point and use it to our advantage. So what does a retailer want to see in order to decide to give up their real estate to a specific brand?

I mean, they want to see that you're behind the brand. They want to see that it's an actual product that they can sell that their customers can be looking for. They also want to know that you're behind your brand, that you're going to be. Because just like what we were talking about earlier, how the buying groups have shrunk, some of these buyers used to handle five to 10 brands. Now they're handling 70 brands. They want to know that you're going to take it, you're going to manage your business, that you're going to drive people into their stores and drive people to buy your product, and that's what they're looking for.

And by that you mean leveraging the assets you have, running advertising to send people there doing whatever it takes to make it profitable for them.

Not just training staff. Yep.

Oh, interesting.

When you say training your staff, that's a scary word for, you know, a husband and wife are running a company, because that's sounds like a lot of hard work.

It is. But there's actually gonna look like. I mean, but there. I mean, so, you know, especially when it's a husband and wife, you know, then you have to.

Get a service to do it for you, you know, and you can get it from anywhere from $80 per store up to $500 per store, depending on the type of company you want to go with. But there's services out there.

Okay, so you don't necessarily mean going to the store and training the staff. You mean they're. There's ways that you can leverage your time so that you're not doing all that.

Correct. No one can hit every store unless you're going to hire a full field team. And that's one of the things that we do too, you know, especially with the cosmetic brands. We work with some of these companies. One of the companies we're working with right now, you know, when we started with them, they had two employees in their home office. Now they've got almost 55 employees out in the field that we've actually gone through and hired every single one of those people for them.

Yeah. Okay. Now, Riley, when we first met, you were shocked at the potential on Amazon.com or just online in general. And you were shocked because the retail belief had kind of been that that's where brands go to die. Would you tell that story and explain kind of how you've seen that brands can leverage and leapfrog from Amazon into retail and how it can be a big asset?

Yeah, I'm still shocked. I talk to Nathan every single morning about the velocity that you guys are doing and I'm still blown away. It still doesn't make sense to me. I tell my wife every day when I go home, I'm like, our kids, we're gonna pull them out of soccer and dance and we're gonna put them in Amazon training courses.

So I know a guy for that.

So you're gonna have a couple, an 8 year old and a 10 year old joining.

Perfect.

But I think this is the next wave. And before, so before, I guess going back before the online came, it was all traditional. It was radio, print and TV who spent the most, got the shelf space. And then a crazy thing came, the Internet. And some people understood how to really market online and the retailers were slow to pick up the.

Momentum and how big online marketing really could be. So the whole CPA world came on and it was that cost per acquisition and people were doing those free trials and getting these huge lists. And.

I don't know if your audience is pro CPA or against it, but ripping off the consumer.

I'd say we're pretty against cpa.

But honestly, a lot of these CPA brands really came out and showed how well you can market online. And it opened up the retailer's eyes. I think the biggest thing that we've got now is this Amazon that nobody understands how big this potential is and how well you guys are going to be able to remarket to your current.

Client base. So the potential that you guys have to make an impact in retail I believe is going to be the next big wave.

Now, Amazon's approach and certainly their pricing structure.

In most cases does not match retail. But it's one of the reasons why I think there's going to be a wave of high priced products on Amazon. And partially that's because those prices have to be high in order to also pivot into retail. So would you talk about some strategies or some things you see moving or working for being on Amazon, but also making it work in retail? Because one of the things that we discovered was we could not go into Amazon or we could not go into retail with our Amazon prices. We had to do something very different if we were going to succeed in retail because it wasn't going to fly. Just copying what we had in Amazon.

Right? And I think this is where brands like you and I go back to being creative. There is definitely a solution if, if you guys would have just taken a look and said, okay, we're not going to be able to go into retail and turn away, I think you guys would have been missing a ton of opportunity and financial opportunity. It goes just back to being creative now. So before there was a product rollout strategy that you go A, B, C, D and E. So Amazon has now got to be factored into that product rollout strategy. And so companies that are starting in Amazon, we'll just have to take and we just morph into a new product rollout strategy to where, okay, so now we've got a product that does this, it's priced at this. So do we change the count size? Do we change a premium look, do we change the message a little bit? How do we. And then also one is once we roll into retail, how do we protect your Amazon business so you guys don't lose that buy box from a bunch of other people coming in. So it's going to.

For everybody at another layer that hasn't really been needed or hasn't needed to be addressed, but it's just going to be that creative approach that we're going to take.

So basically finding a way to make your product new again.

To succeed to a different brand or a different audience.

Without sabotaging, but still being able to maintain your message and your client base. So when you do go into the retail outlets, you now have a loyal fan client base that you can market to and say, hey, now available at xl.

Yeah, you know, we have a kind of a cool pending opportunity right now inside of the tribe of making this process really easy and getting them into retail. And it's all Been, you know, who do we know and how can we leverage it to make it easy for our tribe members to get inside? I'd actually like to hear it from your perspective, because I've told this story before, but would you talk a little bit about the systems that we're building right now to make it easier or faster for people to get their products that are online into some of these retail stores?

Yeah. One of my partners, actually, one of our affiliates, actually, he launched the as seen on TV category. He built it from the ground up, designed the concept, and we were talking before, after we met you, and we're just sitting around and he said, you know what? As seen on TVs dead. Nobody's marketing on TV anymore because of TiVo and DVR and Netflix. Nobody's watching commercials. So the whole category died. And so what we're looking to do is reinvent it as seen on tv or, sorry, as seen online. And building up the canon. The top sellers online are now going to be available at super centers across the country. And so what we're trying to do is one, bring the momentum that you guys have from Amazon or online into that retail outlet with a brand recognition. So as before, people could walk in and walk past and see the as seen on TV logo, though we're designing that same kind of logo for a top seller online and then also have that credibility factor with all the reviews. So that credibility factor and then that recognition as they walk through these supercenters will be there. And two, we're also making it so some of these major retailers are truly a pain to get into for the vendor setup. Having your D and B, your logistics, your fulfillment, everything, we're looking to streamline that and just make it a plug and play kind of scenario.

Yeah. So it's almost as easy to get into retail stores as it is to get listed on Amazon or correct. Sell on your own retail.

That's the goal.

Yeah, yeah, we're not there yet, but we're starting to get those systems. Systems in place.

Yes.

Well, gentlemen, thank you so much for sharing with the audience some of these strategies to getting into retail. Obviously, a lot of people who are listening are going to be connecting with you inside of the tribe and working on getting their brand stories perfected. And we're all doing, you know, we have our module together about getting into retail and crafting that story inside of the breakthrough business Bootcamp. So if people want to dive more into this and be listed in stores all over the place, we have a section together inside of that training that is, is part of, part of that and all about getting into retail, and then the opportunity exists inside of there to work directly with those systems to potentially get into retail stores across the country. So thanks for hanging out with me on Freedom Fast Lane. Keep on changing the world, and we'll be working with you soon.

Thanks so much.

A big focus of ours inside of the tribe is getting brands who are doing one thing right, specifically doing their online piece right, and getting them to look and see themselves as a lot bigger and having more impact. And that means getting you retail ready. It means crafting your brand story. It means connecting you with these individuals who can help you get into retail stores if you qualify for something like that. That's the kind of stuff that we're building inside of the tribe. If you either have a business that is taking sales or you want to build a business that is much bigger than just you, much bigger than Amazon.com, much bigger than everybody else who's trying to get out there following this business model. We want you in the tribe. You can get all the details of what we're doing@freedomfastlane.com tribe and our goal is to bring in people with really strong ideas, partner them with funding sources, get them into the masses, get them in retail and really blow up brands bigger than what everybody else is going for in this space because we think we can make the biggest impact that way. I think what this world needs is more entrepreneurs, more capitalists, and more cooperation between those people. And that's what we're building over at the tribe. If that's you, we want you in over@freedomfastlane.com tribe. You can get all of the details and we'd love to have you inside. As always, I appreciate you listening to the show and sharing this with anyone who might be taking their business much broader or thinking about going retail. And I hope this was helpful for you. Thanks for listening to Freedom Fastlane and I'll see you on the next show.