Nathan from ILA Safety wants to get his women's personal alarms into big retailers. Evan says build momentum with boutique stores and press first, then pitch the big chains with proof. Start with small test orders in one region, sell them out fast, and the retailer will come back for more.
Chapters
Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. In today's episode, I'm going to answer a question from one of my readers, Nathan, who is a newsletter reader and has a website called ILA Safety. They create personal alarms for women that are trendy and chic. And their accessories. So now he's wondering, how do I get the final push for that big order? So he's got a website here. I thought it'd be good to check out the site to be able to talk about it while we give some advice for Nathan. So here's the site. Now it's important that you realize very rarely do companies like this get huge orders off the bat from big retailers. So you gotta start small, build the momentum, keep signing up the little guys. I know that's kind of where you started with the boutique kind of retailers, so keep going with those and keep getting in the press, keep the momentum going. So when you start talking to the bigger retailers, you have all this momentum behind you. So I know you've done some press, you've been on TV, you've gotten some articles, keep pushing that out and keep signing up the little guys. As soon as the momentum starts to die, it's a lot harder to get it going and to get the attention of the bigger retailers. The next thing, when you're approaching a retailer, they're going to look at who else is selling it. Right, so on your website you say where to buy. So if I click on that, all it says is you're available across the UK in high street retailers and online. So it doesn't say, you know, where it is that you can buy it. It goes to say to find out where to purchase the product you're interested in, visit the product selector. So I click on product selector. Right now I've wasted a lot of time trying to find out who is selling your product. So then I click on this as a product. And it doesn't actually tell me, like you promised, where I can find this. So, you know, the more people have to search to find something on the website, the more frustrated they're going to be. So if I'm a retailer and I want to sell your stuff and I want to find out who else is selling it, I can't find out without calling in or emailing in. So I'd switch that around. If you have some name stores who are selling it, put them on here, show some brands. Even on your homepage, I'd show some of them off, show some of the media off that you've You've gotten— just again, build that momentum going on as much as you can. When you start talking to the bigger guys, it's rarely a huge order that they place. They want to test it on a small scale, could be geographic location, one product line, test it out, see how well it works, and then from there they expand. So what you want to do, work with them. You get that first small order, you work with them, you promote as much as you can, you tell your audience about it, you drive people to their store. You want it to sell out, right? As soon as they make a small purchase wherever they're going to be selling it, you want all of their products to sell out. Get some media around it, tell your fans about it, build up an audience. If they do that, they're going to want to do more business with you, right? The more they see that people are coming back, ordering on the small scale, they're going to want to expand it out, buy more and more from you, and the small orders lead to big orders. So I don't know how much success you've had so far, if you've even talked to some of the bigger guys or if you've gotten some small orders. But that's usually the step process. I wouldn't expect, you know, overnight somebody sees your product and places a huge order with you, but step by step, if you keep building up momentum, you keep working with the small guys, you keep getting the media, you show on your website where they can buy it now, so you can show off some of the retailers that you're working with, and then you start making these smaller orders with the bigger guys, focus on one product line, even in a geographic location, show that you can sell out and it's going to be a success to give them the incentive and motivation to want to sell more, buy more from you, and continue to expand and promote your product. Looks very cool. I wish you the best of luck, and hopefully you can keep us posted as you go with your progress. It's very exciting. So hopefully that helped. If you guys like the video, please give it a thumbs up below, and I'd also love to hear what you have to think about the site and what you would do if you want to leave a comment under the video. And stay tuned for the next episode. [MUSIC] [MUSIC]
