Less Posts, More Sales | Growing Your Product Business with Wholesale

How many people are so sick and tired of everyone telling you more content, more content, more content? I mean, the conversation now is yapping videos or creating Instagram Reels or show up on TikTok. Okay, I love social media for how it's used. I'm growing my Instagram. That's the place where we're growing and also growing on on YouTube. But here's the deal: Everyone keeps telling us that more content, more visibility is what's going to drive sales. And actually, one of the things I will like—it's like the hill I'm going to die on—is that whole. Is the way to grow your product-based business. So let's get into it. Hey everybody, I'm Jacqueline Snyder. I am the host of the Product Boss Podcast. I'm so glad that you're here today. Here at the Product Boss, we help physical product-based businesses grow their brands and the businesses behind their brands, whether you're getting to your first 6 figures, multi-6, 7 figures, or on your way to 8 figures, I am so glad that you are here. Now, one thing I want to talk about is wholesale. I don't think that we talk about this enough, but one of the things that I've always taught my clients is using other people's audiences on how to grow their brand so that they're not reliant on ads or reliant on social media, for example. And I use this as the case based on my own experience. So I grew up in this industry. My parents actually started off in denim back when I was a kid in the '80s, and they were traditionally selling wholesale to retailers and in person, right? Whether they had their own retail shops or they did flea markets. Actually, that was kind of the thing in the '80s, the '70s and the '80s. So why was that happening? Because we didn't have access to our own customers. We didn't have direct-to-consumer unless you owned a retail brick-and-mortar. You didn't have access to the customer. There was no online shopping. Maybe there was catalog, but you had to be a pretty big brand to have your own catalog and ship and mail to people and that kind of thing. That's the world I grew up in. Then when I started my product brand, so back in 2007 to 2012, let's say, e-com, I remember even when I was coaching my clients, 'cause I've launched and grown over 2,000 fashion brands, including my own, and when I was helping people back then, I was like, go buy your domain. Name www and put a holding page. Don't just have like little workermen. So all those people that remember back then, because people weren't even thinking about building a website and selling direct to consumer at that point. We were still doing trade shows and selling to retailers. Okay, now over the last, I'd say, 15 to 20 years, things started to shift. The wholesale buying environment has shifted based on fair.com, for example, and there's other sites like that. In fact, Back in the day, I bought the domain findashowroom.com because at that point it was like, how do you connect the manufacturer, which is you, you guys are manufacturers of products, so how do you connect the manufacturer to the wholesale rep so that they can sell for you, uh, direct to retailers? Okay, so that was something I started. Then Faire basically cut out the showroom, cut out the, the sales rep, and then said, okay, this is how small boutiques can comb through this and then find products and then purchase and ship. Now, when Farrah started, and I'm forgetting the name of what it was called back when it started, but they actually really started as small products that people bought for subscription boxes. So that's really where it started. You'd go on there and fill a subscription box company because you could buy stuff, and then it expanded to what it is. A site like Faire is great, but also can get overflooded. And whenever you play in someone else's playground, you're playing by their rules. So Faire has rules about buybacks, about when you have to ship by, lead times, all the things. What I've always taught, now Faire is, again, it's a tool, the same way that I teach social media. Social media is a tool in your marketing tool belt. Faire.com or any site like that is a tool in your wholesale tool belt, but it doesn't have to be and doesn't get to be the entire strategy. So when we're thinking about wholesale, wholesale, think about it as exposure. Kim Kardashian discovered my products, bought my cuffs. I have a photo of her. My, um, I remember the, the store owner grabbed a picture and then sent it to me. She was buying for her and her sister because she discovered it when she was walking through the shop in LA. Carrie Underwood's stylist discovered my product in real life at a store, bought it. She wore it on the Country Music Awards. We freaked out. My old assistant Caitlin was such a Carrie Underwood fan that she freaked out. We let the stylist know, like Caitlin was crying when she saw it on the Country Music Awards. And so they loved that we were so excited about it that they actually had Carrie wear my cuffs and headband in the Good Girl video. So if you ever go on there, you'll see my product on that as well. Plus there are other celebrities because this is during a time that celebrities were the creators, celebrities were the exposure. We didn't have social in the way that we have it now where magazines mattered. Okay, so I was getting exposure and organic exposure similarly in a way that people would do it now with creators, um, and online. So all of those opportunities happened for me because my stuff was on the shelves of retail environments. And so while you're working so hard trying to post and grow on social and get followers for followers' sake, We talked about this in one of the previous episodes. One of the most important things to do is grow your email list. So yeah, they can be followers, but are you growing your email list? And the second thing, actually, if I were to start a business right now, I'd build a website, right? I'd have a really beautiful, great user experience, high-converting website. I would immediately start an email list, but my first way that I'd start selling would be wholesale. That would be it. And the way that I teach wholesale inside of my program, The Collective, is a way that You create the relationship with the buyers, you sell to them. It's very much a relationship. Again, fair gets to be a tool in there. Okay, so that's what I would do. I'd jump into wholesale right away. And what we've been talking about over the last several episodes is how in-person is still selling better than online. And so think about that, like people are going out and shopping, malls are up, Gen X is going to the mall more often, people are shopping at in-person markets, people are back to Main Street USA or wherever you are, and they're back to shopping. Okay, so here's what I want to talk about in this episode. I want to make sure that you know if wholesale is right for you and what I would do, the first 3 moves I would make. So first thing that you get to do as you're building your business, and this doesn't matter whether you're just starting out, you're a 6-figure business, you're 7 figures, and this is a place that you always go back and check: are you pricing for profit? Do you have the right profit margins from the get-go? If you were to work with me or my team, we would make sure that you were profitable. In fact, That's the flex. I don't care if you have a million-dollar business with 10% profit and not paying yourself. That is a million-dollar hobby/headache. I would rather you have a 6-figure business with 20 to 30% profit, paying yourself, having money to invest, to save, to reinvest, to pay taxes, whatever it is. The flex is not the revenue. The flex is the profit margin. Okay? So when you're first starting, what we have to really identify here is, Pricing correctly. So if you're in the beginning stages, you want to price correctly. If you are more advanced, you're six or seven figures, you want to make sure that you're constantly going back to the price, like the the raw goods, the cost of the product, the lever. We're always renegotiating. I just did this with a client. She's a multi-six-figure business, and she's really been scaling and growing. And we're at a point again, like an inflection point. Where we had to reconsider the packaging. So we went back to the packaging manufacturer and renegotiated the prices there, 'cause now she could order more units, so it could be cheaper per SKU. We're working on a new manufacturer so the manufacturer's prices can come down, so that we are constantly working on keeping the quality intact, but working on the profit margin. And as you start to scale your business, costs come down, right? Cost per unit comes down because you're buying in bulk, you're buying bigger. So from the start, or if you're coming up with a new product, okay, whether it's an ideation, a new product, or in the beginning, you wanna price correctly. You want to build a wholesale margin in. I say that because if you're like, well, I'll never sell wholesale, which I never say never, you never know the opportunity that's gonna come up. So I guess I just said never. But the idea here is, is you price from your cost of goods to your wholesale price. Your wholesale price to your direct-to-consumer retail price. A super like basic, basic, basic way that I'm gonna tell you is to take your cost of goods, which is the raw goods plus labor for one SKU, times 2, that's your wholesale price, times 2 is your retail price. Now, if you work with me and you're in my programs, let's say you are in the Collective, you can go look at the pricing cost sheet or jump into the AI that we have programmed and it'll actually work out your costing for you because it's, slightly more complicated by that, for that, but basic. I just want to give you this 2x2 markup so that you guys are thinking about it. Now, the other caveat here is at scale, because some of my multi-million dollar clients that I work with at scale might be offering discounts to bigger retailers. I've got clients selling to like the TJ Maxx stores. I have clients selling to Whole Foods, to Target, to Chewy to like massive retailers. Okay, so when we get into that, they may request discounts. And so when we have the right margins built in, we have ways to, to drive the percentage down. Actually, a client that sells to Sprouts, a client that sells to Whole Foods, so they might ask for discounts. So as long as we're marking up with the right margins, then we have room for the discounts. And yes, we might make less per unit sold, but at scale It doesn't matter. This is something that, you know, as it comes up for you, it's something that we want to work on in, in more personalized feedback. Okay, but this is just the basics. So from the start, or from the start of launching a new product, you're always looking at your profit margins. Always. If you can't be profitable on it, you have to reconsider. Do I even bring it to market? Do I reconsider the materials it's being made with? Do I reconsider how I'm making it? The unit sometimes like okay I'll manufacture more because it's it's cheaper per unit in fashion we we used to have this for cut and sew garments so we used to have like a general rule that we would add thirty cents per seam line so as we were designing the product because from the start we had to make sure that the materials were within the price point and margins and then the the construction and how we were you know. We would have conversations for a very long time around how many buttons are we using, because even if it was a 5-cent button, it still increased the price of the retail at the very end. Okay, with these markups, so we would then say 30 cents per seam line. So as you're doing it, if you got all you know creative and as a designer, and I'm like I want to do the Union Jack design on the back of the shirt, and I added up 30 cents, and it priced it out of. The price point that my end customer was going to buy it from, I had to figure out cheaper ways to construct it or not do it at all. This is what it is to be the boss of your business, to be the creative director, to understand the outcome and work your way backwards. Okay, I'm really teaching you this higher level of thinking about your business because we don't get to willy-nilly do what we want. We're making physical products that need to be sold to an end consumer at price points. It's not the price point that you would pay because your customer could be a totally different person than you, but you've got to understand the customer and what they're willing to pay and what the market will bear. And I see this with thinking, again, people buy $10 face lotions and $300 face lotions. People buy, you know, $12 bracelets and $6,000 bracelets. There's a customer for everything, you've just got to hone that in. Another cool thing about when you're being discovered on retail shelves when you're selling wholesale Typically, the actual end customer doesn't care how many followers you have. They're discovering the product on the shelf and they're like, they're trying it, they're trying it on, they're tasting it, they're smelling it, they're physically interacting with it. They're not then jumping onto their Instagram, looking up your brand and being like, do they have enough followers? No, it's the quality of the product on the shelf. I was actually coaching a collective member on this last week and we were talking about the product and its conversion in the retail environment. It was actually a beauty bug repellent. If you're listening, I'm so glad that we had that meeting together. So it was a beauty bug repellent, and the packaging didn't clearly identify what it was initially. It took a lot more conversation at in-person markets. She was able to really, she was there with the customer, she was able to kind of tell the whole story. But when it was sitting on the shelves like of Ace Hardware or beauty stores or whatever the retail stores are, it wasn't having a good sell-through because a customer didn't understand it. It wasn't packaged the same way that like bug spray is packaged, and it wasn't visibly understandable of what it was. And so what we really identified was what could a point of sale look like? How does the product need to be represented so it could sell without anybody explaining it? That's a big gap and a big difference between if you're selling in-person markets where you're there to interact with the customer, or if it's standing on a shelf and there's Nobody around to help. Have you ever gone to a store and you're like, is there anyone working here? There's barely any people on the floor unless it's a really great boutique, and they're like, how can I help you? What can I show you? Sephora is really good at this actually. Sephora has a lot of people on the floor to educate people on product. Most places don't. I know this from when I was building Cuffs Couture, my product line. My product was a flat folded piece of fabric into threes that was a wearable wrist wallet. By itself, nobody would know what it was. So we had to create packaging for it to stand on that explained it visually, not words, like very few words, much more visuals. And then I had to create a point of sale that was like, I did these plexi tubes that were kind of like wrist-shaped that held them so they all stood up. They were different sizes depending on what the retailer would buy, with a sign behind it that said, it literally said like jewelry plus handbag equals Cuffs couture, right? So like we did all of this market research and branding. And so then when I was selling it to a retail environment, I'd be like, hey, you could buy this and here's the point of sale to explain what it is. And most of them would get that to go with it. We have an earlier episode from like way back in the day with one of the president of sales for Pura Vida bracelets. And they talked about that, that same idea of like how do they sell these strings with little charms for how much they sold them for in the beginning? It was because of the point of sale. So when I go back to this, when we're thinking about the retail environment, you have to think, how does this thing sell from the shelf? So one, what's their interaction look like? How do you support the retailer in selling it? So are you educating the retailer? Are you giving them a point of sale? Like what I used to— when Kim Kardashian wore my cuffs, everyone who bought the Tatiana cuff, which was the cuff that she bought, everyone got these foam core pictures of Kim holding it. 'Cause it really mattered back then, like having a picture of the celebrity next to the product. So I would send that if they ordered it. So that's the other part is that your customers are not concerned with your followers in real life. They're concerned with what is the product like? How am I interacting? Do I understand it? And your retailers also may not care about how many followers you have either because they just want the product to sell through, whatever pushes that. As a little tip and caveat, I also teach my clients to support their retailers. So you can, if you're doing social, if you're sending emails, you can be like, great places to buy my stuff in LA, great places to buy my stuff in Reno. Post it, drive traffic to your retailers. They're your bread and butter. We're never in competition with our retailers. Even if you sell online, even if you have a brick and mortar, you're constantly in support mode of your retailers. And so if you're thinking, okay, how do I get retailers, how do I sell wholesale without a platform like Faire? How do you drive your own rules around it? That's definitely something we work on deeper. We've got an entire module, it's basically like a mini course on wholesale as well as experts within the collective that are experts at wholesale, including myself. And so it takes line sheets and open to order and purchase orders and rules and minimum order quantities and all the things that we really build in when we're working with you so that It benefits you and the retailer. One thing I will tell you also is I would never let a retailer order 1 or 2 pieces of anything because once it sells, what's to prove that it was good or bad? I might just sell it randomly versus like knowing if it's a bestseller, knowing what the sell-through is. And also, if you think about it and you walk into a retail environment when there are more of one product, or I would say more of a brand and you're seeing the merchandising in a store of a brand, you start to discover the brand and interact with it and understand it. If there was, let's say, only one shirt from a brand and that was it and you didn't like it, you may never interact with it again. So a lot of times I also tell my retailers, hey, we have like a minimum, we usually have a minimum of 4 styles or SKUs basically for them to have in their retail environment so that the brand holds weight on the shelf, right? So the brand represents itself because if they're just gonna buy like 2 of something, what's the point? So that's another tip. Okay, finally, one of the biggest things that I see fall through for people is they're always working on that front end. So they're thinking wholesale, I've got to get the stores, I've got to get the stores, I've got to get the stores. That's great. And this is a lesson I actually learned in Cuffs Couture where I opened up a bunch of retailers, but the health of my business wasn't based on the first order because usually the first order is a test order. It's something that they kind of dip their toe in, they like it, they try it. Your business, the health, the longevity of it, the thing that's easier than growing followers is reorders. So I want you to think about it. Let's say you get a new retailer and they buy $1,000, $1,500 worth of product from you. You've now sold $1,500 worth of product to them, which might be around $3,000, $3,500 retail priced. So think about all the customers that are coming and interact with your products. So just think about like This tree of you to the retailer and the retailer just spanning it out to dozens, if not hundreds, of customers to buy from you. Okay, what we want to do is we want to encourage and support. Like I said just before, this was like, how do we support sell-through in the, in the store? Because we want them to reorder again. The first order is great, but it's a test order. The way that we judge did this work is are they reordering? Now Don't assume that people are just gonna reorder from you because they magically think. If you are a big part of their store, if you're something that they've sold out of, that it's like blowing their socks off, or I don't know, let's go with like the squishy craze. If you've got littles or preteens or whatever, I don't even know what age it ends out at, but like the Neato squishy phase. If you've got Neatos or squishies and you're like, oh my God, everybody wants these, you're paying attention to it. But if you have a jewelry brand with some necklaces or some t-shirts and it's just a small part of your retail environment and it's not driving all your sales, you might not even pay attention to that it's run out or that you need the reorder. So it's your job as the manufacturer, it's your job to contact your retailers and get their reorders, to remind them of it, to support them, to work in partnership. We always wanna think of our retailers as partners. And are you getting reorders? If you're not getting reorders, you also get to get into discovery of why have they not sold? What didn't work? How can you support them in moving the product? It could be, oh, did you try presenting it like this? Did you explain it like this? If you guys are selling retail, I would do little drop-ins, especially if I was traveling. I'd go find the retailers I was selling to and just kind of pop in as a customer. And I would look at the environment in which it was selling and be like, oh, Of course it's not selling. Like they've got it flung into a bowl and it doesn't make sense as to what it is versus, oh, it's prominent, it's on the register, it's got the signs, it makes sense, right? And then I might say like, hey, I'm actually the owner of Cuffs Couture. Can I just explain to you some ways to like make it sell better? And I might even contact the buyer or the owner of the store and be like, hey, so kind of like I saw it, thank you so much for buying from us. I kind of saw them in this bowl and it's not really gonna sell in that way. Can I give you some suggestions? On better ways to sell. So I think what I want you to take away from this episode is one, the power of wholesale and how maybe your focus is in the wrong places. As product people, we want more customers to have our products in their hands and to be interacting with them. We want to be making money. We want to be making sales. Wholesale to me is one of the fastest ways of distribution, of awareness, of brand recognition, of revenue. You get to sell to one store and make $500 to $1,000 versus, you know, 10 people at $50 each, okay? Think about that. There are more personal interactions. There's ways to support the sell-through. If you're not getting sell-through, where do you get to be in ownership of not supporting them in how to sell your products well? Sometimes it's a mismatch. A lot of times it's how do you support them or how do you remind them to come buy from you? If you're one of my students and you're in the Collective, we've got the entire wholesale module that talks to you about what to send, what emails to send, what the line sheets look like with templates, what follow-up looks like. We've got the whole thing mapped out. Plus you guys have the AI and you have your weekly calls with your advisors or your feedback loop. So absolutely, if this is something that you're hearing, you're like, oh, I gotta work on that, go ahead and, you know, submit a feedback loop, jump into one of the wholesale calls that we're having, you know, ask the questions. Get support around this because there's a lot of gaps that could be filled that could be the reason why it's not working or not going the way you want it to go. And otherwise, if it's not something that you've leaned into, I would say this is the time, better than markets. And if you sell at markets, think about it, your stuff is selling in person. So how can you sell in more places in person? And wholesale is a great way to do it. If this episode was helpful to you, which I hope it was, Make sure that you're subscribed to the show or that you're following the show, whether you're listening on Apple or Spotify. Maybe you're watching it on Spotify or you're watching it on YouTube. Subscribe, leave a comment, leave a review. Super, super helpful for me to get feedback if it's nice. If it's not nice, just send me a DM on Instagram. Um, but thank you so much for being here for the show. And if you want more support, we are gearing up for the holiday season. We've got a lot of things happening right now at the Product Boss. We've got an event in Phoenix. We have a holiday planning event that's coming up in real life, or we're gonna be doing an online plus in, in real life. We've got a workshop. It's theproductbossworkshops.com, which is how to lead, run, and grow your company and how you can scale it to $1 million without it breaking. So many different opportunities for us to support you. I do love the workshop. I think it's really clarifying. I'll drop the link in the show notes. And as always, thank you again for being here. Keep growing your businesses, keep building the brands and the business behind them. And I'll see you in our next one.