Is Your Brand Ready To Be A Big Box Retail Product? with Tim Bush

Protect your brand, product or invention from the hazards of consumer product launching and go from idea to product to big brand. With guidance from retail product design and development experts Tracy and Tom Hazard. Get the insider secrets to put the right things in the right order with the right resources so you can out design, outsource and out profit your way to retail success.

Hey there, product launchers. Welcome to another office hours. And this one is with Timothy Bush, our on the shelf expert, the person you want to talk to when you think you have something that's ready for big box or mass market retail. So let's hear it from Tim. Hey, product launch hazard, people, how are you? It seems like it's been a really long time since the last time I spoke to you, but guess what? It's only really been a month. A month is a long time. A lot has happened in a month. We moved. So you are witnessing a whole new office here that's just getting started. I do have two dogs in the room, so if you hear rustling, barking, panting, that's the dogs. That's the dogs. All right, so today we are going to talk about is your product ready to go to retail? And I know it's a weird topic because of course you think that your product is ready. Of course you think that everybody should be looking at your product. Of course you think that as fast as you can get it to retail buyers, that's what you should do. So I'm here to say let's hit the pause button. Let's go over a couple of things and make sure that really you are ready. Because let me tell you from experience that if you hit up a buyer and things don't go well until that buyer really swaps out and changes positions, you are going to have a tough time going back to that buyer. So if something happened you weren't quite ready, they said they're going to pass on the product. Listen, that's where you're kind of at unless something majorly changes. And generally the thing that changes is that buyer moves on, switches out. And so I want to make sure that when you get ready to take your product to a buyer, that it's awesome that you're ready, that the buyer is wowed and you're not going to have any issues when it comes to just, like I said, not being ready. All right, so the first thing that I'm going to ask you about is pricing. So there's a ton of stuff out on the web about pricing your product for retail. And so I'm not going to get into an entire pricing show. We'll do that again some other time where we'll talk about pricing. The one thing I want to make sure that you've done though, the one thing that we want to mention here is have you priced your product across all channels? So let's say you're getting ready to send your product to Costco, price it for Costco and you're happy with it. Well, guess what, we don't all have a crystal ball. We can't all tell right off the bat if Costco's going to be the only place that we ever take the product, the only place that we ever go with you, your product. So you want to price it across all the different channels right now to make sure that it works across a wide range of retailers before you start selling it to and lock in your price. Because once you start selling it in one channel, that's your price for that channel and everything else is going to either go down off of that or go up off of that. So before you lock yourself in, and maybe some of you already have on Amazon, because Amazon is a channel, it's an E commerce channel. And whatever price you're selling it on there for is kind of where your retail is. So even if you say, oh, it's just on sale, come on, it's on sale all the time on Amazon. So whatever price that is, that's what the retailers are going to think that your price is. So whether it's club store, whether it's big box, whether it's grocery, whether it's drugstore, whether it's specialty, whether it's E commerce, you want to make sure that your product pricing works well across all those different channels. Okay? Don't lock yourself in to just one channel with one price. I guarantee you down the road you're going to regret that. So price it across all those channels, make sure it works. And we are going to have a pricing episode coming up, so you're not going to want to miss that. All right, Number two, packaging. Alright? If you've listened to my podcast at all, if you've gone all the way back to the beginning, which some of the beginning podcasts I know are rough, but they still have good content. And one of those was about packaging not being a do it yourself project. Okay? Packaging. Just because you have a friend that can sketch or you have a friend that does graphic design, that doesn't mean that they know packaging. I mean, Tom and Tracy will tell you this a hundred different times in a hundred different ways. This is an important part of you selling your product. You are not going to be there in the retail store every time going, hey, check out my product. Their packaging is going to have to do that for you. And so there's a couple of different things that your packaging has to be able to do. Number one, it has to be able to stop. People. People have to be, oh, hey, what's that? They have to stop. Okay, you have like a tenth of a second to capture their attention. What about your packaging is going to do that? What is going to make them stop? Number two, it has to make them pick it up. So once they stop, there has to be something engaging enough that they want to pick it up. All right? And then the third thing is there has to be a call to action. You have to solve something on the packaging to get them to put it in their card. So number one, gotta stop. I'm strolling down the aisle, you know, I'm on my way to pick up the one thing that I know that I need for sure. And all of a sudden I'm oh, what's that? I'm stopped right in my tracks because your packaging is so engaging. It just made me stop. And so I have to stop and look and say, what is that? And then on the box it says something like cures nosebleeds. I don't know, but oh my gosh, my son has nosebleeds all the time. Scoop it up and then on here it says all natural organic nosebleed remedy. Okay, I like organic. All natural. My kid has nosebleeds. Bam. I'm going to put that in my cart. But you're not going to get that by guessing. You're not going to get that by Uncle Johnny who does some graphic design doing that. You're not going to do that with an iPhone. Pictures. That's not how that works. So if you're going to put some money after you build your product, you're going to put some money into something, put it into your packaging. That's your silent salesperson. And without that, product's just going to sit there. Okay, so number one, pricing across all channels. Number two, packaging. Make sure that it's engaging. It's not a do it yourself unless you yourself are a packaging expert. All right, number three, sales. I know that it's kind of a double edged sword, right? You can't get into a retailer until you get some sales. You can't get some sales until you get into a retailer. But there are ways to get sales before you start Showing your product to a big box retailer, Amazon number one, okay? And I know what you're thinking. I know that your parents like it and your family likes it and your friends like it and they've tried it and they say it's the best thing, okay? That's not a vetted product. Family and friends can't be all you do. You have to start selling it. And mind me, by the hundreds you need to get deep into this. Like 1, 2, 300 units sold to people that you don't know, people that you don't live next to. These are the people that you need to sell the product to because they're going to be brutally honest. If it doesn't work, they're going to tell you, hey, man, this thing doesn't work, or it doesn't work well, or I don't like it, or it's the wrong color or it falls apart or it's awesome. This is the best thing. I don't know how I survived without this. Those are the kind of feedback that you need. And believe me, bad feedback is not bad. Bad feedback is only bad. When you just sold 250,000 units to Target and now you're getting some feedback that things are going wrong, that is bad. Okay? But when you're selling 1, 2, 3 at a time, 10 a day, and somebody says, put the brakes on, something's going wrong with this, you dodged a bullet, okay? Because now you can fix it, put it back out there, make sure that people are buying it and it's all going well, and then you can sell it to a big box retail. Then you can do a couple containers, loads and feel comfortable about it. But please don't go to a big box retailer until you have vetted this product and it's sold multiple hundreds of units across a certain type of channel, whether it's on your own website, on Amazon, on another E commerce site, someplace where you can control inventory in it. You're not selling thousands and thousands of units to one person and expecting them to sell it when it's unvetted. Does that make sense? So I know there's people around you that think your product's awesome. We need to get some people that you don't know to say that same thing. All right? Sales, vetted pricing, packaging. All right? Number four is uniques. I know that you think your product is unique, and it probably is. But being unique and having uniques are not the same thing. When you talk to a retail buyer, they're going to want to know why. Why do I need to buy this product and you need to have some unique, some specific things that make this product unique enough to sit next to another like minded product and either do better, do different or even take that one off the shelf to replace with yours. Just having a cheaper product or what you would consider a better product is not enough. It has to be different, it has to be unique. And that could come in the form of colors, color choices. It could come in the fact that there's some just new tweak that you made to it. People are getting silly rich on Amazon just taking regular products and making some changes, some unique changes. And I have people that come to me every single week and say I can do that product better and cheaper. And so therefore I think the red carpet's gonna come out and the velvet ropes are gonna part and it's gonna be, oh, it's gonna be beautiful. No retailers, once they already are locked into a product, that company has a vendor number. It's a lot of hassle to get rid of them and to take you on. So it has to be more than just a better product for a better price. So what's unique about your product? What sets it apart and that it has to be tangible. It can't be just, ah, well, it works so much better, it looks so much better, it acts so much better. Those aren't tangible things. Well, this particular USB drive has some new technology in it and the download speeds are twice as fast. That's tangible. That's tangible. Something we can grab onto. Not only that, but that's something that you can write on the packaging that's going to make that person put it in their cart. So some of the uniques, when you're thinking about, hey, well what's unique about this? Well, what do you want to tell the consumer on your packaging that's going to be like, oh man, I got to get this. That's what that is. So it's exactly what you're going to tell the buyer. Okay, number five, who are you selling your product to? Okay, I know that this is not having anything to do with your product and it being ready for retail, but before you go to a retail buyer, you need to figure out who's buying your product. What type of consumer are you wanting to sell to? And let me give you an example. I mean, I have clients that come to me, they're wanting to go to Costco, but they're currently selling TJ Maxx. I mean, the customer that shops at TJ Maxx might also shop at Costco. But those are not technically the same customer. The demographic at TJ Maxx is not the demographic at Costco. It's not household income of $80,000 plus. No, not a membership shopper. No. TJ Maxx is where you go to get great name brands that are closing out at great prices. Sometimes something that you don't even need, it's just a good price. That's not necessarily. Those two people might shop in both stores, but they're not the same shopper technically. So you can't sell TJ Maxx and the same product at Costco at the same time. So you gotta decide, who's your customer? Who are you selling? So once you figure out who your customer is, they're women between the ages of 35 and 65. They have kids, they're mothers, they have household incomes or professionals. Once you figure out who that person is, then you gotta figure out, where do they shop? Where does that person shop? And those are the retailers that you want to start to target. Which leads us into number six, creating your target list of retailers. You can't just start throwing out a net willy nilly. And whatever retail buyers get caught up in that net is where you're going to be like, yeah, man, I pulled that net in. I got like six retail buyers in there. No, you got to be strategic about this. Who are you selling your product to? And then where do those people shop? That's your list. That way when the buyer says, why us? You can say, well, your target customer fits within the demographic of my customer. We have synergy with who's shopping at your retail stores and who buys my product. Okay, that's definitely info that you want to have. So sometime at some point, you might want to take a survey of the people that have purchased your product. Remember when I told you you needed Hundreds of sales? 1, 2, 300 sales? Maybe at some point you need to just survey those people, find out who they are, what they do, where they shop. And that way when the buyer asks you, hey, why us? You can say, well, because those are my people. All right, last number seven on our list. And marketing is a big word. And so I don't want you to get lost in just thinking advertising and put your product in a magazine or something like that. Marketing also speaks to how you market your product to people to help the sales and the retailers that you just got into. So how are you going to market your product this year? And that's something buyers are going to want to know. And there's a lot of ways you can look at it. One arm of that needs to be social media. We have a big social media presence. We're talking to our customers on social media. We're interacting with our customers on social media. Remember, social media and your customers and your contact with them is something that these retail companies desperately want. It's something that they can't buy. They can't go to China and get your customers, they can't go to Korea and get your contacts on social media. And they certainly can't buy your relationship that you have with your customer. They want access to that. And why shouldn't they? That might be part of and that will be part of why and how they might purchase product from you. Okay, so social media is one arm of that. Trade shows, ecrm, houseware show, fancy food show. Depending on what product you're selling, you got to put some money in your budget to go out and market your product. You can't just sit back and say, I just want to build some product and send some emails and get my product into a retailer. Listen, I tell people this all the time. In fact, it was one of my probably first three podcasts, which is, is it harder to get products into retail or is it harder to get product to sell once they're in? And the answer is, it's harder to get products to sell through once they're in. That's right. Getting your products into retail is not the hardest thing. That's not the hardest thing. Getting them to sell through and getting a reorder is the hardest thing. And you have a big part in that. You can't just sit back.

They're in. Good. I'm good. It's time for the golf. Time for it to hit the course. No, no. That's when your real work starts. That's when you really have to get after it. That's when you really have to hit the social media. You got to hit the trade shows. Hey, it's available here, it's available there. That's when you have to start really marketing it. So money in your budget, trade shows, stuff like ecrm, houseware show, those kind of things, places where you get in front of people, social media, you can do some print. I'm not saying that you can't do some print, but you can also take advantage of some of the promotional opportunities that are available to you at the retailers that you're in. They love that when you go to them and say, hey, what promotional vehicles do you have available this month? I want to take advantage of some of that. Okay, that's amazing. So promotional vehicles, through your retailers, social media, trade shows, those are all different ways that you can market your product. And you're going to want to set some money aside for that. All right, so let's recap. Pricing across all channels. Packaging, make sure it's speaking to the consumer. Sales, make sure your product gets vetted and you know that there's no major issues. Number four, uniques. What are the uniques? And are you going to call those out on your packaging? Number five, who are you selling to? Figure out who your customer is? Number six, target retailers. Once you figure out who your target customer is, where do they shop? And that's where you need to go. And then seven, marketing plan to push your product forward. All right, Tim Bush, TLB Consulting. Hey, Tom, you're back.

Tim. Yeah. Hey, thanks so much for that. That was a great, great overview of all those different considerations. I just wanted to ask you a quick question. What do you think that most people who come to you who are trying to get into big bucks retail, out of all those seven are the least prepared for where are the biggest landmines? You think that people think they're ready, but they're really not.

Actually, they're all. I picked those seven because they're all kind of landmines. These are all key things. I think that a lot of people that come to me don't have adequate sales. They don't put the time in online to get that figured out. And they may come to me because they want me to do that, but they need to understand that, hey, then we're going to have to take baby steps to get to where we're going to approach Target. Sometimes they come to me and say, hey, I want to go for Target. I want to go for Costco. No, we have to start at E Commerce. We're going to have to build you a site. We have to start on Amazon. I'm sure you agree with me. A couple hundred, 200, 300 pieces before you can really figure out whether your product is okay.

Definitely. You've got to get some market proof one way or another that actually shows that people want this product. There is a market for it. How big is that market and how quickly do you go through those two or three hundred products, too? Right?

Yeah, it wasn't until. Yeah. Well, we've been selling for 10 years and now we just hit the 300 mark. And I mean, I think that that's okay, too. But if it's taking you 10 years to sell 300 units. Then go down to number seven and talk to yourself about marketing. By the way here, it's unrealistic trade shows and marketing. I mean, just marketing in general. Getting on social and spending some money, putting some effort behind that and then getting out to some trade shows and actually getting in front of people. I think people get turned off to trade shows because they don't know what they're doing. And so they buy a booth, a 10 by 10 booth and they spend $3,500 and meals and all this. And then they just stand there and people just go by and then they get soured on it and they say, man, I did a trade show and I lost a lot of money. It was horrible.

But you didn't really have a plan for what you're going to do at that trade show and how you're using it as a tool, really.

Right. Or maybe you've been marketing to some big buyers but you didn't let them know where you were. You didn't try to set up any appointments and you didn't create some really targeted pitches. When people are walking by, you have to say one thing to them. I had a client for a while that had a electric composter and basically we could take an entire bucket of stuff in the house and compost it down in three hours. That was my call out pitch when we were at a trade show. Hey, we can compost your leftovers in three hours. And that would get people to. What do you mean? Compost anything in three hours. And that would get them to stop and at least. What do you mean? Ask a question. So you have to figure out your product and what are you going to say to people as they walk by. And if you're shy, you got to get over that. There was this one guy, I was at a True Value trade show and he talked really loud and he would go out to people and he'd whisper to him and he would steal everybody. I asked him, what are you saying to those people? I'm not telling you, but whatever it.

Was, talker was succeeding.

The load talker was succeeding. And I don't know whether it was because people were trying to understand him so that he would stop. But we were both selling some sort of bug spray type thing. He would just go, hey, I wouldn't hear what he was saying. And he was just getting every. But he had a plan and he attended trade shows so he knew his plan was working. And I guess probably like I said, all these are but uniques. Everybody thinks that their Product is unique, like I said. But tangible things that you can hold onto are key. And I know that, like you and Tracy, that's part of what you guys do. And you can really help people figure out what's unique about my product. Or you might be able to tell them there's nothing unique about your product.

I know that's the tough thing sometimes to tell people. We always talk about how we're telling people their baby is ugly. I mean, we don't want to do that. But the reality is, if you don't have a product that's significantly different from someone else, you're going to have a very hard time doing it or you're going to have to throw a whole lot more money at it in order to get attention. There's all sorts of pros and cons. Right. And different factors. But I like what you said earlier, too, about the packaging. How long do you get on the retail shelf with somebody walking by to grab their attention?

A tenth of a second. Yeah. It's so quick that you can't even count it. And sometimes, to me, the fact that anybody stops at anything at all is amazing. But there is. I mean, there's. People are good at that. I'm not one of those people. I'm not going to do your packaging for you. But I do know if I look at your package, and I can tell you, because the first half of my career was on the sales floor, places like Bed Bath and Office Depot. So I know how to merchandise and I know what will look good on a shelf and whether people are going to stop. And then the big question is, once you get them to stop, then what? What are you going to tell them then?

Yeah. And then the only other thing I was wondering about, and I know you talked about it early on, so if I missed it, I apologize. But the different retailers each have a different economic model they operate on. It's very different at Costco than it is from Target or someone else, where you may think you're the vendor, you've got this product, you've got your margins all figured out, but you haven't planned for selling it at Walmart versus Costco. I mean, it's an entirely different thing. And maybe it shouldn't even be the exact same skew. Right. People often not prepared for the different, I guess, margin, makeups and all the different factors involved in what adds up to be the shell on the shelf price.

Yeah. So here's the two that get people into trouble. So you can survive if your product is selling At Target, you can probably sell it at Bed Bath and Beyond or someplace, you know, other like minded big box retailers. But if you started online and you started discounting online and started selling your product and you're thinking to yourself, hey, I'm still making 100% margin on this product or 80% or 70%, I'm still making good money. And a lot of people are coming off Amazon now, they want to go into mainstream retailer but there's not enough margin in there because all of a sudden now you have to add another 20, 30 points to your model and all of a sudden it's not working. And they've gotten so used to discounting deep on Amazon because it's just this sea of I'm beating you by two pennies. So now I'm winning the buy box. So I think that that's one thing and yeah, you may have to discount now and again and on Amazon, but you better know what your other prices are going to look like. And the other one, I guess the other place that they get in trouble is in Club store because even though Club store they don't like Costco only requires 14 points of margin. So people think woo hoo, I'm going to go buy a new ski cabin. But there's all these backend program costs that they require or that you need to be ready for that get you into trouble.

Yeah, well that's the thing. I always say you got to have an expert who knows the lay of the land at that retailer. So you are definitely our go to person.

Well, I appreciate that. I think when you're trying to survey this type of thing and get your product into retail, there's something that you're really good at. If you built a product then that's what you're good at. You had an idea, you were able to facilitate that idea and turn it into a product, but you're not going to be generally good at everything. And I think a lot of times people burn through a ton of money trying to be good at everything and then they figure out that they need help and by the time they figure out they need help, they don't have any more money left. And so my advice to people is figure out what you're good at and do that. And then when you still have funds available, go find some other people that are good at the things that you don't know anything about.

I agree. You got to play to your strengths and hire to your weaknesses and recognize you actually have weaknesses. Nobody's great at everything, right? Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Tim. That was fantastic. I'm sure that that's going to be of great value to our members.

Well, I hope so. And of course you guys can always email me on the platform and if you have any questions, happy to answer them. Tom, as always, thanks for making it available. I hope everybody gets a lot out of it.

Thanks so much. Our pleasure to have you. Thank you for doing it. All right, till next time. Bye everyone.

Bye bye.

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