Meet Joseph Tarnowski, Expert in Connecting Brands to Retail Buyers

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Hey there, product launchers. I have a great new expert to introduce you to today. I've got Joe Tarnowski from ECRM and Range Me. And there's a lot of our experts have tons of experience and Joe's one of them. So we're going to find out how he got that experience. We're going to find out what ECRM stands for. I know what they do, but I can never remember what it stands for. But the real point that I want you to get out today is that Joe is here because he has loads of experience across multiple product categories watching companies present to buyers, watching things happen in the industry in a way that he's got this really unique perch of seeing what goes right and what goes wrong. So he's here to protect you from those hazards of product launching. The other hazards, of course. And so. Hey, Joe, Welcome.

Thank you. Thanks for inviting me.

We're so glad to have you as an expert here. And really, I just want to get started because I realized this morning as I was preparing for our call that we've been on our flash topic on Tim Butch's podcast On the Shelf. We've been doing that, I don't know, maybe six months or something like that. And I don't know your story. Like, I don't know how you got started in the industry. Like, I know what an expert you are, but we dive in and we just get talking about stuff that we forget that we weren't personally acquainted before that.

That's right. Actually, the first podcast that I did with them is when I gave my background. And so, yeah, so I can start from the beginning. I mean, my background is in trade media journalism. So I've been covering retail and food service prior to coming on board at ECRM for about 24 years. And so we're talking food service retail on a magazine called Food Service Director, then Grocery Retail with Progressive Grocer. I was with them for about 14 years. I was also written for Convenience Store News, the gourmet retailer. So a lot of food retail. And even now in my role on ecrm, I still dabble a little bit and do some more writing for the trades and including drugstore news chain Drug review, mmr. I like to keep my hand in the game. This way, they trust me as a marketer.

Well, so now that explains even more why you're here to complement the skills. Because I always joke about this, but I don't do food and fashion. And so I've done every product category under the sun. And I have done like fashion accessories because I have a textile background, but I don't do food and fashion because you have like taste, speed to market, FDA involvement, like there's a whole bunch of stuff. So you've got a broad range of experience that complements that. I love it. Great.

I don't do the fashion, but I definitely went deep in food and kind of that's a segue into what I'm doing now because since over the years the product categories that I've covered have been food, general merchandise, health and beauty care, pharmacy. So when I came on board with ecrm, those are the specific areas that they cover. So I feel like I can give you a quick two minute overview.

Tell us what ECRM stands for.

All right. Well, the name is old. It's a 25, just about a 25 year old company. And ECRM officially stands for Efficient Collaborative Retail Marketing.

And that's been the name all along.

That's been the name for the past, I think 10 years or so. It was something else previously. I don't remember what it was.

Did it have something with like Market Gate in it or something like that?

The website platform for ECRM is MarketGate.

Right.

But there's been a couple of other iterations of the name in the past. I think it was something with the Efficient Consumer or category manager. I don't remember what it was, but.

Well, collaborative marketing is exactly what we're here to do. So you guys fit in perfectly with that.

Yep. And most of the categories that they cover are categories that I have reported on over the past 25 years. So basically what ECRM does in a nutshell is we help retail buyers and food service operators to discover new products and help plan their categories. And we do that in a few ways. And on the flip side of that, obviously is the supplier side, where we help connect these suppliers with these retailers and food service operators.

And by suppliers, they mean new product launchers, people, new product brands. Right.

Mostly, I'd say 95% new and emerging products. They're not in retail yet. Maybe most of them are just on Amazon or they're selling online. So they're looking to get on the shelves of retail chains on the shelf Kind of like Tim's podcast. And so that's what we do is we help make those connections and we do it in a deep way. So on a basic level, we have our more than 60 category focused sessions and that's where we will bring together all of these suppliers and all of these retail category buyers and we will have private pre scheduled meetings. So this is a very basic level. It gets a lot deeper than that. I'm not going to go too much into the details.

So the only thing I want to touch on is that the service that you guys provide from a buyer's perspective is amazing. So I was a buyer, it was in a contract furniture industry, but I was a buyer there. And the inundation you have, and this is early email that I'm talking about when I was acting as a buyer and the inundation with emails and solicitations and all of this is something that is so overwhelming to these retail buyers that they can't possibly vet them, source them or take all the time. And so ECRM is providing that sort of middle ground and conduit to that so that they understand who's qualified, who would fit their model before they ever take the meeting. So the time saving for a buyer is huge. But the quality that they do in terms of quality qualifying is amazing as well. So just be thinking about this. This is not like they're in your way that they're not. That's why I don't love market gate, because it's not a gate, but it's really sort of understanding. Are you ready yet? Are you there yet? And ECRM is providing that buyer side saying you should meet with these people, right? Like they are ready, they are the right kind for you. And so that's an invaluable resource because there's just not enough time in the day for most buyers to get to all their emails.

In fact, that is really, really what we provide is efficiency, effectiveness and relevance. More than everything is we make sure that we're vetting everybody and we're only putting the relevant suppliers in front of these buyers. And the thing is, outside of our core sessions, right, so we have 60 sessions, they're category based, divided up into four or five divisions. So we'll have grocery, so things like candy, snacks, beverages. We'll also have food service, so campus food service, commercial, non commercial food service and retail food service. Then we'll have general merchandise, which is part of your bread and butter. So we'll have sessions like pet toy, housewares, household consumer technology, Then we'll also have health and beauty care and that spans a lot of categories. So have skincare, hair care, cosmetics, vitamins and supplements, otc. And then finally we have pharmacy and medical markets. And so we'll cover specialty pharmacy, diabetes, pharmacy technology. So across all of those, so we will connect the buyers and sellers. But it really goes beyond that where like you mentioned, we're taking a lot of the busy work off of the retailers hands. And because the process starts well in advance of the in person sessions. So we will work with the supplier, with the buyers. When a buyer signs up, they'll let us know what their focus is. They'll let us know the subcategories that they're interested in, any particular certifications. And what we'll do is based on that, we will match them up with the suppliers who on their end, when they register, they're indicating which categories and subcategories they take off.

And this is the number one thing, when you're a new brand, this is an invaluable resource because you don't know what you don't know. That's why you're here. Product launch hazards likely because you do realize that you don't know a whole ton of stuff. And one of the things that you don't know is all the information that a buyer wants to know about you. And so it's that information that might be missing that you just didn't know you needed. Like a certification is required, you could have gotten before that meeting and now you're ruled out and you're done and you could have been prepared for that. And that's something that, because you know ahead of time, because they're filling out this very, very detailed profile and all the information and all the boxes get checked. So that's really different. So that's part of why you guys bought or merged with rangeme is that I don't know what the right term for that is.

You just read my mind because that was the segue. So yes, so we acquired RangeMe last year. Actually it's almost exactly a year ago. And because of that, RangeMe is a product discovery platform that captures a lot. Again, they have thousands of buyers from major retail chains using the platform and they gather and they have 125,000 suppliers and again mostly primarily new and emerging brands across all those categories that we already are working with on ecrm. So what's really cool is the platform though is amazing. It's very slick. It captures all that information so that when the buyer looks at a Supplier profile, all of that information is right there. And the other advantage that rangebee has is rangebee is very deeply connected with buyers. They are the inbound product discovery platform for about 50 major retail chains. So in other words, if you go to Target's website and you click on the link for vendors to submit products, rangebee handles the entire back end of all the inbound product submissions. So for them, for Albertsons, the Whole Foods, for cvs, for a lot of major retailers. So all of their buyers are on the platform and what happens is if suppliers submit through those links, it's routed to the appropriate buyer at the appropriate retailer.

It's like alert. There's something new and innovative in your that meets your criteria. Right. It's kind of a mess, right?

Yep. So again it eliminates all of those things you talked about. They don't have to worry about the phone calls, they don't have to worry about the emails. We'll even give them a card, a business card that they can take to trade shows. So if they meet with somebody they could just give them the card that says rangebeat.com target and it doesn't give out their information. So that this way they upload their product information through the platform.

Yeah. So that's an insider secret. You may not know product launchers that buyers emails are hidden like they keep them very, very, very close. A lot of times I mean, you know, people get smart and think that they can defeat the system by figuring out what the emails are. But I know a lot of companies that have their buyer emails are slightly different than the company standard for just that reason. And if you ended up emailing that address, it ends up at some assistance desk somewhere into basically a black hole. So because otherwise they would never get their work done.

No, and that's the thing. Time is such a premium with them. And so that's what we do. Like you said, we really help them get the most out their time investment because they can't be out of the office for too long. So we'll do that and we'll do it in other ways too. Aside from those 60 plus category based sessions. We will do more custom related sessions for some of these larger retailers we call them and this is a new name for them but efficient strategic summits. So a good example is, and this is where the integration of RangeMe is really coming into play. Because a good example is we just did with wakefarm, an own brand summit and we used, what we did was we put the word out, I made some content around it, we put press releases out in the trade media, we put send email blasts to all of our databases and arrange me list inviting suppliers that qualify to submit their application to participate. And then what happened was they had to apply through the Range B platform. We had a custom link. Then once they applied, they the buyers, it was the products were routed to the correct buyers at Waferm and then they vetted them based on, you know, whether it was something that they wanted. So we had a thousand people apply and then once they narrowed it down, there were 250 suppliers that were invited to a custom session that was held near the Wakefront offices where they had about 26 buyers participate.

That's an amazing opportunity because it's like a lot of times you're out there submitting your toy, your game, your furniture, whatever it might be, right? And you're out there doing that and you have no idea if someone's interested or open to buy, as the term goes in the industry. Right. But here they're asking you to set up the summit. So they're clearly interested in finding new and innovative products within this category under this criteria. So being able to participate, yeah, 250 sounds like a lot of people to compete with. But it's 250 who are very focused with an opportunity to really get bought. And that's huge.

And the thing is, is we help eliminate all the busy work in getting that done. You know, from the point of putting the word out there, you know, we run, I think, six straight publications as well as our website, LinkedIn and all that. But then vetting, you know, bringing everything into the system so they can basically just vet everything really on the platform. And it's like I said, it's very slick, it's really, really easy to navigate. And then at the physical meetings themselves, we manage that for them. So they just show up and it's really close to their offices. So we just schedule it so that the buyers can come in, meet with their and then go back. So it's all about efficiency. It's part of, you know, they're looking to grow their own brands business. We do this with a lot of different retailers throughout the year. We've done Diversity Summit, Supplier Diversity Summit with Walgreens last year. I mean, these are all public knowledge. We've talked about these in the trades, but that's one of the ways that we're working ECRM and RangeMe together. RangeMe more and more is becoming the platform where the retailers, whether they're at these summits or at our sessions to kind of vet these products and suppliers who they're going to be meeting with.

That's fantastic. So, so one of the things is that we, so we interviewed. It's Nikki Jackson. Is that right?

Yes.

Yeah. Nikki Jackson, who invented Range Me. She's the, she's the founder of IT and everything. And, and she came out of the world of working in consumer products, good in the beauty industry. And so there's a whole story about it. I'll make sure we link it in the post so you guys can read it. But I did both a podcast interview with them and an Ink article and so we'll link both of those in. But what I found was so interesting is she had both perspectives. So she went out in the world wanting to do her own beauty products. Right. And then found out how she was an insider and she couldn't even get a meeting.

Couldn't get it. Yeah.

And so she said this is ridiculous because there's a list of things I didn't know if I wasn't going to present to my own company, which is the only company I knew. And so that's really where rangeme came about. And so I loved the thought that she came from both sides of the viewpoint to understanding like what. What's valuable for the buyer side and what's valuable for the product and brand side and how you can bring those two together so that it's much more efficient at the end of the day for both sides and much better fit. Because getting on a shelf is a risky thing, right? It's risky for you because you might have as a product brand because you might have a lot of inventory invested in that and what doesn't work because it's just not a good fit and. Cause they didn't ask the questions of you and you didn't ask the questions of them. So that can be problematic. And of course it's very risky on the buyer side because they can't afford to not be turning inventory at the rate at which they need to keep their jobs. So you have the.

Yeah, we're all about that. Like I mentioned before, that relevance. But it even gets into like the ECRM MarketGate platform is a custom built platform and it's evolved over the 24 years that we've been around. Like here's an example. When a buyer going through the list of suppliers with one of our account managers, right. The other thing about ECRM is we're incredibly high touch. So everybody who registers is assigned an account manager, walks them through their schedules A couple of times as it gets closer to the session to make sure that it's relevant. And for example, we've built in things like if, let's say a buyer is looking for prestige beauty and sees that the initial pass of matches, one of the suppliers is a value supplier known for value products. So then the buyer would say, no, I don't want to meet with this person because they have a value. We're looking for prestige. Well, they have an opportunity. Let's say that value supplier came out with a new line of prestige products that the retailer doesn't know about. They can rebut through our system and say, look, I know, you know, we're a value retailer, value supplier, but we just launched this new line of prestige products you might be interested in. And then they could say, well, you know what? On second thought, I will meet with. You know, so it's so tailored to make sure that when they get together in person, that that time is well spent both on the supplier side and on the buyer side.

So let's talk about some of these events that you run, because I think that that's really also critical. So I'm not going to. Because they're way more. I hate to call them a trade show. Like, it doesn't. Like they are at all. Like, it's way more than a trade show. But you have educational platforms for both sides involved in every single event that you guys run. And you run events pretty much every other month or every month, if I'm not wrong.

Put it this way. In February, I think we have 22. We schedule them according to where. When the major buyers are doing their planning. So sometimes they lump together in ways that are just so February. I'm looking at my calendar now. February has got like 22. There's like 12 in April, a handful in June. So depending on the buyer.

October is big, I bet.

No, October is actually not as big. The beginning, they tend. The first half of the year is really heavy, and then the summer.

You know why October is big on my end? Because that's usually when we do all the supplier audits in Asia or the factory audits in Asia. I bet that's when they all decide to travel to Asia.

It slows down because you're getting to the holiday sales season. But the one thing that. It's funny you mentioned trade show, that we're not a trade show. We've really repositioned ourselves against that. And Tim will. Tim will be the first to tell you he will.

I know.

As far as, like, well, they're not events, they're sessions. Because it's not just sure the in person meeting is just the part of it that the people see. But there's so much planning and stuff that goes on in the front end. Then the follow up side that we're really just an extension of the retailers category planning and product discovery efforts. So we try to eliminate trade show or event from all of our marketing, all of our content. But there are a lot of educational opportunities that we do. I'm involved with a lot of them because I used to set them up when I was with the trade media. So we'll bring in a lot of speakers. We usually have at least one or two educational sessions at each of these. Sometimes it's market research companies like Nielsen or IRI or NPD or Mintel. We'll have them talk about trends based on their data. We may also have industry experts such as Tim came in and spoke about, specifically about selling, where we may have customers come in. And I love doing retailer panel discussions. Get a few retailers on the panel and have them talk about trends that they're seeing and how it's impacting their businesses. We like to do different types of things we'll try to do. We want to make each of our sessions a place where people are there to engage with each other. So sure, you have the meetings themselves and the meetings are a learning experience. And this is probably one thing I'll do one of these sessions on is one thing that I always say is for suppliers, especially from every meeting with a buyer you should come away with something whether it's a follow up that could lead to a sale or information that's going to improve their business. One of those things, you should get at least one of those things from every single meeting.

And there's one sort of that model that a no is actually, actually a good result. Right, exactly. Learn something that you didn't have and now next time you're going to be even more focused in who you approach.

And you knock it out of the park at your next year's meeting with them. Yeah, so and that's the thing retailers would say, I'd rather have them take my feedback, work it into their products and then come and hit a grand slam the next, the next year and then so it's an ongoing thing, but we also provide opportunities, lots of networking opportunities where you have your breakfast, your lunch, then we'll have cocktails and then dinner and usually that it's all geared to keep the group together, whether it's A ballroom where we'll have a performer and then we'll have the massage chairs.

Because everybody's sore at the end of the day.

Yes, it is an intense day, but this way they can. We want to foster that networking. Or we'll do an off site at like a bowling alley or topgolf or someplace like that. But the key is on both sides. Sure, the suppliers love the opportunity to network with the buyers during these functions, especially the buyers they may not have met with or that they met with and they want to further the conversation. But the buyers want to meet and network with other buyers because they compare notes. Yes, they'll bounce ideas off of each other and they'll get a lot of good intelligence on the category from each other. And I always say, you know, the best source of information is your peers. You know, just get everybody together. So I'm a big fan of roundtables.

Yeah. And that's the thing that you don't realize unless you've been on the other side of it, is that as a buyer you don't have a lot of time to do the research in your market category necessary. You actually rely a lot on your suppliers providing that information. But you know it's a salesy pitch when you hear it from them. So you gotta find another way to like vet that and like talk to other buyers. Because actually everybody knows each other. I've been in, in and around office furniture for a really. Like that was my broader category where I knew every buyer in every store. And because I was an outside consultant, it was like they would call me and they would say, hey, what are you hearing about materials? Are you hearing darker woods are in? Like, they would ask me that because they knew I was touching other stores. And so it was their way of getting what are the other stores doing? So they want that info. They just don't have a lot of opportunity to forget it.

Well, I, it's funny, I use that and just the sheer number of people that are at our sessions to actually crowdsource insights from them. So during each of our sessions we have what we call exit interviews, where a member of our staff meets with each attendee for a 20 minute meeting to get feedback on what we can improve. You know, so we're talking. There's dozens of these meetings every session and we act on them. We have a meeting at the end of the session where we get all that feedback. We say, how can we make this better? Whether it involves tech, whether it involves a process thing, or people or service thing. And so we're constantly doing that and that's why we've evolved the way we have. And the cool thing is I would insert a question in there and I inserted it for buyers because suppliers are also, like you said, they're going to answer in a way that best suits them. But so I put in a question so I could crowdsource insights. So the question is, what product blew you away and why? Because in answer to that question, I'll get kind of the trend that's happening. So for example, you'll start to see.

It happen from exit interview to exit interview.

And one retailer would say, I love these grab and go thing because it was vegan and convenient. And so you'll see, okay, obviously veganism.

Is a trend going on, right? Yeah, plant based.

Yeah, not me. But plant based is a big trend. Portability is a trend on the go. So you get a dozen or two dozen answers on those questions and it gives me a good idea of where to go with my content. And that's where I come in, is my role with ECRM is twofold. One is to create content that keeps our current customers engaged with us throughout the year.

And that's on both sides on the buyer side and the supplier side.

When we say customer, we talk about the retailers, food service operators and the suppliers. So to keep them engaged with us in between the in person meetings. I mean, at the in person meetings we do have content there, but also in between to keep. Just to keep us on their radar, but then obviously also to help kind of draw new potential customers into the fold by just letting people know that we're here because the industry is so big and you get some of these startups that they come out of nowhere and they're not necessarily gonna know who we are right off the bat until they start getting out there. So I've seen so many instances, especially on LinkedIn because we're B2B. So LinkedIn's our primary social media platform, but we'll see somebody coming in saying that I may have connected with saying, hey, I didn't know you guys were affiliated with Rangemate. Tell us more about what you guys do. So we're getting people coming in from there or from our content floating around. And the cool thing is since we have so much staff that's dedicated to these categories, our staff almost acts as micro influencers within their domain. So they're posting their own content, health.

And beauty and toy and whatever experience they have that's really fabulous. So that's something here, is that I'm going to close with that because I think that's really awesome. So product launchers. I really want you to pay attention to Joe's profile because on Joe's profile are links to that. Make sure you friend him on LinkedIn. I know. Because I know that's where he posts the best information. Follow him there. Right. And friend him there because you're going to be able to keep up on all of that. The other thing that I want to make sure that we do, and I will do that as a follow up with this. You mentioned six trade publications. I want to put them in this blog post here and make sure that we have links to all six of those. Because one of the things that I talk about in other episodes many times is that, you know, I call it the trifecta. And one of the things is to get good coverage in a trade publications that a buyer actually cares about. And because you have so much connection with buyers, I guarantee you probably one of these six trade publications they probably read. And so that's a good place for it.

Yeah. That's something that I'd like to talk to your audience about in future sessions is the content side of this. How to leverage LinkedIn to get your product out there to get noticed and how to create content within. How to get a guest column accepted by a trade media editor. Yeah, Things that they could do, different ways that they can get involved to make themselves into an expert. I've had people that, they're Experts, they have 40 years in a retail company, but they're afraid to voice their opinion in a column. And I'm like, wait a minute, there are not many people around that know that business better than you.

This is how I ended up with a column. Right. Because there weren't many people out there. They're out there looking for that. Right.

So I definitely love to make myself available for your audience for anything content related, anything if they have questions. I've sat in on hundreds and hundreds of meetings with buyers and sellers at our sessions. So I've seen great ones, I've seen bad ones. I can give you some advice on how to avoid some of the making it a bad one. And so anything like that, I would love to help you guys.

Okay, guys, so product launchers. Make sure you tune in to Joe's next office hours, which will be coming up within 30 days. Every expert's gonna do a one a month, so you'll be finding him there. And you can also reach out to him through the profile at any time. All his contact information is there. Remember we're not gating anyone here. We want to make sure you have direct contacts to these experts because they want to help you. They want to help you grow. They want you help you avoid the hazards of product launching, the really dangerous ones and they want to help guide you into the things that you don't know that you don't know yet. So thanks Joe for joining us as an expert and we look forward to more office hours with you.

Look forward to working with everybody.

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