Your next customer is a retailer, not a feed.

Keep running it. The problem is that it’s rented: the moment you stop paying, it stops producing, and the rate keeps rising. Everything we build alongside it is owned: buyer lists, search visibility, a content library, and tracking that tells you which channel earns its budget. The paid gets more efficient when it isn’t carrying the whole company.

A broker is a relationship. They walk into the doors they already know. We build the outreach, the pipeline, and the tracking that reaches the retailers nobody has introduced you to yet, and your broker becomes more productive standing on top of it.

It’s a different game entirely. Consumer growth is auction-based, fast-feedback, and creative-led. Selling to a retailer is outreach-based, slow, and about the economics: margin, case pack, lead time, terms, sell-through. Both matter, and they take different skills. Your consumer agency is usually the first to say so.

It will look like the best version of you. Retailer materials usually get made in a hurry, by whoever has time, and they look it. We carry your brand into the line sheet, the deck, and the retailer site with the same care you put into your packaging, so a retailer sees a brand that’s ready for their shelf.

As a business problem as well as a legal one. We keep structure-function claims distinct from disease claims, hold to FTC substantiation standards on health claims and testimonials, place DSHEA disclaimers correctly, and account for state rules including Prop 65. A retail buyer runs their own compliance review, and a rejected line sheet costs you a season, so getting claims right is the fast path.

The full chain: contact, qualified retailer meeting, sample or line review, purchase order, doors opened, sell-through. We report qualified retailer meetings monthly and doors opened quarterly. One caveat: sell-through data lives with your retailer or distributor and often arrives 60 to 90 days late. We ask you to commit at kickoff to sharing whatever your channel partners send back. Without it, tracking stops at the purchase order, and we’d rather tell you that now than at the third quarterly review.

Usually a brand doing $3M or more, mostly D2C, with wholesale still under about a third of revenue, and gross margin that survives a wholesale discount. If the margin doesn’t work, the expansion fails on arithmetic before marketing gets a chance. We’ll tell you that in the first conversation.

That’s the best time to start. Most brands pay for the booth, the travel, and the samples, then leave with a stack of badge scans and no follow-up. Outreach into the attendee list before the show, meetings booked before you arrive, and sequences that run ninety days afterward turn the same budget into pipeline.