How to get your Products into Retail Stores

Yesterday was a red-letter day. Beautiful Bracelets are now proudly displayed in the main window and inside the shop of Gossip (Fashion & Accessories Shop) in Carlswald Lifestyle Centre, New Road, Midrand! After having already done it...I thought, what do you say to someone who needs advice on how to do it themselves? Well I then googled "how to get your products into retail stores" and found a whole lot of rubbish. Like write a business plan. On how to do it. I say if you have only 6 weeks to make a profit you need to be much more pro-active and you cannot waffle through writing a business plan on how you will achieve getting your products into retail stores with 19 points. Take a few samples of your products and knock on doors. You could do the "cold-calling" idea and make some phone calls first with a view to setting up an appointment with the owner but in this case it would probably yield a less than satisfactory result. And of course, unless you're not paying for the phone calls, it would eat a large chunk of your profits (in South Africa all phone calls including local are exhorbitantly priced which is why more people here use text/SMS or Whatsapp and email.)

I am assuming that by Week 3 of the "6 weeks to profit with only R1000" you've already done your market research by selling quite a few (or a few hundred) of your products and now you really do know what the market wants, and if it is actually a fashion item like Beautiful Bracelets is, you've also researched and discovered in the previous 3 weeks what shades are people actually buying at the moment. In South Africa right now, it is late Spring, Summer is almost on us, and this season the fashion shades are "sorbet" or "ice-cream" shades. Soft pinks, lemon yellow, mint green and turquoise are selling like crazy. And "grey" is the new "black". So of course, amongst the different types of bracelets I am making sure these colours (spelt UK way for any American readers since half the readers of this Blog seem to reside there) appeared in my samples.

Of course, then the next thing you want is to have direct access to the decision-maker for the retail store, usually for a small gift or accessories shop this would be the owner. Who might not be easily available. The first store I stopped at wouldn't even give me the owner's phone number. They really lost out on a wonderful opportunity. Such a pity. Because within a few minutes of that conversation it just so happened that the owner of the Accessories store I walked into, was present, re-designing and re-arranging all the displays in the store. We have all probably heard the saying "Luck is when preparation meets opportunity". Well I certainly made the most of that opportunity. And Beautiful Bracelets are just that. Beautiful. They sell themselves to anyone who looks at them, and they seemed to preen in front of Louise, the owner of Gossip  Fashion & Accessories Store..

One has to be very business like and negotiate a proper contractual arrangement on a selling price you can afford to release the goods for, yet still make a (smaller) profit and have the product stocked in the shop at a price that would still be attractive to the customers. This selling price needs to be the same as the price reflected on your website for each item! Payment terms need also to be negotiated if the products are on consignment. In South Africa a verbal contract is binding but for a long term arrangement it would be wise to put in in writing and have both parties sign, fairly early on.

To get products into the national Retailers, which one would do having grown to a level to sustain supplying that level of demand, one would have to hire an Exhibition Stand at one of the Trade Fairs/Expo's that all the Retail Buyers attend, like SARCDA or Design Indaba (for South African Retailers).

It's a memorable day, and the overwhelming feeling is one of gratitude.