Are you a small business? Is your business struggling to be discovered, make connections and grow? In this episode, Elliot Begoun welcomes Vir Satyan, the SVP of Supplier Success at RangeMe, shares how RangeMe helps level the playing field to be discovered, get connections, and eventually grow. He shares how you can set up your profile for customers to get what they need to know and to put your business forward. Vir Satyan also talks about RangeMe from both the buyer’s and retailer’s perspectives. Grab this opportunity to find a new avenue to help your business grow. Tune in!

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Listen to the podcast here

RangeMe: Discover, Connect, And Grow Your Business With Vir Satyan

Before I start, we are going to have an interesting conversation about RangeMe and all the things that they have to offer to help emerging brands and the challenges and questions that you may have about the industry in general. It’s going to be the typical conversation for us on the show. We will see where you let us take this, and your questions will help dictate how things go.

Before I start, I got to do a few things. First of all, I’m very excited to share with everyone reading a little bit about our new partnership with New Hope. We are partnering with New Hope to provide a series of ongoing workshops aimed at trying to empower, equip, and support emerging natural founders and entrepreneurs in this space. We will have workshops every month starting in March through Expo East.

Each workshop will also have a preview video that’s going to be hard-hitting and subject-specific as well as some written articles to support it. The workshops are something that you can join, and you will find them highly participative. The goal is to try to provide and give you as much information that is actionable and accessible, in a way that hopefully will enable you to make some things happen in 2023.

I also want to talk about my two commercials. The first is a bit about the TIG Collective. This is something that quite frankly, I’m extraordinarily proud of. We recognize that advisors and founders were circling each other. They were hovering around one another, not quite sure how to interact. We see a lot of, what I would call a vanity collection of advisors, where advisors were collected for pitch decks to say, “This person’s helping me,” but no real relationship there, or extraction of that wisdom.

We felt like there was a missed opportunity that if entrepreneurs could be connected to that wisdom and unlock it in a way that they can use to multiply their brand and move things forward, it could be a difference maker. The other challenge that we have in the industry is that there is not enough diversity in our boardrooms. We have a very diverse consumer base that we are serving, but our boardrooms look like me, middle-aged White guys, and we need to change that.

Part of the premise behind the Collective is to recruit and find women BIPOC and LGBTQ+ industry experts who are looking for their first opportunity to give back and be on a board. Not only will they have the opportunity to advise and support the entrepreneurs and the Collective, but we will be providing a masterclass on governance, fiduciary responsibility, M&A navigation, and so forth.

All the things that help equip them and ready them for a board role. Plus, we are partnering with great partners like the Women on Boards and the JEDI Collaborative and others to try to make sure that they know that this is the place where great future independent board members reside. That’s the TIG Collective. The next thing I want to talk about quickly is the TIG Venture Community.

A lot of conversation going on in the marketplace with the challenges and realities of raising capital. I’m going to be somewhat of a contrarian here and say, “I don’t think things are any more difficult than before. They are just different.” I am emboldened by the fact that we are talking about it in a different way. We are starting to talk and hear more about putting profit before growth and cash before everything.

The challenge that we see is that many brands have great opportunities but maybe aren’t built to be truly institutionally backable brands. They don’t have such a differentiated place in the market that they are likely to rocket to $100 million, but they have a path where maybe they can build to $20 million or $30 million and be EBITDA positive and cashflow positive, and that makes for good investments.

The TIG Venture Community is aimed at supporting that type of trajectory, those type of founders who want to bridge and build to optionality. Maybe, at some point, they do want to go the venture route, but they are not ready to make that decision now. It’s based on an investment thesis on investing in singles and doubles, not on Grand Slams. We are using very innovative structures and terms like our new care instrument, our COGS agreement, retaining equity, or blending equity and debt. It’s earmarked. It’s focused on the brands in our community that we are engaged with every day.

If you are either an entrepreneur interested in being part of a community and looked at differently, please reach out to us. If you are an accredited investor or somebody who cares about the future of this industry, please reach out. We’d love to have you as part of our community. All of my long-winded spiels are done. I’m warmed up. I can tell I’ve hit that normal cadence and now I’m going to turn it over to my guest and friend. Vir, are you there? Let’s have you introduce yourself and talk a little bit about RangeMe.

I was enjoying your flow and I was sitting back and taking it all in. Thank you very much for having me on here. It’s been fantastic to be an ally and a friend in the TIG Community for many years now. My name is Vir for everyone reading. Hopefully, some of you have had the chance to interact with me before, and if not, I look forward to meeting you at some point in person.

I lead our supplier success team here at RangeMe and I was one of the founding team members several years ago now. Fun fact, we started RangeMe in Australia, and in Australia, they called them range reviews instead of category reviews, which is why the name RangeMe came into being, category me doesn’t have the same ring to it.

The whole concept when we started RangeMe was founded by Nicky Jackson, who had worked at larger CPG companies before Kellogg’s and Goodman Fielder. When her daughter got eczema as a child, Nicky worked with a local chemist to come out with a product called Derma Baby that worked well. She thought, “This is going to be a breeze. I have had connections with top buyers at retail chains for fifteen years. I will reach out to them and shoot them an email.” She did that and they ghosted her in many cases.

They didn’t have time for her because she was no longer Nicky with the big CPG firm. That’s where the idea of for RangeMe came out to be, which was helping make this easier or as much of a level playing field as possible for small brands. For me, my passion is helping brands get the most out of our platform, continuing to take their feedback, listening to what’s happening in the industry around us, and then making the platform better every day.

A couple of things. One is I always found it interesting working with a fair amount of brands from Australia that range is a verb there. “We range in these stores or we are trying to range these products.” I have this belief, you are in your rights to call bullshit on this, but I have this belief anecdotally, I don’t have the data to back this up. Nick McCoy, if you are reading, help me out, brother.

Our consumers that we are all trying to achieve are tribalized. We see the tribalization in diet, paleo, keto, and plant-based. We also see tribalization in function, climate action, social justice, and so forth. Retailers are scrambling. They are trying to figure out how to fit all of this demand for specific niche tribalized brands on their shelves. They know they need to have brands that represent diversity. They need to have brands that are climate-friendly.

They need to have brands that meet the needs and wants of their consumers. They have got consumers that want functional products. The hard part is trying to sift through that and identify which ones make the most sense. As a brand, it’s hard to surface to the top and be able to scream out, “Pick me. I’m the one.” First of all, do you buy into that? Secondly, if you do, what role can or does RangeMe play in helping facilitate that connection?

Yeah, I absolutely buy into that. We have seen that on RangeMe as well with the behavior that buyers have on the platform. It’s changed from many years ago when they would come in and browse leisurely or they knew specific brands they were looking for and they’d come in and type the brand name, want to look at their profile, and get more information.

We don’t know what the next big thing is from the consumer standpoint. Let us come in and see what other buyers are doing. It’s been interesting. One of our most engaged with collections that we have on the platform is the trending on RangeMe collection, which shows you as a buyer what other buyers have been looking at and showing interest in. Over the last months, in particular, sustainability has been at the forefront.

As you mentioned, it’s very segmented with now you want diverse and sustainable or you want healthy and sustainable. They rely on the platform for us to surface up those emerging brands. A question that comes up when I talk to brands 101 a lot is, “What small percentage of your platform are brands like myself?” I remind them that it’s over 85% of our platform brands in that 0 to 10 million space were not the platform that a Chobani or a Pepsi would be using.

It’s all for emerging brands. Retailers are relying on us to be able to present in a quick and efficient way the brands that the consumers are looking for, for them to stay on top of. It also helps with the data points that we can collect. That’s why keeping your profile up to date is so important because what we are starting to see more and more of is differentiation among competitors.

CVS is looking for something that Walgreens and Rite Tape don’t have. When they look at your profile and the retailers you are currently working with, you may have an edge if you don’t work with some of their competitors because they want to be the first in that space to carry something like you. When you think of us as consumers, it makes sense.

When I go out to the store, I go out to specific retail stores knowing that they will have an assortment of products that their competitor may not have. If they all have the same thing, then I will go where the price is the lowest and usually that’s the larger chain discount stores. We are trying our best every day to be that quick source of truth. It’s important too that we are always part of the industry and not in isolation.

When we are talking to brands, we say, “Do as much as you can.” If you can have a booth at a trade show and you can make that work with your finances, sure. Go for it. Consider RangeMe as part of the process like you would have a LinkedIn profile. It’s digital. It’s easy to access and it collects data points that make a few clicks. A buyer can surface your brand, which otherwise might take much more effort and be much more expensive.

A couple of questions. One is, can you explain the difference between the premium and the basic RangeMe profile?

Very similar to LinkedIn, the model on RangeMe is you can sign up for free, there’s zero cost involved, and 85% of our brands are on our free platform and user-free service. If you want more bells and whistles, that’s when you can opt-in for our annual subscription, which is RangeMe Premium. It has a couple of key benefits. Number one, you get the ability to be RangeMe verified, and that is you have the bare basics required for retail.

Things like packaging, barcodes, liability insurance, and an EIN number, which to many readers might be, “Everybody has it, but there are tons of brands that come into the platform that don’t.” When you have those, it gives you a green check mark, and no matter what the buyers do on RangeMe, those brands surface first. For a buyer looking at the newest emerging brand, at the very least, they have confidence that the brand has the basics required for retail.

The other big piece and what RangeMe is all about is brand exposure and brand awareness. In an ideal state, every single brand would get purchase orders every day on the platform, but unfortunately, that’s not how the industry works. What we are trying to do is give you as much exposure to as many retailers that fit what you are looking for and carry your products as possible.

One of the benefits of premium is being able to see which retailers have looked at you, how they found you, did they type in certain keywords or was through a submission you did to them, and what products they’ve been looking at. If they spend more time on one particular SKU than others in nowaday’s world of SKU consolidation, it’s good information for you to say, “These 3 out of 5 SKUs I have been getting a lot of time and retail attention. Maybe I need to consolidate and have those three moving forward.” Those are the key benefits that you get as a premium member.

When brands set up their profile, what do you see as the elements that they are missing the most of fully calling out? Where’s the opportunity to improve your profile most apparent?

The first step when you are creating your profile is your brand cover image. That’s where I see about 80% of brands missing key information. The elements that you want to consider there are highlighting your packaging. The buyer can imagine and visualize what that packaging would look like on their brick-and-mortar shelves or their online eCommerce sites, calling out your unique attributes or certifications with logos.

That way the buyer’s looking at it and they can go, “This is a great protein bar. It’s organic, non-GMO, and gluten-free.” It’s also WBENC certified.” In 30 seconds, they have everything they need to know at the baseline level for them to say, “I’m going to reach out to this company and have further conversations.” A lot of that information is also available in your product form, but if a buyer has to go in, look through each product, scroll down, and look at all the questions you have answered, it takes them a lot more time.

That image becomes key. It’s because it’s only for retail buyers, you have got to position that image from a retail buyer perspective, not necessarily a consumer perspective. What’s been interesting for me is over the last few years, those two are starting to come together. Whereas several years ago, you may be a beverage brand that has an image of someone lying in a hammock on your website because for D2C that worked.

Now, consumers are going, “This doesn’t tell me what your product does. Call out the attributes I’m looking for. Are you sustainable? Do you have health and wellness attributes that are more important for me when I’m evaluating other things?” It’s starting to become the same marketing that you do to the consumer that you also want to do to the retail buyer.

I also always encourage brands to think about using the lens of empathy and make sure you are calling out if you believe what you are offering is category accretive. You want to hit on issues that are going to be salient to the buyer. Let’s talk about RangeMe from the buyer’s perspective. As a retail buyer, why am I leaning on RangeMe? What am I doing with the platform? How do I engage with it? What am I seeing? For those founders on the other end understand what it is that the buyer behavior is on the platform.

It’s been interesting too because the behaviors changed so much in the last few years. When we first started, one of the key pieces of RangeMe was helping manage the inbound submissions. When you go to CVS, Publix, or Albertsons, you see, for example, at their new vendor portal, it says, “Create a RangeMe profile.” The thinking there was, you have got tons of different category buyers. Each of them manages special categories or specific categories. When you create your profile and you select your product categories, the buyer, when we help them create their profile, whoever he, she, or they may be, select categories that they manage and only see brands in those categories.

If I’m doing coffee, tea, and cocoa, when I log on to RangeMe, I see the 5,000 brands on the platform in coffee, tea, and cocoa, but I don’t see the other 150,000 brands. I don’t have to walk down endless aisles and hope that every second booth matches my category. I can browse later if I want to on my downtime, which very few buyers have much of these days but mostly, it’s managing and routing everything straight to me

It then became about staying on top of innovation. About a few years ago, kombucha started becoming one of the searches for words by buyers on arrangement. That was around when it was starting to blow up and get into more stores and more brands were coming out with it so buyers can stay on top of innovation. Especially in the last few months, what’s changed a lot has been instead of spending lots of time every day and week browsing, the buyers have been coming to us and saying, “This is what I’m looking for. Put out this open call on your platform, let brands apply to me, and set it for 3 or 4 weeks. Once the application process is finished, we will review the applications and then reach out to the brands.”

A great example of that is the Albertsons Innovation LaunchPad. It started on RangeMe. We had 900 applications. The Albertsons teams didn’t have to go in until the application deadline finished. They then whittled it down to 50 and those 50 brands have been invited to Expo West to meet with those Albertsons’ buyers. That kind of open call, even when you and I first started talking years ago, we did twenty that year. In 2022, we did 480 of those open calls.

Most people think of RangeMe only for retail grocery. Few even really understand the CVS and all of that. What’s the future look like for the platform and what other channels are on it, or do you plan to have on the platform?

You are right. I see a lot of comments going, “If you are not a grocery brand, this isn’t a great platform.” Grocery has always been the most engaged and active. There’s typically more innovation in that segment. In general, we have health and beauty care. Retailers like CVS and Walgreens, but also Altern and Sephora, and more boutique retailers joining as well.

Over the last couple of years, we have expanded the hardline section a lot. You have got Lowe’s. You have got Tractor Supply, Walmart that obviously carries a lot of those products, and we have pet retailers on as well. We cover all imaginable categories. We see more innovation in food and beverage, and now in health and wellness. Near-term and mid-term expansion plans are to continue to grow into different countries.

We launched into the UK months ago, so now we have the likes of Tesco and Asda and the co-op group, which are some of the top grocery chains. They are using us, and we are starting to expand in some other European countries as well. What we are seeing too is retailers from other countries, and you have challenges of getting the product to them, looking at the American market as the key source of innovation.

Also, wanting to get in and get on with some of these brands, and how the brands work their way to be able to get into international markets is another conversation altogether. That’s certainly on our roadmap to continue to offer expansion opportunities. We are doing an event with Walmart Mexico and it’s for brands that either manufacture or assemble their product in Mexico and that’s going to open up opportunities as well.

Here’s another question that I see coming in, explain the relationship between RangeMe and ECRM.

ECRM acquired RangeMe a few years ago now, and I talk about it as, think of me as LinkedIn where it’s digital. It’s 24/7. It’s always around and visible. Think of ECRM events like your job interview where you have that one-on-one time, FaceTime, either virtual or in person with the buyer, and you are able to connect with them and meet with many of them.

Both are different offerings for different stages of your lifecycle. We always talk about it as a funnel. You start on the basic version of RangeMe. If you are willing to take that investment risk of putting $1,200 up a year for premium service, it’s a good way to start. Once you are able to spend more money, consider our ECRM programs where in most cases, over a period of three days, you have preset prescheduled guaranteed meetings with buyers from different retail chains and you get that one-on-one time with them.

Let’s change gears a little bit. Let’s talk about what you are seeing in the marketplace. The one benefit that you have is, you cross over a lot of categories, brands, and retailers, so you have a pretty broad field of vision. What are you seeing that you find that’s interesting or something that maybe is concerning?

To me, cross categorization gives you some trends, but then to your point also some areas of worry. The biggest trend we are seeing is sustainability. There’s no doubt that retailers are going in and they are interested in brands that have some level of sustainable attributes, whether it’s certifications like 1% for the planet of Fairtrade or Rainforest Alliance, or it’s your packaging being sustainable. That’s what’s coming to the forefront.

If a buyer is evaluating two products and they are both similar in the type of product, they are looking for one that has more sustainability than another. Part of why that’s also worrying is there’s a lot of green washing that you see where what is truly sustainable is becoming more and more of a question. If something can be recycled, does that mean that it’s sustainable? What kind of recyclable packaging is it? Is it endlessly recyclable?

You are starting to see a lot of people use terms going, “This can is endlessly recyclable.” If it’s compostable, is it home compostable or city compostable? Does your city have those compost programs? If they don’t, then isn’t it going into the landfill? There’s education required on all sides about what truly is sustainable. That’s one of the things we are seeing and diversity continues to be at the forefront.

That’s another tough one. That’s the reality of the consumer base. That was my point early on as this tribalization or segmentation maybe is a better way to do it. That’s a big change and a big change across everything, including how we fund. Brands are building good strong niches with defendable moats and creating relationships with a narrow segment of the population. Fortunately, we live in a market where a narrow segment of the population is plenty large enough to build a business. The more you resonate with that segment, the less expensive it is to market. In a lot of ways, it makes good sense.

What role can RangeMe play in the storytelling or the connection that maybe brands don’t realize in this? Again, it’s so hard, especially in nowaday’s world and specific to retail where so much of the interaction now is, I call it a drive-by submission. You submit during the category review, which may now be once a year. You don’t hear anything for potentially six months or more. What role or how can RangeMe be another arrow in the quiver of these entrepreneurs as they try to tell the story to the retailer or be found?

It’s such an interesting point for a variety of reasons. You talked about segmentation and one of the things that I feel like I’m seeing a lot is brands wanting to try to get out of their niche markets because they want to continue that growth. On many occasions, jumping too far out of that niche market may not be great if you are not able to do it in a sustainable fashion.

Staying in that niche market is important. On the retail side, what’s been interesting and the role we are trying to play is opening up avenues for brands in retail channels that they may not have thought of from either a brand fit perspective or the consumer perspective. An example of that is some of your dollar chains. We have great partnerships with Dollar General, for example. There are brands that I have spoken to years ago that said, “I would never want my product in a store like that.”

The consumer that you are trying to reach nowadays is looking for your product in a store like that because they are trying to save some money. It may not necessarily always be as black and white as the type of retailer name is not a fit for your brand. We are trying to give opportunities for brands to say, “Consider working with a retailer like this might work out well for you.”

You might find that the margins are better for you. Your same store velocity increases, and it’s not what you might have perceived the shopper to be because shoppers are starting to go to different retailers too. As a consumer, I know myself. I don’t always say, “I’m only going to go to X, Y, or Z retailers.” I sometimes say, “This looks like an interesting retail store. let me see what kind of products they have.”

That’s great advice. The other reality too is that when you are solving a real need or problem and there are passionate people around what they put in or on their body, what they are doing for the planet, or social justice across every socioeconomic group in this country. Sometimes we let our egos get in the way. It seems a lot sexier to be seen our products in Erawans than in Dollar General, but they are 5 Erawans and $11,000 Generals. You could do the math.

It’s thinking about, “Where do I intersect with my shopper? Where are they going to be, and how do I meet them in a way that makes sense for them and me?” That’s great advice. What’s the future looking like? What are you guys thinking about in terms of a roadmap or extension of what RangeMe offers? Are you going to continue to focus on what you have been doing?

We dabbled a little bit in the direct purchasing aspect of things. Independent retailers can now purchase directly. It’s a very small portion of what the platform is. We realize too that there is so much more that we have to get better at and do more work in the focus that we have, which is helping retailers find these brands. Being more specific and focused is the best way over the next few years.

For us, continuing to get more retailers involved is important. Continuing to make it easier for retailers to interact with brands is important. Focusing on those sourcing campaigns has become fantastic because of stats that we don’t typically publish, but maybe should. There were 7,000 applications into those campaigns in 2022 and over 1,500 of them got selected to meet with buyers directly. Many of whom got purchase orders.

Continuing to give brands that opportunity is important for us. On the retail side as well, it’s expanding in a way from our core focus or core categories of the grocery where we do a lot of now, and bringing other retailers in. I use the hardlines example. There are lots of retailers there. We signed up with DICK’S Sporting Goods, a great retailer. We have lots of brands in that category, but staying true to the emerging brand will always be our focus.

We are not a platform that you need to do or use if you are doing $100 million in revenue. We are a platform for emerging brands and helping them get seen will continue to push on the sustainability and diversity parts of things and partnerships. Partnerships are important. I love the Albertsons Innovation LaunchPad for that reason.

Starting on RangeMe, evaluating, and then inviting them to meet at Expo West, which is a great event that New Hope does a fantastic job with. The more we can partner in this industry, I found that it’s always good when you work together because everyone’s trying to do the same thing, which is to help brands get into retailers and grow. It’s better if we do it together than separately.

I’m going to switch gears again because that’s host prerogative. What motivates you every day. What’s the passion behind doing this?

It’s always been talking to emerging brands and helping them to the best of my ability and the best of my knowledge. I feel like I’m learning every day. We are learning every day at RangeMe. We are getting great feedback. It doesn’t always have to be negative or positive. My opinion is feedback is feedback. There is no negative or positive. You take it all in and the industry’s changing all the time.

Trying to continue to iterate while it’s changing, but keep leveling the playing field as best we can for brands is what motivates me. There’s always going to be noise. There are brands that I look at that say, “It hasn’t worked out for me,” and that’s okay. There are also brands that I know have had brand or company-changing experiences through our platform. What continues to motivate me is to give everyone the best possible chance of success with the tools that we have.

I can see why that would get you going. Here’s my next left-field question. You are an entrepreneur. You surround yourself with entrepreneurs every day. You were one of the very first to jump into the RangeMe team. What have you learned in these years about entrepreneurship? What has been a surprising lesson that surrounding yourself with all these entrepreneurs has provided you?

We are going deep and I like it. To me, it’s been community. Early on, my personal approach was I’ve got to put my head down. I’ve got to show that I can handle all of the stress and the changes, the countless late nights and weekend work by myself. What I found that the industry gave me was a sense of community that struggles and challenges are not individual.

We have much more in common than we do apart. The more we can work together as groups and rely on our community for strength, it makes us better people. It also makes us more open to experiences. I’ve had the privilege of living and working on three different continents now. With each change, you take in more of the culture where you’ve lived and you open yourself up more.

The biggest learning that I have had is to be more open to the fact that there is support around you if you make yourself available for that support. You will find that you are able to handle a lot of the stresses of entrepreneurship better in ways. I also think that being more open and vocal about shedding away from the toxic positivity, it’s a term that I’ve been thinking about and researching more it doesn’t always have to be amazing. You don’t always have to be doing great.

It’s interesting. One of the people whom I have got a lot of spiritual learnings from is Ram Dass. One of the things that Ram Dass talked about was the world always living in polarization where we try to counteract, “I am not good enough with I am great or I am not worthy with, I am extremely worthy,” but they are both still polarized points of view.

He encourages everyone to meet in the middle and go, “How about I am.” I am could be, “I am tired and I am not tired. I am good. I am not good, and I am all of it.” Finding that center of you don’t have to always be either side. You can be in the middle and say, “This is me. Some days are great. Some days are not. Some things I do well. Some things I don’t and all of it is encompassing in me.”

First of all, I’m a Ram Dass fan and very much a subscriber to his teachings. I had a similar epiphany several years ago, and it’s why we have been focused for that several years on building community. The entrepreneurial journey is isolating and lonely. I say this all the time, “The only real two constant companions that you have are the two that stand on your shoulder every day, which is fear and doubt.” That’s a tough way to go through the challenges and headwinds of entrepreneurship where the only two people you have got to keep you comfortable are these two little voices in your head of fear and doubt.

Being a part of a community helps you acknowledge and understand that you are not the only one experiencing that. The other huge power to unlock is vulnerability. We do such a shit job of that as a whole, as humans, but certainly as entrepreneurs. We have this incredible veneer. I like it. Toxic positivity is a great way to describe it. We have this veneer that we put on that we are afraid to show vulnerability as it may be misconstrued as weakness.

I see vulnerability as courage to strength. I see when you are involved in a community in which you can be vulnerable, that’s where the greatest learnings, growth, opportunities, collaboration, and all of that takes place. It takes place leaning in. I spend a big part of my career. I’m a lot older than you are, in the corporate world, where vulnerability is forbidden, and so is intuition.

For me, what I had to relearn or maybe connect with was that vulnerability is one of the great ways to identify if I’m doing something right, if I feel the ground beneath me is less stable, is less predictable, and if I feel uncertain, that’s usually the right place to be. If I feel completely comfortable and confident, that’s usually complacency. It’s interesting. Community is, all of you who are reading, if you are an entrepreneur who isn’t a part of something bigger than yourself, another group of entrepreneurs, don’t let that continue, please.

In a non-intended self-promoted way, our community here at TIG is meant to support you, but there are plenty of others from startups and CPG to the networks to SKU. Be a part of something, even if it’s five other entrepreneurial friends that you hang out with once a month and can call. Don’t do this by yourself. Let me ask this question for you. A lot of conversation going on about what’s happening in retail.

When we were at the height of the pandemic, things slowed for new item placement, and innovation kind of ground to a halt. The shelves were focus of the retailers was to keep shelves stocked. Are you seeing from RangeMe’s perspective, a resurgence in buyer activity, buyer interest in new products, and bringing new things in? What’s the pulse feel like to you?

It’s exciting to see that because the first couple of years of the pandemic ground everything to a halt as you said. We are seeing a big resurgence. We are seeing retailers now wanting to focus on that skew differentiation and carry different types of innovative products that their competitors are not because people are getting back out there. they want to attract more customers there.

It’s been exciting for us to see because we are getting back to that ability of innovative new brands to get found and to grow, like you said well, which came to such a grinding halt in the first couple of years of the pandemic. We are seeing a lot of heightened by activity again. A lot more of those open calls of those sourcing campaigns on the platform and different types of retailers looking for innovation, where we typically have not worked with them from an innovation standpoint, and they’ve stuck to more of their core.

They are starting to expand out of that and bring in other types of products, and they are looking for emerging brands. One of the things we get a lot of, and one of the most widely used filters is not carried by other major retailers. They are able to look at brands that might be new again, and may not going back to that point, may not be with competitors of theirs so that they can be first to market.

Here’s another question that came in. One of the things that we are doing with a lot of our brands is that we have them work through a process of establishing a growth hypothesis, which is bottoms up look at where they believe the business can be in five years based on underlying assumptions from pricing to cogs to promotion to marketing.

One of the things that we’ve challenged a lot of our early-stage brands is to rethink that, to think about, “What would that look like if you put profit before growth, and you put cash before everything? What’s the fastest path to profitability?” In doing so, what some of our brands have recognized is to curate a smaller number of stores or to be hyper-regional focused where they can penetrate multiple channels, omnichannel in a specific geographic radius, and so forth. If I’m a brand trying to accomplish those types of things, how do I think or look differently with RangeMe, or how can RangeMe, if possible, help me do that?

We are certainly seeing that on the buyer side as well, where a lot of those open calls are mentioned are specific to certain states. Hy-Vee’s program, where they call it the Best of Local, is such a great example. They only want submissions from certain states. That’s a smart approach for the brand side of things as well, which is to think more about your same-store velocity and think less about the number of doors that you are necessarily in.

With the regional filters that we have on our platform, you are able to get seen by buyers that are specifically looking for your region, whether it’s a combination of states or state-specific. Those campaigns are always going to have those regional elements in there as well. Very few, less than 2% of the campaigns we do are open calls for the entire country to apply. One of those examples is Walmart Open call, where as long as you are made in the USA and get fit, the very high requirements they have, you are fine to apply, but most of them are what state are you manufactured in? It’s usually regional too, where those stores have their biggest movement and their biggest presence.

That excites me. There were some chains that struggled with that, but there’s a real opportunity and a more capital-efficient way to build your brand, rethinking that, thinking about not having to grow as fast, not having to be ubiquitous, and not having to serve such a large geography from your time working elsewhere. One of the things that I always find intriguing when I’m working with a brand from Australia, they look at the US market. They look at California as almost twice the population of Australia.

They’re happy if they could control California, and have a good market share in California and the Pacific Northwest. We here, tend to immediately think about being national by Thursday and that’s a risk and disservice. I also think there’s a lot of opportunity to look for alternative channels. One question that came in here and I want to make sure to get to is about eTailers. Are many of those like Thrive and Grove, Gopuff, and others using your platform?

They are, and Thrive, in particular, has been one of our longest-standing partners, and I’m a customer of theirs, so the curation they have is second to none in my opinion. We are seeing a lot more eTailers use the platform. We are also seeing a lot of non-traditional retails. We have hotels now and airlines starting to use us as well. We have always had this approach of anyone that carries consumer package or good products should be using our platform to find them because they could end up being good relationships for these brands.

One of the things you always talk about is cashflow, and sometimes these non-traditional retailers are quick to give you the purchase order, quick to pay you out at a healthy margin, and you have to be open. That goes back to the openness of being open to opportunities. That doesn’t mean going out to every opportunity, but being a little more open where many years ago I would hear brands say, “I only want to be in Whole Foods as products or Erewhon,” like you said, as that example, but being a little more open to going, “Maybe retailer ABC is also a pretty good fit with what I’m looking for and fits my financial model and my growth model.

One of the things that we try to share and encourage is for entrepreneurs to think about the way to go to market differently. We put it in channels because those are neat constructs. We put it in natural, specialty, conventional, mass, club, or eCommerce. That’s not how shoppers think or shop. We get up and go buy things. What I’d rather see entrepreneurs do is think about it more on a continuum.

There are two activities that shoppers do. They discover new products and replenish the products that they know and use every day. They do that both in the physical and digital planes. That’s it. You can rush to this. Think of it like a parade. If you are at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade in New York, you don’t want to go to the corner that everybody else is at because you will be ten rows back and you won’t see anything except the top of the person’s head in front of you.

You want to find that side street, that alleyway, or that intersection where maybe you can get a much better view of what’s happening in front of you. That’s the opportunity for entrepreneurs. Sometimes that means thinking about going somewhere else first or focusing somewhere else in terms of outlet retail or even where you are going to intersect with that customer along that continuum. That’s great coaching. Too many of the entrepreneurs rush to the same shelves and then either lament that they can’t get on it because everybody’s trying, so their buyers are awash with the same emerging brand or if they do get on it, they can’t stand out or it’s monetized that it’s so expensive.

I love looking for a non-traditional outlet. We got a couple of minutes late and by the way, everybody, Vir is spending his day off hanging with us. That is either dedication or stupidity, maybe a little bit of both, but we want to make sure we can free him up to go, and enjoy the rest of this beautiful winter day here. Vir, if people want to learn more about RangeMe, if they want to have a conversation with you or someone on the team, what’s the best way for them to do that?

I’m always open to them contacting me directly and my email address for them is easy to spell. It’s [email protected]. I encourage them to connect with me on LinkedIn and reach out to me personally. I’m always happy to get on a call, review their profile with them, and give them my humble opinion about what changes they can make to their brand page to help them stand out more.

My friend, that brings us to the end. Thanks so much for joining, and thank you, everybody, for being a part of this episode, and we will catch you next time.

Thanks. Take care.

Important Links

• RangeMe

• New Hope

• TIG Collective

• Women on Boards

• JEDI Collaborative

• TIG Venture Community

• DICK’S Sporting Goods

• Albertsons Innovation LaunchPad

• Thrive

• [email protected]

• LinkedIn – Vir Satyan

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