The COVID-19 pandemic has forced so many stores to close. For those selling products out there, this means fewer places we can sell in and have the necessary visibility to put our brands out there. It is time that we get down to the stores themselves and help find ways we can help stores thrive, and ultimately ourselves, in this tough environment. With a team who are in the trenches day in and day out, Will Ahearn, the President and Co-founder of Dirty Hands, has a bird’s eye view of what is happening at the store-level. In this episode, he joins Elliot Begoun to talk about the things that he is seeing out there right now, providing insights and tips on what brands can do and not do and what to expect. He then discusses what you should be looking for in terms of a merchandising strategy in a store. Plus, Elliot also gives us a look into what Dirty Hands can help you with—a hand to hold in this pandemic.
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What Can Brands Do And Not Do From A Store-Level Perspective With Will Ahearn
A quick founder shout-out. I’ve been talking about this brand for years. I’ve been involved with them for a long time. It’s The Good Crisp Company. They continue to innovate even in these crazy times to figure out ways to do things differently. They’ve launched their new line of cheese balls. Cheese balls in a canister like their beloved chips in a canister. These are the better-for-you offering of what’s out there. It’s a great branding, great product and a lot of other benefits.
It’s a brand that’s doing many things right, being a tardigrade, being smart and metered with their growth, focused on deeper penetration in the accounts they’re in and executing well before expanding wildly. It’s paid off. I would encourage you to reach out to any member of their team, Matt Parry, Steve Wangler and Alex Hanifin. They’re all great resources and super generous. It’s a good all-around brand. You can learn more at TheGoodCrispCompany.com. I wanted to call them out and give them a shout-out. That’s my shout-out for this episode.
Joining me is a member of what we affectionately call the Natural Products Mafia. A group of us coalesced right after Expo 2020 was canceled, right at the set point of all this craziness. We came together as supporters, advisors, and service providers in this industry to make sure that we were getting the best and most important information, two, supporting each other during these unknown times and three, supporting all of you.
Will Ahearn has been a part of that. From the beginning, we get together casually via Zoom every other Friday and talk about all the stuff that’s going on. I asked Will if he can jump on one of these episodes to give everyone some perspective in terms of what’s it like out in the stores. What’s going on? What can brands do? What can brands expect? What should brands not be doing? There’s no better person in my mind that has got a team in the trenches day in and day out who is getting a bird’s-eye view of what’s happening at store level. Will, thanks for joining. I’m glad to have you. Let everyone know a little bit about you and then we’ll jump in.
It’s my pleasure. Also, shout-out to Steve Wangler, one of the first brand contacts back in the early Dirty Hands days and a true partner back in his days at KeVita. He’s one of the lovely guys you see every now and then. On that note, I’m Will Ahearn, the President and Cofounder of Dirty Hands. We are an in-store support group who’s made the transition to make headquarter calls. I have a few other things up our sleeve coming as far as ways in which to help brands grow. Our ultimate purpose is helping people and brands realize their full potential.
I’m excited to chat. We’ve got teams across the country that walk into grocery stores every day, get a sense of how things are going, and try to immerse themselves in the stores they walk into. That allows them to engage with the people who work there, who are living some of the struggles and the challenges that exist in the days we’re in. I’m happy to pass some of that along.
What’s the origin story? Why did you decide to do this?
We’ve done a bad job telling that origin story. My dad worked for ONE Coconut back in the day. It was the coconut water. He saw value when his teams at store level showed up at Whole Foods, offered support and were present to help the stores achieve their goals, whether that was a reset or short-staffed day. When he grew, he focused his team on going into Whole Foods.
With that in mind, he saw an opening in the market where there were a lot of people he had worked with who were advising brands, but no one was getting into the trade and helping to make sure the product was on the shelf, priced right and out of the backroom. It’s basic things that we all expect to happen every day in a grocery store that sometimes and often doesn’t happen.
He convinced me to come home and work on this ONE brand thing. It sounds very crunchy but honest to God, it was the truth. I was finishing up school in DC. I was baking granola for a woman who had a small granola business out of her basement in Washington, DC. I fell in love with this idea of doing work that mattered, helping this small brand get to more people and share this amazing product with more folks.
He convinced me to come home. I started seeing stores with two days of training where he was like, “Go in there and figure it out. Do this and try that.” Sooner or later, the lesson I learned was that when you spend enough time at the store level, you begin to see how everything works, see the gaps and see that product sometimes doesn’t make it out of the background or that grocery stores operate on such thin margins that they’re never overstaffed or very rarely are they overstaffed. They’re always slightly understaffed. If somebody is calling out or not working hard, there’s extra work to be done.
I got going and eventually needed some help. By being present, I ran into a lot of people who had products that weren’t on the shelf and who realized that they were missing sales because the product was sitting in the backroom or the sales tag went missing. No one was there to say, “We’ve got to get this on the shelf.” I ran into a lot of people who also needed the help and eventually said, “We need to hire some folks.” We stole a guy at Whole Foods who was awesome. His name is Ninon. Shout-out to Ninon Phillip, who is still with us working in New York. Anybody who’s ever dealt with the independent team in New York knows that Ninon is a positive, upbeat guy. He gave us credibility in the market. He was the first one to say, “I trust these people and these people understand the right ways to build partnerships and grow brands.”
Store Brands: When you’re building out a business, what you want and ultimately need is buy-in. Even more so with family because you don’t shut it off.
After Ninon, I brought in my brother-in-law, sister and eventually, my older brother. We started growing from region to region in Whole Foods. We went to the North Atlantic after the Northeast, then to Northern California, Southern Pacific, Mid-Atlantic. The origins are all of us within the family doing the work. We were the ones who were visiting stores, building relationships, showing up for resets and doing the work that we ask all of our people at the store level to do daily.
For us, it gave us this visibility until it’s tough. It’s long days, manual labor and keeping track of a lot of different things. That allows us to bring a perspective that’s maybe not shared among distributors or other folks out there who see the lowest man on the totem pole as somebody who just needs to get up and do their job. We want our people to love where they work and to feel like they’re a part of a community that supports them. That’s a big differentiator between us and others out there.
I’m glad I asked that question because you don’t talk about it enough. It is a cool story. It’ll jump into my second question and then we’ll get more into the specifics of this episode. It’s about that entrepreneurial journey where you solve the problem that existed in the marketplace. It started close to home and then it expanded out. You’ve been doing this for a while. You find yourself not only as an entrepreneur leading a fairly big business but also as a leader. What did you learn? What do you wish you could have told yourself back then coming out of this that you’ve learned the hard way and that every entrepreneur here reading should understand?
There’s a lot. Leading a business, especially when it’s your family is tough. One of the lessons I’ve learned is setting expectations from the get-go. Early on, there were situations where I didn’t handle the family dynamics well. Although I was here first and pushing things forward, I was not the kind of leader that said, “What do you think about this? Are you okay getting up in the middle of the night to go do a reset?” It was more of, “I need you to do this.” When you’re building out a business, what you want and ultimately need is buy-in. With family, even more so because you don’t shut it off. You go to Christmas. Those events or those moments that you maybe didn’t handle the right way can fall off you.
That leads me to the other point. You’ve got to have a short-term memory. You can’t be dwelling on the mistakes you’ve made or the trouble that you got yourself into. You need to recognize it, move on and not be afraid of making the wrong decision. I don’t think any decision is ever perfect and I don’t think any decisions were made without a lesson attached to it. I’m always the one who’s like, “Let’s go. We’ll figure it out.” We’ll learn from whatever we decide to do.
I’m a big fan of imperfect action over inaction. Know that everything you do, no matter how planful you are and how much you think through, shit happens. It’s not always going to work but you’re always going to learn. Be open to that and understand that every interaction that you’re having is a learning opportunity. As long as you’re receptive to that and you look for the lessons, there is no downside because education will make you make better decisions the next time.
You could sit and write out every possible scenario and rarely will it happen the way you think. You’re either sitting there waiting for things to be perfect or you’re just going. We, as an organization, have always been one who said, “It won’t be perfect when we start. We will probably mess up, but we’ll get it right eventually and it will build.”
Let’s dive in. Let’s start at the high-level macro. I know you’ve talked to your team because you talk to your team all the time. For those reading, what’s going on in the stores? What are their challenges? What opportunities exist? Give us your team’s perspective as to what life’s like out there.
Shout-out to everybody out there doing the work. There’s so much to learn and so much to glean from the reality of what is now. I did post a question. It’s not post-COVID. That was the original hope. We’ve been at it and we’ve been through these waves. How are teams feeling? What are the challenges we’re seeing? A lot of it came down to shortages of labor across the whole chain. It’s grocery stores who can’t staff up or can’t retain people. It’s distributors who don’t have drivers. It’s manufacturers who can’t produce because they can’t hire people.
The market out there isn’t supportive of employment. They’re not forcing people to look at how they get back to work. It’s understandable. Part of me looks at the environment that is COVID and the unknowns in grocery stores that are a place where people are still going regularly. I can understand the stress and mental anguish that comes with spending your days in that store. Regardless, it creates challenges at the store level and sucks the energy and the passion out of those who still remain in many cases.
We, as an organization, look at this as a problem but also as an opportunity to inject that positivity, show up, lend a hand, be helpful, buy somebody coffee and ask them about how they’re doing. Don’t just say, “This is what I need.” It’s a moment for deeper partnerships. That’s what we’ve always done. Especially during the COVID era, we’ve done our best to allocate more time to help because ultimately, if the staff is tired, unmotivated or don’t have enough time in the day to get through all that they need to do, something goes undone. If we can be there to take our load, support our brands and extend the hand beyond, we’re at least doing what we can to help the store succeed, which sometimes we all forget is an important piece of this equation. If stores closed down, it’s less stores for us to sell products out of.
Ultimately, at the end of the day, we’re all in the real estate business. Those linear feet of space represent our opportunity to leverage the best. We all have a role in it. The store has a role in it, but it’s our collective job to make sure we’ve optimized every opportunity to capture as much as we possibly can.
I’m going to take some of these questions that have come in and I’m going to push them together because there are lots of similarities. One is around the timing of resets and the scope of resets. The resets seem to be going slower and the resets that are happening are much smaller in scale in terms of the amount of new products and new SKUs being brought in. There’s a lot of questions like, “Am I alone in this?” what is your team seeing out there?
Our business is broken to a couple of different pieces. We got Whole Foods. We have service in Sprouts and the independents, which are mom-and-pop retailers, plus offerings on the growth services side. In Whole Foods, I love the place but they’ve never been in great at resets. They also rely on third-party labor through SAS who’s having an equally difficult time hiring, retaining, and getting people to the store. They had a hard time before COVID.
Those never happen as quickly as we’d like, but I’m not sure if it’s changed all that much. With the independents, you did hit the nail on the head. People are swapping less stuff in and out. When they are on the resets, they’ve got to focus on what they have right in front of them. Resets are a changeup and an intensive process to make sure that everything that’s supposed to be there is. It’s a lot.
It’s having some flexibility, checking in with those retailers and getting an understanding of, “Is it a refresh? Is that a small update? Are we kicking the can down the road until 2022? How can we help? How do we support you and your stores? If you need people to help come to do resets, let us know. We can show up and help.” That offer goes quite a long way, especially for some of these mom-and-pop stores who don’t have enough help.
Store Brands: The market out there isn’t supportive of employment. They’re not forcing people to look at how they get back to work.
We’re seeing a lot more along the lines of a post-holiday refresh, SKU adjustments, and things are moving slower. For all those asking, “Is it just me?” No, I promise you it’s not. Every brand from big to small will tell you, for the most part, they’re aggravated by the pace of things, by the speed of change and by the access they don’t have to collaborative conversations with their category managers.
There’s a lot of what I’m calling drive-by submission. “Send me a one-pager, fill out a new product form and we’ll let you know if you’re in or out. If we let you know you’re in, maybe 6 to 9 months from now too.” It’s not easy. Another question here. I definitely have a take on this, but I’ll go after you. The question is around, “I’ve got this challenge. The investors that are interested in investing told me I need to show more traction to get the investment, but I need the investment to get the traction. How do I leverage a resource like Dirty Hands to help me get that kind of traction in order to be more attractive or better position myself for investment?”
I break it down into a few things. The first is to choose the area that you have the easiest access to, that you yourself can help influence. If you’re a brand who’s in Northern California, New York City may not be the place you want to go. If you’re a brand in Northern California, look at somebody like Dirty Hands in Northern California.
My mindset is to build the success story in a small place that says, “Here’s proof that if I do this and this, if I show up in the mornings to pack cases three days a week, if I do demos on Saturday and Sunday, if I put IRCs on, this is the change in volume.” Break it down to a three-step process that you can help influence. You can hire somebody like Dirty Hands. We are great at telling your story and spreading the word but your passion as a founder is something that’s contagious.
To pair with Dirty Hands, we have the relationships. We make the introduction to you as founder and you then make the pitch. If you show up on a regular basis and you just focus on a few of the things you know will help prove that your product sells, then you’re able to take that success story and say, “I want to replicate this recipe in these places from beyond here. This is what history shows me works.” I can give a much better way of making use of your dollars and a partner like Dirty Hands but not overstretching yourself and forcing yourself into a hole.
I’m super aligned with that. One of the challenges is what I call the founder’s conundrum. The conundrum being investors want to see traction before they invest and in order to get traction, you need investment. That’s the ultimate conundrum. Founders make mistakes by allowing the investors to define what that traction means instead of building a case study to prove to them that traction is there to be had, but it needs the money behind it.
If you’ve got money to do this in 5, 50, or 500 stores, what you do in my mind, my recommendation and the way a tardigrade would do it is that you go in and you build a case. You go in and you execute. You take all of the arrows instead of trying to diffuse what little dollars you have across all the stores that you’re serving.
Let’s say you’re in 250 stores. You’re small and growing, but you can’t take all of your tools to 250 stores, so you wind up being diffused in your efforts in 250 stores. That’s going to do very little to build traction for an investor, but if you go to an investor and say, “I don’t have the money. I have 250 stores. I concentrated on the ten that I had the money to do. These are the things that I did. I spent $1,000 to store inactivation. Here are the velocities in those ten stores compared to the remaining 240. I’m confident that if I replicate this in the remaining 240 stores and the next 240 after that, those are the results I can see. I’m asking you to invest in me to be able to do that.” That is traction.
You can show a discernible difference, plus you’re going to learn in those ten stores what works, what doesn’t work and what happened. You have to change the narrative and the conversation. You can’t allow yourself to be held hostage by somebody else’s definition of traction. You have to define traction. You have to build a case study. It’s got to be provable, scalable and realistic because you can’t go out and spend $10,000 a store and do all kinds of crazy things. That’s not going to be scalable. You have to build a model to do it. Using a team like Dirty Hands in a region or something along those lines makes a lot of sense as you get to that size.
It’s the partner effect. 1 plus 1 is 3. It’s not just like, “Hire Dirty Hands so I can go do these other things.” It’s like, “Work with Dirty Hands in this place to prove this story, get people excited and share the founder passion that’s behind the brand.” That is a great way to look at it and not like, “They’re going to do this so I can pull my hands off and I’ll round up with them every couple of months to ask how it’s going.” Be engaged and involved. That’s where you see the biggest return for the investment.
Here’s a cool question. I don’t know if you have any numbers on this. I’m curious about a reasonable expectation in terms of velocity lift or performance for merchandising support versus lack thereof. Do you have an indicative average? What do you see for those who invest in merchandising versus don’t?
It is a tough question to answer, one that we get pretty often. I typically say 20% to 30%. Although people register, the reality of what retail is, it’s an up and down. You’re selling well, you go on sale and then you come off sale. Someone loses a tag and you fall off shelf. You hope that over time, the ebbs and the flows lead positively. All the things that happened at store level, products sitting in the back, spoiling out, distributor issues, wrong pricing, competitors coming by and moving you out of the way. You hope that over time, things trend up.
The reality with Dirty Hands is that what we do is make sure that there’s a constant trend up. If you’re a beverage and you get into the cold box, you’re not just there for five days and then you disappear because somebody comes in and pushes you out. You can be guaranteed that your state of the market will only increase positively because we’re there as often as we are. It’s hard to quantify life without Dirty Hands but recognize that when you don’t have visibility at the store level, you’re trying to use, in many cases, one-dimensional data to highlight your opportunities.
The visibility that we bring is equally valuable because, similar to figuring out the recipe, you can look at what’s working in your top stores. You can recognize where you’re doing the most sales volume and then look at the shelf and say, “What is it about this store that is leading to the success that I’m having?” Those levels of depth that come with our relationship and the consistency that comes with it, make sure that that growth is you’re not getting high and then low and having to start all over. Your only way is working up.
Store Brands: Spread your wings. Don’t focus on the person who you know is going to buy your product. Focus on everybody who potentially could at the very least be a spokesperson for your brand.
First of all, it’s always going to be different by category. The more impulsive you are, the more directly correlated it can be. I’m not just saying this because Will’s on and he’s a buddy. The syndicated data that we deal with is always in arrears. We’re getting that data after the fact that we can affect change. First of all, for every founder, you should be in at least 4 or 5 of the stores. Even if you’re not in that store selling, you need to build relationships with people at the store level to understand stores and what works. Think through little things that you wouldn’t normally think on the radar, like packing out and what makes sense from a case configuration. Knowing what they’re going through in the store is going to make you a more informed founder. Build a relationship with your stores.
My kids are all grown, but I remember they used to hate going to the grocery store with me because it was an all-day adventure. I’d wind up talking to people in the back room and to the store director. Getting people to take their tails on guns, scan the UPC and tell me what’s moving on the shelf. You learn so much. The benefit of having your products touched, looked at and seeing what’s going on is that data is now and then you can quickly understand if there is an issue. This business is hard as hell, but it becomes a little bit easier when you’re managing to the exceptions versus trying to manage everything. That’s all you do.
It becomes easier when the people at store level know you and your brand. You don’t have to show up every single day to make sure it’s on the shelf. They want to support you because of who you are, the passion you bring, the stories you tell them and the value you bring to the relationship. It’s not always just sales. It’s not always just selling the most.
Retailers look at it and say, “I want to be the place that launched this brand. I want to be Elliot’s first customer. I want Elliot to win so I’m going to do what I can to support him.” That’s a powerful piece because then, all of a sudden, you have access to somebody who tells you what’s working and what’s not. This flavor is selling. This flavor is not. You got feedback that this one was spoiled and this one’s not. You got issues with your distributor ordering products I’m not getting. Sooner or later, you have somebody who can alert you when things are not working.
I always look at it and say, “It’s the time you spend at store level talking to people about your product.” Cashiers are talking to every single customer who’s walking through the store. Talk to them, get them excited and give them a sample. The more you do that, the more you have an army of people who are excited about your brand and recognize your product as more than just an SKU on the shelf. “It’s Elliott’s SKU on the shelf, and I like Elliot, so I’m going to make sure I help Elliot win.”
Don’t forget that the employees in these stores are also your shoppers. In fact, especially in our channel in the natural space, that’s where they shop. They’re shopping there on their breaks and before they go home. You can solve a lot of your velocity problems if you build a relationship and connect with the majority of the employees in the store. It’s not bad transactionally either to be well-known and be a product that they prefer.
We have a brand that launched in Whole Foods. It’s an energy drink. It was like, “I want the product in everybody’s hands because if I can turn a consumer who works in the store into a daily customer, I’m winning.” It is a valuable piece to remember. Often, they’re getting discounts so they’re not paying for Whole Foods’ prices. They’re getting some money off.
They become ambassadors in the store. They set the baseline for it. They’re fickle too. If you’re not doing it, your competitor is or somebody else is doing it. It doesn’t take much. Here’s a cool question too. In general, some basic good ground rules I want to know for smart merchandising. What should I be looking for as I think through a merchandising strategy in a store? Let’s talk about the center store and perimeter and then we’ll talk cold box. It’s all slightly different.
In merchandising, the first piece that we go after are voids. If you don’t have your full line on the shelf, you’re missing out. Sometimes that’s the easiest way, especially if two of your SKUs are selling and you’re trying to get that third one in. Looking at the distribution as the first piece to tackle is super important. Maximizing your placements so thinking about, “Can I put this somewhere else in the store? Can I get more eyes on it?”
If you’re a hot sauce and you’re within the hot sauce set, top shelf, left one facing each, you have a small portion of people who are walking in the stores who are eyeing your product. If you could get that hot sauce off the shelf, on the meat counter or by the specialty sauces, then all of a sudden, you have more people looking at the product daily. Our job is to increase those eyes and interactions.
Placements, how many points in distribution around the store are there that are important? The last two are the space that you own. Are you one facing each? Are you multiple facings? Do you have a bit of a brand block that builds credibility? I looked at a shelf and I said, “This must be a good product given how many faces it has.”
The last one I mentioned too is position. The top shelf and bottom shelf are dead zones. If you can get off those, do whatever you can because you have more people who are interacting or feeling comfortable reaching for it. That stretch where they’re like, “Can you help grab this for me?” It’s a barrier to somebody buying products.
One of the things we talked about is knowing your noes. Some of those things are when you should say no to a retailer. If you’re going to be on the bottom shelf or the top shelf, you’re going to be stuck in the well of a cooler or anything along those lines, be comfortable enough to say no because you’re setting yourself up for failure. You have a merchandising strategy about where you need to be to succeed, what’s the minimum number of SKUs or facings you have to succeed, where are those secondary placements and off-shelf opportunities that you want to try to go and get. You might have to earn them. It might take time. You might have to buy them.
You should know what that plan is and recognize it. Consumers are making three feet of assessment in about three seconds. Grocery stores are built because we are habitual creatures. If you were to close your eyes, any of you reading and think about the last time you went to the grocery store. I’m convinced you can envision the route that you take, which way you entered the store and how you worked your way around.
There’s a reason that produce is on one side, bakery is on the other and dairies on the back wall. That’s not the fact that they all just did that. There’s a method behind the madness about guiding you through and making sure that they optimize the opportunities to do it. Driving trial and discovery in the center of the store can be so difficult, especially depending on your category if it’s not a heavily shopped aisle.
I think of cross-merchandising opportunities as well. If you’re a pasta, look for the sauce. If you’re a baking good, look for flour or milk. When you’re in grocery stores and you recognize the flow, you get a sense of what’s coming on sale and how quickly it’s moving. A lot of grocery stores get allocations. When those allocations are in drive, there’s opportunity. Sometimes if you’re a center store brand and you’re present or you have relationships in certain stores, you can find yourself on some of those off-shelf opportunities a lot easier, but you got to be present.
That’s an important thing. It’s not like it used to be, but there is still store-level latitude to some degree. I’m a believer in getting your hand slapped every once in a while by trying to affect some change at the store level that comes back and bites you. It’s okay because you throw up your arms and say, “I’m sorry. My team’s too aggressive. They just want to help you sell as much product as possible.” It’s not such a bad way to apologize.
It’s looking for the yes. You never want to go into stores to rearrange shelves and have somebody walk in and be like, “Don’t do that.” It’s a surefire way to get tossed out but if you get somebody to say, “Sure, go for it. Do your thing,” then sure. That’s our mentality. You got to get an okay from somebody, but that okay is not. You respect the feedback that you get. If somebody says, “That’s not okay. We need you to hold on to those activities,” we’re there to support our brands and our retailers. We can’t do that if we’re kicked out of stores. First and foremost, we got to play within the boundaries.
The other thing is that in my experience, you don’t want to be disparaging or penalize any other brand unnecessarily. You do what’s best for the store, the product and ultimately for the consumer. Look at it that way. In the old days, this business was built more on DSD. Everything was in the trenches. I remember when I started my career. We would go in and pull our competitor off the shelf in a cart and roll the cart into the backroom and then take their spaces, put a tag up and run out the door. We would do that store after store. We’d come back in two days later and all of our shit would be off the shelf and theirs would be on the shelf. That was the game that was played. That’s part of the reason where there are unified schematics and so forth so that there isn’t that opportunity.
That’s what it was when you started. It’s funny, I was looking through old emails and I saw the first email my dad ever sent me about servicing a store. There was a section that was dedicated to, “If somebody screws you over, this is how you handle it.” Fight back. Have the confrontation. Recognize like, “I’ll stop if you stop,” and then you move on. It was a specific call-out on how to handle stores. “Be ready for somebody to try to screw you up because that’s the way the game is played.”
I go store to store in my Reliant K car, which is a company car. It’s the worst car ever made. The horn was on the turn signal. That’s all we do all day long, just go in and fight trench warfare. There’s a cool question here. What are you seeing that the brands are doing that is out of the box, innovative, some best practices, some suggestions that those reading could think of to differentiate the way they show up?
The one that stands out to me and is on everybody’s mind is Mid-Day Squares. Their presence is out there. They’re loud and in your face. I don’t think that’s everybody’s personality but there are ways in which to tell a story that excites people and gets them interested in what you have to do. In some cases, it’s the roar in your face. In other cases, it’s just a story.
Store Brands: To all the founders out there, make sure that you’re focused on who you’re welcoming into your organization.
Whole Foods put out a story about their people. It was quiet and humbling. It was why work in Whole Foods. Those kinds of stories, if you could pluck the heartstrings, get people emotionally attached to the brand through things like LinkedIn and social media, you can drive trial to the stores and get people excited about it before you can get back there and demo the way that people want to be demoing. That’s nothing new.
Demoing is an art form that’s been around for a while and has been paused if you can get in stores. I’ve seen great brands that are demoing these customers and the Amazon Prime shoppers and the people who work in the grocery stores. When you go back, recognize that everybody is a potential customer. Spread your wings. Don’t just focus on the person who you know is going to buy your product. Focus on everybody who potentially could, at the very least, be a spokesperson for your brand.
Are you collaborating between brands in terms of merchandising and in-store execution where adjacent brands are working together?
Yes. A buddy of mine is putting together something that’s called The Region Coalition. The guy who worked at Dirty Hands early was one of our first brand partners. He’s looking at brands that are focused on regenerative agriculture and bringing them together as a coalition to approach retailers to say, “This is a wave that’s coming. This will soon be a hot word within the industry, within the grocery world in general. Let’s work together to get you an end cap of these products, work with you to help tell that story, help educate the people at the store level and be one of the places that get this movement off the ground in a big way.” That’s a pretty interesting idea, aligning more on the cutting-edge missions and approaching retailers with hopes of using them as the launching pad.
We see that with the Upcycled Food Association too. We’re trying to do a bit of that at TIG Brands, too. Everyone reading, it’s hard. I get it but retailers still want and need innovative new brands. They know that they need that. Time is tough for them when they’re trying to keep employees employed in the stores, things on the shelf, people come and all of those things. Their eyes are off the ball a little bit. They want and need new products, innovation, support exists and building that relationship.
There are a couple of things that I’ve seen that I like to answer the question, one is going back to leveraging and motivating the in-store employees. A couple of successful things have been breakroom parties. It’s bringing product and employee coupons to the store directors to put in the breakrooms that say, “Thank you for being on the front lines. We appreciate you being out there. Here are some complimentary products and coupons.” It does a lot for goodwill. It does a lot to drive trial. It’s surprising.
IRCs still work. I will tell you this one even though this is public. I’m going to get a lot of shit for this, but sometimes guerilla IRCs work where you have IRC on your product. Put your sticker in an adjacent product that is, for example, flour and milk. There’s nothing wrong with, “I happen to drop an IRC on this half-gallon of OB milk.” Things like that still happen to the store level if you’re out there. My coaching would be to use the filter that isn’t in the consumer’s best interest in the store. If it’s only self-serving, don’t do it but if it’s going to enhance some other brands’ opportunity for a new trial, do it.
The other one that we’ve experimented with a few brands is geotargeting some key stores, doing direct mail pieces to them, and inviting them in the store to taste. It’s an eye switch. It’s a different way to catch people that are being bombarded by digital and so forth. It’s showing up differently. It’s being different. What about don’t? What are brands blowing it at the store level?
It’s being a jerk. At this time, there’s a lot of work to go around and a lot of stress. For us, the hardest part of COVID was the mental anguish. Having to manage childcare and people waking up feeling like, “I’m burnt out, tired, stressed and nervous. My parents don’t want me to go to these stores.” For us, even though we feel like we’re out of the thick of things, we need to recognize that it’s still a difficult place to be at this point in time.
Bringing positivity whenever you can, showing up and saying, “How do I bring value?” It’s not, “How do I get something out of this?” As salespeople, we will look at store-level visits as things we have to do. It’s taking up our time versus, “How do I show up and bring a little value so someone associates what I’ve done today with my product?” That remains the biggest problem maker for brands having either the founders, the owners or people they hire who show up and say, “I’m being judged on how well I do these things. I’m going to do them regardless if it’s good for anybody else.”
Those are all good points. The other thing is to remember your role in this. To me, at the end of the day, it’s understanding that the grocery business is ultimately a real estate business. Their job and effort are to drive as much gross profit per linear foot as possible. You have to participate in that. We got time for one more. Ryan is asking one, “At what point in a brand’s lifecycle is Dirty Hands interested in partnering with them? Does that differ between categories, like mature and innovative? How much placement or traction do you look for in new brands before the team is interested in partnering with them?”
We started as merchandising and have built out. We got to a certain point where we looked at some of the problems that some of our own employees or some of our brand friends were having with their support system at the headquarters. We hired a guy, Ki Saunders, to help us bridge the connection between Dirty Hands and the headquarter office.
A lot of our partners within what we call the growth services space are young emerging brands. They’re still finalizing their financials, working through their sourcing and trying to understand the right way to go to market. If not for you, Elliott, we would have even fewer places to go for that type of help. Arguably, the scariest point for a brand’s lifecycle is those early days where they haven’t made mistakes yet and want to make sure they’re not making devastating mistakes but need somebody to be there and say, “Let’s do this. Let’s hold off on that.”
Brands within that space can have $0 in revenue. We can work single-spins regions, getting you introduced to the key headquarter buyers and the store level, autonomous stores who may pull from a unifier KeHE or a local distributor. We can support brands at a very early stage in that. We look at that as stage one. Once you are in the store, once you have good traction, once you have a regional authorization in the Whole Foods, authorization in Sprouts or Natural Grocers and it comes time to execute at the store level and maximize your presence within the accounts, that’s when it’s time to call Dirty Hands.
Our model often works better for high-velocity items than it does for lower velocity. We’re showing up, in some cases, in the Whole Foods regions of 40 stores 250 times a month. If you’re a toothbrush or olive oil, that frequency may not make sense for you. As a business, we’ve said that there are enough products and enough partners out there who need that service within that space. That’s where we’re going to focus.
There are cases where olive oil or a toothbrush comes to us and says, “I have this problem. Can we partner for a short period of time and help solve that problem?” If they’re good people, nice clients and good partners, we’ll work with them. We want them to be successful. We want them to solve this problem so they can continue to bring value to the market. The biggest differentiator for us is the opportunity but also personality in who they are. Life is too short to work with people who call you up on Friday night and say, “I walked into Union Square and there’s no product on the shelf. What am I paying you for?” That’s life. That’s why we exist. Even though we can’t solve every problem, we’re here to solve the big ones.
I’m a big believer in the no-asshole rule. It’s not worth it. It’s something that makes me happy to be doing what I do every day. I genuinely enjoy everybody I’m around all the time. Yes, all of you who are reading, even you. What would you want the brands to know not only about Dirty Hands and how to reach out to you but, in general, your last parting bit of wisdom to share? This has been great, by the way. It’s been an impactful discussion.
I had a fun time. I can’t stress enough the makeup of your team and who you have representing your product. Every person you bring into your organization is a representation of you and the product itself. When I walk into a grocery store or I’ve been with brands and the leaders aren’t bringing in people who align with the brand, they find themselves trying to fix problems that were started by somebody else coming in.
As a founder, you look at certain resumes and you’re like, “This person is perfect. They’re going to fix all my problems.” If they’re not culturally aligned with you and what you want the product to be, they will cause a lot of problems and, arguably, potentially force your brand into a light that you don’t want it to be in. To all the founders out there, make sure that you’re focused on who you’re welcoming into your organization. I’ve personally experienced and I’ve seen it happen a lot of times with brands where certain individuals come in and the resumes look great, but the actions and the compass that they use are not aligned with that of the founder.
There’s a no-asshole rule and there’s a no-drama rule. We’re here to do a job. I can’t spend my days worrying about you saying something that pissed somebody off because you didn’t have the emotional intelligence to handle the situation in this way. Teams are ultimately what build brands and you’ve got to make sure you’ve got the right one.
I must take Ryan’s question quick, “Do you have access to national sales data like Spins or IRI when you share with a brand?”
Honestly, we don’t use Spins at this point. What we use to gauge success and data are thousands of pictures of store shelves that our teams collect every single day. We collect data from our brands and then use that success or failures and look a layer deeper into what is happening on the shelf. We try and bring that extra level of depth to the conversations in the data that we use. It’s also something that’s on our radar and we know we need to get it eventually.
Data is such a big important thing. There are two things I’ll say about that. One is that you’re talking about information that happened in the past. You’re always in the rear with data. You want real-time information and that’s the benefit of being in the stores. The second thing with data is that even if you had access to data, each brand has to have its own specific. That’s the way it works. If you’re going to invest in data, you need to have a plan to leverage that investment. Always ask yourself the question, “If I get the data, what am I going to do that’s going to change the outcome with it?”
Also, recognize that, in many cases, if you’re focused on ten stores, you can get data from those ten stores by creating a relationship with someone at that store-level who pulls data on a regular basis. You’ve got to sweeten the pot, but it is possible.
Thanks for doing this with me. I appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for joining. We’ll see you next time. If anyone else wants more information, let us know.
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