Well…shit

You’d think receiving a call that you’ve just had your products accepted to 180 Jewel Osco locations or 300 Sprouts stores would be a moment for celebration, but for me it was yet another iceberg to navigate as a scaling CPG brand. What could possibly be the reason for that reaction and why is it a common thought for CPG entrepreneurs everywhere…?

Before we dive into that, I’d like to introduce myself. My name is Jordan Karcher and the brief anecdote you just read comes from my days as the founder and CEO of Grounds & Hounds Coffee Co. 

My life has been spent in and around grocery store shelves, and my career has been spent finding ways to create and land products on retail store shelves.

Growing up, my father ran wine & spirits distributors throughout the east coast. Beverage brands were king in my house, copies of Wine Spectator and Whiskey Advocate peppered just about every room, and trips to the store always included checking the distribution, pricing, and promotion of brands in my dad’s portfolio and his competitors. So naturally, after elbow injuries ended my college baseball career, I packed up from Miami and moved west to Sonoma to kick off my career in the wine & spirits industry with Korbel Champagne cellars followed by, William Grant & Sons, finally culminating in the launch of my own beverage brand, Grounds & Hounds Coffee Co. .

Years after bootstrapping Grounds & Hounds Coffee Co. from my grad school spare bedroom, we were acquired by a private equity group, eventually growing revenue to 8 Figures in about 3 ½ years. During this time, I experienced every up and down of entrepreneurship, but one specific issue bothered me like no other… fighting the uphill battle of scaling, and managing scale, through the grocery space as an emerging brand. A call from a national retailer confirming full distribution was always bittersweet. One one hand, your brand was growing rapidly. On the other hand, managing the growth in an unfriendly retail environment could lead to poor customer experience, wasted marketing dollars, rushed hires, and the high possibility of losing distribution in the stores within 1-2 years. 

From poor inventory management and inaccurate pricing to sloppy display and lost facings, it is nearly impossible to deliver the quality of experience and execution we expect as brand creators who pour our soul into creating great products and companies in the disjointed and outdated retail grocery space. Rather than simply accepting the situation as “it’s just the way it is”, we’ve set out to provide a scalable ecosystem that will allow brands to reconnect with, and regain control of, their products wherever they’re sold. 

You may be thinking, “is this an isolated issue?”. Simply analyzing the annual domestic lost sales at the retail level in grocery, over $66 Billion in missed sales occur due to out-of-stock issues. This doesn’t even account for lost sales, lost customers, and frequently lost distribution which rolls downhill to crush emerging brands.

Eileen closes the broken feedback loop between retail locations and the brands on the shelf. Through an accessible, responsive, and scalable marketplace, we are revolutionizing the way brands gather, analyze, and act upon real time store level insights while supporting rapid scale across diverse retail distribution.

Rather than rely on the unscalable and unpredictable approach of using periodic store checks by distributor reps, store merchandisers, category managers, or a brand’s sales team, we’re tapping into the abundant pool of shoppers and workers who pass through grocery aisles every single day. Eileen leverages first party data gathered from in-store shoppers and third-party API connections to develop actionable insights, elegantly and simply displayed in brand dashboards.

Between sales reps, distributor commissions, slotting fees, free fills, promotional dollars, and broker fees, brands can spend tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to simply secure placement in key grocery stores only to leave success up to chance and lack any true ability to identify and correct in-store issues before it’s too late.

Through an interactive, monetized, easy-to-use platform and a one-to-many communication structure, brands can gather actionable and easily understood insights with the simplicity of an e-mail/SMS marketing platform. Brands on the Eileen platform can request and receive real time visibility into stores of their choosing for a fraction of the price of a full-time merchandiser or sales rep.  

When factoring the potential to improve in-store inventory and optimize pricing and promotion within the category, the sales management cost savings are only the beginning of how Eileen will revolutionize store management for brands. If you’re tired of fighting an uphill battle with retail and want to regain control of your products, drop us your info and I’ll GLADLY give you a free trial to make your life a little less stressful!  

Sign up for a free demo today and let us bring your team closer to the shelf than ever before!