How to get your product into stores, shop by shop

Getting your product into stores is less about the pitch than people expect and more about the second visit. Most shop owners will say yes to a good product on easy terms. Far fewer of those first yeses become a shelf that stays stocked a year later, and the difference is almost always what the producer did after the first drop.

This is the whole loop, for a small food or craft producer selling to shops one at a time: who to ask, what to bring, which terms to offer, how often to go back, and how to keep track once there are more shops than you can hold in your head.

1. Pick shops whose customers already buy things like yours

The best first stockist is not the biggest shop in town. It is the shop where somebody already walks in looking for what you make.

• Delis, cafés and corner shops for food that is eaten soon: bread, biscuits, cheese, granola.
• Gift shops, galleries and concept stores for ceramics, leather, candles — anything bought after being picked up and turned over.
• Farm shops and markets with a permanent stall for preserves, honey, coffee and anything with a story about where it comes from.

Walk in as a customer first. Look at what is on the shelves, what price it is, and whether anything like yours is already there. A shop with three local jams has proven its customers buy local jam; a shop with none might simply not sell it.

2. Go in person, at a quiet hour, with a sample

Email is easy to ignore. A person at the counter at half past three on a Tuesday, holding a jar, is not.

Ask for the owner by name if you can find it. If they are not in, ask when they will be, and come back then — not with a box left for “whoever does the ordering”.

Bring three things:

1. A sample they can taste or handle. One opened jar with a spoon, a few biscuits on a plate. Not stock.
2. A one-page price sheet. Your product, the size, the price the shop pays, the suggested shelf price, shelf life, and how often you would come back. If you have not worked those prices out yet, wholesale vs retail price does it from your costs.
3. An offer that makes yes easy. Which is the next section.

3. Offer terms that remove the risk

A shop that has never sold your product does not know whether it will move. You can either ask them to gamble — wholesale, they buy it outright — or take the gamble yourself with consignment, where they pay only for what sold.

For a first order, consignment is usually the right answer. It is the arrangement that turns “maybe” into “leave me a dozen”. What consignment means and how the bill works covers the mechanics; the short version is that you count what is left on each visit and the shop pays for the difference.

Write the terms down, even on one page: the price per unit, who sets the shelf price, how often you visit, how payment works, and what happens to damaged or expired stock. The consignment agreement template is a starting point.

Then say when you will review it. “Let us try it for six weeks, and if it is selling we can talk about you buying outright” is a sentence a shop owner can agree to on the spot.

4. Leave a small first order

The first drop should fill a shelf face and last until your next visit, and no more. A dozen is often right.

Here is the first fortnight in a shop that took twelve packets of biscuits at MX$85:

Seven sold in two weeks, so about 3 to 4 a week. That is the number that matters now — not the MX$595, but the rate. It tells you how much this shelf needs to hold.

5. Go back when you said you would

This is the step that decides whether a shop keeps stocking you. An owner who sees your shelf empty for a week stops thinking of you as a supplier and starts thinking of you as a favour.

Pick a cadence and keep it:

• Weekly for bread, pastries, fresh cheese and anything short-dated.
• Fortnightly for biscuits, granola, coffee and most jars.
• Monthly for ceramics, leather and anything that sells a few a month.

Group the shops that share a cadence into one route — the Tuesday route, the first-Monday route — and visit them in the same order each time. You will drive less, and the owners will know when to expect you.

At every visit: count what is left, get paid for what sold, swap anything damaged for free, fill back up, and leave a note of what you did. A printed delivery note at the counter settles most arguments before they start.

6. Keep track before you have to

With three shops, a notebook works. Somewhere around eight to ten, it stops: you are entering counts from memory in the evening, you cannot say what all your shops owe you without adding it up, and the shop that said “come back in spring” has been forgotten.

That tracking is the part Artisanly does. Shops that are not stocking you yet sit in a prospects list with a follow-up date, so “come back in spring” turns up in spring. Shops that are stocking you sit on routes with their cadence, and each one shows as due from its own last visit. At the counter you type what is left; it works out what sold, what is owed, and what to fill to.

It is free under 25 shops, which covers most producers for a long while. But everything above works with a notebook too. The loop is what matters: the right shops, a small first order, an easy yes, and coming back on the day you said.