#growth-and-marketing
Thread
Hi guys, I need your help! MATCHU is doing quite well online, but next year we really want to make some progress in our offline sales. Focusing mainly on our watersport category (SUP boards). We did a succesful offline retail test with Decathlon this year, and are looking to build further on this. Our boards are very easy to sell because of our unique designs and we want to create a WIN-WIN situation for the stores and ourselves :)
Does anyone have a way for me to get in touch with sports stores, or watersports stores? It can be anywhere in Europe. Big or small, I'm open for everything. Any help would be greatly appreciated, as I have no idea where to start.
Hi @Gianni Esposito - we are also doing retail expansion, and it is though, especially with more independent stores without one POC.
We are focused on pharmacies and currently doing a content-flywheel strategy, where we are building an audience through a linked in connection strategy, having gotten around 400 new contacts of pharmacy owners or workers within the last 2 weeks, and then building a newsletter to them, to push them down the sales funnel.
We dont have the ressources to just drive around and visit everyone, so we are doing this instead to qualify those we can then invest in. Apart from getting in the store, just servicing them is a nightmare from an ops perspective if you have too many small ones (materials, questions, etc.)
Happy to put you in contact with the people doing this for us, but we spend about 10k eur monthly on driving this expansion product in ressources.
@Dominic Day very strong on retail in UK - def worth a chat 🤝
Hey guys, if you want to chat through how we approach then just reach out. We are more FMCG so not as much crossover @Gianni Esposito, but the basic strategy I am sure will be much the same.
@Anders Reckendorff not sure if you are in the UK, but we approached much the same way to begin with before then onboarding with selected wholesalers. Getting a good wholesaler is a bit of cat and mouse in terms of they will take you on once they think there is volume, but once you are in they can accelerate quite quickly to their network. The downside is the margin but the upside is the simplicity in the supply chain and volume if you get it right.
Thanks guys. Not in the UK yet, but could definitely use a strong partner there. If you have any tips, they are very welcome.
@Dominic Day agree strongly on the wholesaler part, and yes, it is really cat and mouse. However, if you don’t have pull in the market and some good activities going around the stores, performance will probably be lackluster even with a good distributor / wholesaler. Given that, starting in concetrated local regions is more cost-effective than a scattered approach.
A few things would change my mind on the above:
1. Need short-term cash? Sell to everyone you can defend within your brand, apart from big retailers you really need in the future and don’t want to underperform with - this was our strategy past 2 years
2. Have a zillion in venture funding and need scale? Overinvest like crazy in sales staff and marketing and go national asap, but understand you will probably pay 10x upfront vs. short-term revenue.
On retail, we have alot of fringe countries (like poland, malta, etc.) with distributors, but biggest in Nordics and Germany. UK is a hard nut to crack, but we are overinvesting a lot there on retail.