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If your brand does well in stores but ecommerce still loses money, it's almost never…
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John Timmerman shared thisEcommerce founders call retail a margin tax. Retail founders call ecommerce a distraction. Both have a point, and both are leaving money on the table. Land your product in a Starbucks and you didn't just get a shelf. You got distribution. Someone grabs it with their latte, tries it, likes it, and now they go looking for it where they actually buy their groceries. The Home Depot works the same way. A customer buys your product in aisle 14. It works. Three weeks later they need another one, and maybe they are typing your name into Amazon to see if it can be on their doorstep tomorrow… If your listing is thin, unreviewed, or missing, that sale goes to whoever ranks first. Your shelf created the demand and someone else collected it. So the play depends on where you started. Built on ecommerce? Use the profit to buy more retail distribution. The shelf is a sampling program that pays you. Built in retail? Go capture the demand your shelf is already creating online. It exists whether you show up for it or not. Each channel feeds the other. Brands that run them as separate businesses end up leaving millions on the table, or funding their competitor's Amazon reviews.
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John Timmerman shared thisI was shopping in Wegmans Food Markets the other day for fruit for my kids, and this stopped me in my tracks. A brand that sold only online three years ago, now owning the floor. Standalone unit, a hand-lettered sign from the store's nutrition team, kids' boxes and adult pouches stacked on every side. That is a brand paying for attention in the store, and doing it well. Grüns launched in August 2023. Unilever agreed to buy it this April for a reported $1.2 billion. It had a real product idea (greens in a gummy), a daily habit people actually keep, thousands of creators selling it for them, and then retail: 6,000+ doors by the end of 2025, per Forbes. Every retail brand I talk to is studying that playbook. Most are drawing the wrong lesson from it. The lesson is not "go DTC first." If you're already on shelf at Wegmans, Target or Kroger, that order is gone. You can't start over online. On the other side, a lot of retail-born brands have written DTC off entirely. It cannibalizes the retailer. Shipping kills the margin. Some of that may be true. DTC run as a standalone store, judged on its own P&L, often does lose money for a brand your size. But in reality, Grüns built demand online and cashed it in on the shelf. A retail brand can run the same engine in reverse: → Creator posts a video → viewer searches your brand → lands on your site → buys direct, or finds the nearest store → picks it up on the next grocery run → velocity climbs at that door → the buyer sees the turns → you earn the end cap, the extra facing, the next region. So the point is, DTC isn't a second channel competing with retail. It's the demand engine behind it. The online dollar can be more profitable. After retailer margin, distributor, trade and slotting, a brand often keeps well under half the shelf price. Sold direct, you keep the full ticket before fulfillment and acquisition cost. Your retailers get sell-through they didn't have to fund. That changes the tone of every line review. And that margin builds cash reserves for the things that move product: displays like this one, demos, more creators. Grüns proved retailers want brands that walk in with demand already built. You don't have to start over to become that brand. Test it on one SKU in one region. Measure shelf velocity before and after. Make the call on the actual data, not the headlines, then decide whether to build it internally, bring in a partner, or a hybrid of both.
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John Timmerman shared thisTarget's digital comparable sales grew 8.7 percent last quarter. Its store comparable sales grew 2.7. Both figures come from Target's own Q2 release dated August 19, so grade A on the numbers themselves. Same company, same brands, broadly the same shoppers, and one side is compounding at roughly three times the rate of the other. Here is why that should change something for a brand that sells into Target. Target reports digital inside comparable sales. It is not a separate business sitting off to the side. So when your category comes up for review, digital performance is already inside the number your buyer is looking at, whether or not anyone at your company has thought about it. Now the uncomfortable question. Who at your company owns your target.com product page? For most retail-built brands the honest answer is nobody, or the person who also does Amazon, or an agency that set it up once. Meanwhile that page is doing three things at the same time: it is the search result when somebody looks you up before they go to the store, it is the only place a shopper reads reviews of your product, and it is a channel growing at 8.7 percent inside your largest customer. Go look at yours and count four things. Number of images. Whether the copy was written by you or lifted off your case pack. Your review count. Then the review count of the two products sitting next to you on the physical shelf. If you are underweight on all four, you are underweight in the fastest-growing part of your biggest account. What I cannot tell you from outside is your own split. Whether your Target business is 4 percent digital or 14, and how that has moved over two years, is your data and it lives in a Target vendor portal, not in a press release. Anyone who quotes you a number for that without your data is guessing. What I can tell you is the direction, and that the check costs one afternoon. The precondition is not a budget. It is somebody named, before the next review, who owns that page.
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John Timmerman shared thisMore people walked into Target last quarter, and each of them spent about the same as before. Traffic up 3.6 percent. Average transaction up 0.2 percent. Both from the Q2 release on August 19. Target did the expensive half of the job. Getting a shopper through the door is the part that costs hundreds of millions and takes a chief executive eighteen months, and Michael Fiddelke appears to have moved it. The cheap half is now yours, and it is the half that decides your units. More shoppers walked past your facing this quarter than last quarter. Nothing about your brand caused that. What decides whether any of them picked you up is your packaging, your price point, your placement, and whether they had heard of you before they got to the aisle. That is a shelf conversion quarter, not a traffic quarter, and the two need completely different work. There is one more thing in those two numbers, and I want to flag that this part is my read rather than something Target stated. They cut prices on more than 10,000 frequently purchased items in the same quarter that the average basket moved 0.2 percent. If prices came down and the basket held flat, shoppers are probably carrying out slightly more units for the same money. Target did not publish units per basket, so grade that a C. If it is right, it is the best news in the release for anybody on a shelf. -> It means unit velocity across the store is moving, and the brands who are visible at the moment of the decision get a disproportionate share of it. Which brings it back to the thing most brands in a few hundred doors have no answer for. Somebody is standing in front of your category with more money in their pocket than usual. Nothing in your plan for the next twelve months is designed to reach that person in that aisle, in that town, in that week. The shelf is not going to introduce you.
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John Timmerman shared thisTarget cut prices on more than 10,000 frequently purchased items last quarter, and reported it in the same release where it raised full-year guidance. Read it before your buyer does. Michael Fiddelke's words (Target's CEO), Q2 release, August 19: reduced prices on more than 10,000 frequently purchased items as part of our commitment to delivering outstanding value every day. If you sell into Target, that sentence matters more to you than the guidance does. A price investment that size gets funded by somebody. I am not going to tell you Target is asking vendors to pay for it, because Target did not say that and I have not seen it in writing anywhere. What I will say is that price investment at retail is usually a negotiated thing, and if you have a category review in the next two quarters you want a view on this before you are asked for one. Two more numbers from the same release sharpen it. Food and beverage grew high single digits. Apparel grew 0.1 percent and home decor grew 0.2 percent. Consumables are carrying the company right now, and the category carrying a retailer gets more attention rather than less. Then the margin line. Full-year operating margin guidance of around 6 percent includes roughly 90 basis points of benefit from second-quarter tariff refunds. That is about a sixth of the margin, and a refund does not happen twice. Put the three together. Your largest customer is growing on the back of your category, has publicly committed to lower shelf prices, and is carrying a margin number that leans on a one-time item. None of that is bad news. Target growing is good for anyone on that shelf, and Fiddelke has clearly got hold of something. It does mean your next review is going to spend more time on cost than the last one did. And the brands who walk in with evidence that they move units off that shelf without a promotion will have a VERY different half hour than the brands who walk in with a promo calendar. The release is public and the category table is two clicks in.
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John Timmerman shared thisEvery seeding platform I know of is pointed at TikTok Shop affiliates and at filling a Meta ad account with creative. That is real work and those tools do it well. It is also a completely different job from getting one unit off one shelf in one store before a buyer looks at that store's numbers. The gap sounds strange when you say it out loud. Shopper sampling programs have retail proof and no content. Creator seeding programs have content and no shelf. Almost nobody runs both at once, so the brands who need both are picking a half. There is a second output that costs nothing extra. When a buyer reviews a brand ahead of a decision, they check that brand's social. What they find is either product videos shot on somebody's kitchen counter, or a stream of people walking into their stores and buying the thing. One of those is content. The other is the only evidence a buyer can read that you drive traffic to their aisle. If you are in a few hundred doors and the plan for the next twelve months is that the shelf sells itself, that is not a plan. It is a hope with a review date attached. We build this for brands. It's our Store Creator Sprint, and we are pretty excited to see how well it works. Let me know if you want to give it a try before your next review.
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John Timmerman shared thisMid-Day Squares got into Walmart USA this week. Three SKUs in the fridge, eight years after Jake Karls was making them by hand in a condo kitchen in Montreal. Go read his post. It's a good one, and the line that stuck with me wasn't the celebration. "This is our opportunity to prove ourselves." He also wrote that they are not in every Walmart yet, and asked people to check the store locator before driving out to look for them. That's a founder describing a reset in real time without using the word. Walmart is going to look at what actually moved off those shelves and decide whether it goes nationwide or goes away, and that gets decided on units per store per week, not on how good the launch felt. The first substantive comment on his post, from someone he doesn't know, was a guy telling him to make sure somebody on the team owns Retail Link and is reading POS in detail. That's the industry's reflex, and the reflex is correct. Then they did the second thing, and that is the one worth noticing. Creators started turning up in Walmart, buying the bars off the shelf, filming it and posting it. Not product mailed to a creator's house. Creators in the actual store, paying at the register. When a buyer reviews a brand ahead of a decision, they check that brand's social. They do, and what they find is either a nice product video shot on somebody's kitchen counter, or a stream of people walking into their stores and buying the thing. One of those is content and the other is a demand signal. We run this for brands, and it produces things a buyer can actually read. Receipts with the store and the date on them. A map of which of their doors somebody physically stood in. Content with rights cleared, formatted for a broker deck or a retail media network. We ran the same motion for BÉABA Babycook launch into Target and sales came in 147% over Target's own projected goal in month one. Most brands walking into a few hundred new doors cannot do this. They have the distribution and no way to move one person toward it, so the shelf has to sell itself for twelve months and they find out how that went at the line review. Congrats to Jake, Nick Saltarelli and Lezlie Saltarelli! Eight years is a long time to walk past a fridge.
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John Timmerman shared thisBeeMax USA LLC makes the best little cone bites I've eaten, and they're cheaper per ounce than both of their biggest competitors. On Walmart.com they have zero reviews. Our model puts their ecommerce gap at over $2M in the next 12 months. Here's the math. They built the hard part. Real product, real shelf, QVC. You can't shortcut any of that. The machine around it just hasn't been switched on yet. Three things anyone can see from the outside: → On Amazon they're categorized under ice cream cones and toppings, not snacks. Wrong aisle. And the listings are being sold by a third party, prices swinging from $33 to $45. Rebuilding that foundation and reclaiming the listings models to $63K over 12 months. → On Walmart.com there's no review base to convert the demand the shelf already creates. Syndicate the reviews they already have: $58K. → Their review gap against Muddy Bites is 47x. That's not a vanity number. That's the number a retail buyer reads before saying no. Stack the foundation and our model says $184K a year. Layer creator seeding and TikTok Shop on top and it's another $317K. Half a million in 12 months, and nobody has to invent anything new. Then there's the shelf defense. Our model puts $1.6M on the nos they're likely to get from retailers while the digital shelf looks like this. One honest line: this is public data, B and C grade. Their own numbers would sharpen it. None of it is A grade and I won't pretend otherwise. The part most brands get wrong is the order. Everybody wants to run Meta first. Today their margin per order against the cost to get that order sits at 0.14. Ads first would torch cash. Fix the digital shelf and it's 0.59. Add a 24-pack bundle at $109 and the first order breaks even. So it's not "DTC doesn't work for this brand." It's the month DTC turns on. CAPTURE the demand the shelf already creates. CREATE more of it with creators and TikTok Shop. COMPOUND it with bundles, a list, and paid when the gate clears. Chomps sells across national retail and is a top-selling meat snack on Amazon, with a creator engine feeding both. That's the machine. It's reachable. Full teardown with sources if you want it. ISMAIL AKTIM, SEID SEIDOV, Hakan Teker
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John Timmerman shared thisMegaFood does almost everything right to capture a sale. But are missing HUGE opportunities to generate it. Let me explain. Pattern runs their Amazon, one of the best distributors in the country. The listing has A+ content, 15 videos, Amazon's Choice. They're in Walmart, Target and Whole Foods. They're already live on TikTok Shop. And they've been making vitamins in their own New Hampshire facility since 1973, with an actual eight-week clinical trial on their flagship. Almost nobody in supplements has that. Every channel above captures demand. Amazon catches people already searching. Retail catches people already in the aisle. TikTok Shop catches people already scrolling. None of them create demand. Compare Grüns. Launched August 2023. Hundreds of creators seeded weekly through an automated gifting pipeline. UGC converted into paid creative as fast as it arrived. Demand driven digitally into every channel and it didn't matter whether you bought on their site, at Target, or at Walmart. Profitable at month 14. $300M annualized by month 24. 7,000+ retail doors. #1 greens brand on Amazon and in US retail. Unilever paid $1.2B in April. Or Mars Men $100M run rate in under 18 months, bootstrapped, profitable, 400,000+ customers. DTC and subscription first. They're only now moving into physical retail. Both built the engine first and let the shelf catch the demand. MegaFood has the shelf. That's the hard part, and it's done. What's missing is the engine that fills it. Three layers: → Generate. Meta at real weight, plus seeding at volume across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, with the UGC feeding paid creative, not dying as organic posts. → Convert. Stop selling bottles. Sell kits. Energy. Bloat. Sleep. Immunity. And by household. Solo, Couples, Family, and the prenatal-to-postnatal-to-kids journey. Every one of those is buildable from MegaFood's existing catalog. Nothing new gets manufactured. → Retain. Email and SMS built around the 31-day VMS repurchase cycle, the shortest of any category NielsenIQ measures. Then the part that makes it worth doing at a brand this size: the halo. Demand you create digitally doesn't stay put. It walks into Target. It searches on Amazon. It converts on Pattern's listing, at Pattern's velocity. Their existing distribution is exactly what makes the investment worth more here than at a brand without shelves. A dollar through a distributor nets roughly 42 cents of gross profit. The same dollar direct nets roughly 72. I modeled it: ~$833K of incremental media returning ~$3.9M in revenue and ~$1.65M in gross profit in year one. Gross-profit positive by month three. The number that matters isn't the total. It's that by month 12, 47% of that revenue is repeat (ca-ching $$) customers acquired in earlier months who kept ordering. New-customer revenue plateaus when you stop increasing spend. Repeat revenue doesn't. That's the difference between buying revenue and building an asset.
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Ranjit S. thanks! Hope you are well!
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John Timmerman liked thisJohn Timmerman liked thisDad turned 84 this week. He’s replanting citrus after losing the last grove to greening disease. It will take five years before you pick the first full crop, and there’s still no cure for greening. The best options to date are new rootstocks and varieties. They show promise, but they aren't resistant to the disease. In five years the trees could all be infected again. Mom says he’s crazy and defines him as the eternal optimist. Why would anybody want to put themselves through that suffering again? She has a point. But Dad has dedicated his entire life to growing citrus. Same as his Dad and his Granddad. It runs in the family, and they love what they do. Dad has taught me so many valuable lessons in agriculture. Resilience is a big one. Never stop believing and you must find a way to persevere. This picture is a block that will be replanted with citrus in the Spring. My father and brother planted a cover crop of sunn hemp and cow peas in the tree row. The citrus trees will be planted where the cover crop sits. It builds organic matter and supplies free nitrogen for the new grove. Happy birthday, Dad, I still believe in you, and the power of hard work and dedication. We continue to pray for a cure and will not lose hope.🧡🙏🎂 #organic #farming #farmer #dad #covercrop #soil #citrus #hope #passion #family
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John Timmerman liked thisJohn Timmerman liked thisSIAA Prompt Library Differentiation that usually loses to the clock. --- You are a specialist in differentiated instruction. I need to create [type of resource — e.g. a reading comprehension task, a set of practice problems, a case study activity] on [topic] for a mixed-ability group of [learner level/age group] learners. Produce three versions: (1) a scaffolded version for learners who need additional support, with sentence starters, visual cues, and simplified vocabulary; (2) a core version for learners working at the expected level; (3) an extended version for learners ready for greater challenge, with open-ended questions and connections to broader concepts. Keep the same core content and learning objective across all three versions. The learning objective is: [state the objective]. --- The instruction to keep the same content and objective is the whole prompt. Without it you get three different lessons, and the class fragments. With it you get one lesson three ways, and every student is working towards the same thing at a level they can reach. Part of the Education series. Follow the page for the rest. #Teaching #DifferentiatedInstruction #Inclusion #Education #AppliedAI
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John Timmerman reacted on thisJohn Timmerman reacted on thisFeel Good Foods recently went from 2,500 Walmart doors to 4,000. Frozen gluten-free dumplings, pizza and appetizers. They're also in Whole Foods Market, Cotsco, Kroger and Target. That is a solid CPG business. Congrats to Vanessa Phillips and Tryg Siverson. Getting on shelf is the hard part. They've done it. Now it's about moving more units off the shelf. In this video I break down a strategy showing how Feel Good Foods can drive more in-store velocity. Feel Good Foods is already doing part of it. I show what the full version looks like. It works for any CPG brand that sells mostly in retail. Watch until the end to see how your CPG brand can do this too. Jonah Winston I made this for you too...
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John Timmerman liked thisJohn Timmerman liked thisMid-Day Squares just launched into Costco USA… Our No-Bread PBJs are now in hundreds of Costco warehouses across: The Northeast, Midwest, and Northwest regions. We’ve been working on this one for a long time, So seeing it finally come to life is a huge moment for us. People see the product in the fridge. But behind that product is a massive amount of work and a lot of people. So I want to shout out our team. Our production crew getting the product made. Operations keeping everything moving. R&D building something people actually want. QA protecting the standard. Finance making the numbers work. Sales earning the opportunity. Marketing creating demand. Customer Experience listening to people every day. And of course, thank you to the Costco team for giving us a shot, to Costco members for supporting the product, and to our community for constantly showing up. Big partnership. Big momentum. Extremely grateful. Now find us in the fridges. Hopefully one day we can be available in all Costco regions!!
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Stealth Vision // Brand development and digital to $500k in 6 months
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Built a Marketing Machine for StealthVision.com when they had nothing but a super premium product and a cheap box to put it in.
Here is what happened next:
- Built a custom Shopify website with rifle builder
- 75k in website traffic (3 months)
- 350+ keywords ranked (40+ in top 3 positions)
- 2M social views (Tiktok, IG & YouTube - started from nothing to 143k views)
- $500k in revenue
- Packaging overhaul
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