There are three ways a direct-to-consumer brand gets product onto a shelf: you sell to the store yourself, a sales rep or showroom sells for you on commission, or a distributor buys from you outright and resells. Each one takes a different amount of margin, gives you a different amount of control, and suits a different stage. Almost every brand ends up using all three, and the mistake is adding a layer before the previous one is working.
This is a structural decision, separate from which stores you want. The choice of doors is a retail strategy question; this is about who carries the product through the door and what that costs.
Selling direct to stores
You email the shop, you quote the price, you ship the carton, you invoice, you chase the reorder. The model most brands start with and many never leave.
What it costs you is time and reach. One person can service somewhere between forty and eighty independent accounts properly, meaning outreach, samples, order handling and the follow-up that produces reorders. Past that, accounts start going quiet not because the product failed but because nobody called.
What it gives you is everything else. You keep the full wholesale margin. On a mug retailing at 34 and wholesaling at 17 with a landed cost of 7, you keep 10 dollars a unit before freight. You know which shops carry you, what they ordered, what sold and what they said about it, and that information is the raw material for every decision you will make about the range.
Direct is also where you learn. A brand that has never sold direct to a shop does not know how a buyer thinks, what objection comes up most often or which product moves in which kind of store, and it will hand that ignorance to whichever partner it hires.
Sell direct until it hurts. The pain is the signal.
Working with a sales rep or showroom
A rep carries several non-competing lines into accounts they already have, and takes a commission on what ships, typically somewhere in the low teens as a share of the wholesale value.
The maths is straightforward. A commission of fifteen cents on the dollar against a 17-dollar wholesale price pays the rep about 2.55 a unit, so you keep roughly 7.45 before freight instead of 10. That is a real cut, and it buys access: a good rep in home goods already sells to two hundred shops and can put your line in front of them in a season you could not reach alone.
Reps come in two forms. An independent road rep works a territory and shows lines from a case. A showroom is a permanent space, usually in a design or gift centre, where buyers come to see many brands at once, often around market dates. Showrooms typically want a monthly fee alongside the commission.
What makes a rep relationship work: a tight territory definition so you know which accounts are theirs, a clear rule on accounts you already own, samples they can actually carry, and a line sheet that does not need you present to explain it. What kills it: signing a rep who carries forty lines and giving them no reason to lead with yours.
Ask a candidate rep three questions. Which accounts do you sell to now. Which lines do you carry that sit next to mine. What did you place last season in my category. Vague answers to all three mean the line sheet goes in a folder.
Selling to a distributor
A distributor buys inventory from you at a deeper discount, holds it, sells it to stores, and handles the invoicing and the credit risk. You get one purchase order, one shipment, one payment and no idea who the shops are.
The discount is the headline. Where a store buys at half of retail, a distributor typically buys at somewhere between a third and two fifths of it, because they have to leave the retailer a full margin and take one themselves. The 34-dollar mug that a shop buys at 17 goes to a distributor closer to 12. With a landed cost of 7, you keep about 5 a unit instead of 10.
In exchange you get volume, one relationship to service, and reach into shops you would never find, including regions and channels that are effectively closed to a direct seller.
The trade you are really making is visibility. A distributor is unlikely to tell you which stores carry you or how fast the product sells, which means you lose the data that makes forecasting and range decisions possible. Brands that hand distribution over too early end up unable to answer a large retailer's questions because they no longer have the answers.
There are ways to soften it. Ask for a stockist list as a condition, even quarterly and partial. Keep a set of direct accounts outside the distributor's territory so you retain a feel for sell-through. And be specific about which channels the distributor covers rather than granting everything.
What each layer costs, side by side
Put the same mug through all three and the choice gets concrete. Retail price 34 dollars, landed cost 7.
Direct: wholesale 17, margin 10 a unit, you find and service every account.
Rep: wholesale 17, commission about 2.55, margin roughly 7.45 a unit, the rep finds and services the account, you still ship and invoice.
Distributor: sale price about 12, margin 5 a unit, they find, service, ship, invoice and carry the credit risk.
Halving your margin looks bad until you put a volume against it. Twenty direct accounts ordering four cases twice a year is 640 units and 6,400 dollars of margin. A distributor placing two orders of 1,500 units is 3,000 units and 15,000 dollars, for one relationship and two shipments.
The question is never which rate is better. It is which structure produces more margin in total at the effort you can sustain, and how much you are willing to pay for the information you lose. Running the same comparison against your own channel economics is the profitability exercise every brand should do before signing anything.
Choosing what to add, and when
A sequence that avoids the common mistakes.
Sell direct until you have twenty-five to forty reordering accounts and can describe, from records, how fast your product sells in a shop. That description is what a rep or distributor will use to sell you, and without it you are asking a partner to find out for you.
Add a rep when you have a region or a category you cannot reach and a line that is stable enough to be sold without you. A rep for one territory first, rather than a national network, so you learn how the relationship works when the stakes are small.
Add a distributor when the volume they promise is genuinely incremental, when you can produce it without starving your other accounts, and when losing sight of those doors will not blind you. Often that means using a distributor for a region or a channel, not for your whole business.
Keep some direct accounts forever, whatever else you add. They are your early warning system for the range, the packaging and the price.
The mistakes that cost a year
Granting exclusivity for a promise. A distributor asking for a country before placing an order is asking you to stop selling in exchange for nothing. Tie any exclusivity to committed volume with dates, and to a right to end it if the volume does not appear.
Letting channels collide. If your distributor sells to a shop next door to a store you sell direct, at different prices, both of them find out. Define territories and account lists in writing, and keep the channel rules consistent across every partner.
Underpricing the layer. Setting your wholesale price at half retail and then discovering you also need to give a distributor a third off that leaves you working for nothing. Distributor pricing has to be designed in from the start, which sometimes means the retail price needs to be higher.
Hiring a rep to fix a product problem. If shops are not reordering, adding a salesperson multiplies the failure. Fix sell-through first.
Scaling doors faster than you can supply them. A hundred new accounts you cannot ship on time costs more than fifty you serve well, which is the discipline behind retail expansion.
Questions DTC brands ask about distribution
Can you use a distributor and still sell direct? Yes, with territories or channels split cleanly. Ambiguity, not overlap in principle, is what causes conflict.
How do you find reps? Look at the shops you want and find out who sells to them. Buyers will usually tell you which reps they see, and that is a far better source than a directory.
Do distributors take unproven brands? Occasionally, in exchange for terms you will not like. A brand with documented sell-through gets a conversation on much better footing.
What margin does a distributor need? Enough that they can sell to a store at your wholesale price and still make a living, which is why their cost sits well below it. If your numbers cannot support that, distribution is not available to you at the current retail price.
Where do you start if you have no stockists at all? Direct, with a short list of shops that fit your category and price point. Paste a product page into WholesalePilot and the preview shows the kinds of retailers and distributors that plausibly stock something like it, which tells you fairly quickly whether your channel is independents, a distributor, or both.