A wholesale strategy for a DTC brand is a short document of rules you decide in advance and then do not renegotiate in an email. It sets one retail price across every channel, defines what you will and will not discount, states your position on exclusivity and territory, names which products are sold where, and says who owns the customer relationship at each step. Six decisions, a page, written before the first stockist rather than after the first conflict.
The reason it comes first is that every one of these is nearly impossible to change later. A price you quoted, a promotion you ran, an exclusivity you granted: each becomes a precedent that the next buyer will find out about.
Rule one: one retail price everywhere
The foundation. Your product has a single retail price, and it is the price on your own website.
This sounds obvious and it is where most brands break their own channel. A 34-dollar mug on your site is a 34-dollar mug in a shop. If the shop prices it at 38 because their margin feels thin, shoppers who check online conclude the shop is expensive. If you sell it at 27 on your site because that is what converts, the shop discovers that the brand it is stocking is also its cheapest competitor.
So the retail price is set once, at a level that supports a wholesale price around half of it, with enough margin for you at that half. If the arithmetic does not work, the answer is to raise the retail price or lower the cost, not to shave the retailer's margin.
Put the suggested retail price on the line sheet, state that you expect it to be held, and say the same thing to every buyer. It is not a contract, but a consistent expectation, evenly applied, is what actually keeps pricing stable in a channel of independent shops.
Rule two: your promotional calendar is now a wholesale decision
This is the rule that catches DTC brands hardest, because discounting is muscle memory.
The mechanics are simple. A shop bought at 17 and is selling at 34. You run a site-wide sale at 24 for a holiday weekend. Every shopper who sees your product on a shelf and checks their phone learns that the shop is asking ten dollars over the brand's own price. The buyer finds out, from a customer, and does not reorder.
The workable version of promotions in a wholesale world looks like this. Keep your core wholesale range at full price on your site all year. Discount only things stockists do not carry: bundles, seconds, discontinued colours, sample sets. Run loyalty or email offers that are not visible as a public price. And if you must run a broad sale, tell your accounts in advance and give them the equivalent margin, so the promotion is something you do with them rather than to them.
Brands that cannot give up sitewide discounting should know that before they open the channel, because it decides whether the channel survives.
Rule three: assortment by channel
Not every product has to be everywhere, and deciding that on purpose solves several problems at once.
A sensible default: three to six hero products go to wholesale, your full range stays on your site, and a small number of things are exclusive to you. Exclusives might be a limited colour, a large size, a personalised version, or a bundle.
This gives a shopper a reason to visit your site after buying from a shop, which turns a stockist into a discovery channel rather than a competitor. It also protects your margin on the products that only you sell.
Be careful with the reverse, a product made only for retail at a lower quality. Shoppers notice, buyers notice, and it costs more reputation than it earns.
Assortment also lets you tier accounts. A design store that took a chance on you early can be offered a colour that the rest of the channel does not get for a season. That costs nothing and buys loyalty.
Rule four: exclusivity and territory
The default position for a young brand is no exclusivity, and it is worth deciding that before anyone asks.
What you can offer instead, in increasing order of commitment: a radius understanding for a single shop, for example that you will not sell to another store within a mile or two for a season; a category exclusivity, where a shop is the only one in town carrying a particular colour; and territory exclusivity granted only against a committed volume with dates and a right to end it if the volume does not appear.
Never grant a territory in exchange for a forecast. A distributor or rep who wants a state or a country before they have placed an order is asking you to stop selling there for nothing, and the way that decision interacts with your margin is set out in how DTC distribution layers work.
Write the account boundaries down whenever more than one party sells for you. Most channel conflict is not bad faith, it is two people who both thought a shop was theirs.
Rule five: who owns the customer
An honest answer to this prevents a lot of friction.
The shopper who buys your mug in a boutique is the shop's customer, in the shop's town, with the shop's receipt. You do not get their email and you should not try to take it. Putting a card in the box that says "buy direct next time and save" is a way to lose stockists.
What you can do is make the product lead people to your brand rather than away from the shop: your name legible on the packaging, a site address, and a range online that is larger than what the shop carries. A shopper who wants the colour their local store does not stock will find you, and that is a healthy outcome for both sides.
Similarly, do not use your stockist list as an advertising audience for direct offers. Use it the other way: tell your own customers where they can find you locally. It costs you a direct sale and it earns a reorder, which is worth more.
Rule six: what wholesale is allowed to cost you
Set a boundary on the channel's claim on your resources, because wholesale expands to fill whatever it is given.
Decide how much inventory may be committed to open purchase orders at any time, and hold to it. Decide the maximum terms you will extend and to whom. Decide how much of your production capacity wholesale can take before DTC restocks are affected, and what happens when a large order would breach it.
Also decide what a wholesale customer is worth to you, so you can tell whether the channel is earning its place. The relevant comparison is contribution per unit against your direct channel after acquisition cost, which is worked through in DTC profitability against wholesale. Without that number, every wholesale decision is made on the feeling that half price sounds bad.
Once the boundaries exist, the day-to-day of running both channels, one catalogue, one stock pool, two sets of expectations, becomes a process problem rather than a series of judgement calls, which is the subject of omnichannel operations for DTC brands.
Putting it on one page
The document itself should be short enough that you actually reread it.
One line for the retail price policy. One for promotions and what is excluded. A list of which products are wholesale, which are direct-only. Your exclusivity default and the three things you will offer instead. Your payment terms by account stage. Your opening and reorder minimums. Your stated lead time. The limits on committed inventory and terms exposure.
Then two more lines that matter more than they look: who you will not sell to, and what would make you end an account. Discount outlets, marketplaces that will undercut your stockists, and shops that never pay on time all belong on that list, and it is far easier to decline when the rule predates the request.
Keep it where you write your pitch emails, and check a new buyer's request against it before replying. If you want to test whether the rules survive contact with your actual category, paste a product page into WholesalePilot and look at the kinds of retailers the preview returns; the mix of shops and distributors tells you quickly which of these rules will be tested first.
Questions founders ask about channel rules
Is it ever right to sell below your stated retail price? On your own site, for products no stockist carries, yes. On a product sitting in shops, almost never, and never without telling the accounts first.
What if a large retailer demands better pricing? Price the tier honestly, including what their volume and their chargebacks cost you, and be willing to walk. A deal that loses money at scale does not improve at more scale.
Can you sell on marketplaces and wholesale at once? Yes, if the marketplace price matches your retail price. A marketplace listing undercutting your stockists causes the same damage as a sitewide sale.
How do you handle a shop that discounts your product? Ask once, privately, and understand why: slow sell-through often hides behind it. If it continues, stop selling to them. One shop undercutting the channel costs more than its orders are worth.
Should the rules ever change? Yes, annually, deliberately, and communicated to accounts in advance. What damages a channel is changing them silently in the middle of a season.