Getting into retail stores is a sequence, not a pitch. You set a wholesale price that still leaves you a margin after a store doubles it, put the range on a one-page line sheet, choose a short list of shops that already sell to the customer you sell to, send a plain email with the terms attached, and make the first order small enough that a buyer can say yes without calling a meeting.
Everything else brands do before their first stockist, the trade show booth, the wholesale page, the cold list of five hundred shops, is optional or comes later. What follows is the order that works when you are coming from a Shopify store and have never written a purchase order in your life.
Step one: make the price work before you talk to anyone
Retail pricing is arithmetic, and it has to be done first, because every later step depends on a number you cannot change once you have quoted it.
The rule most independent shops work to is that they buy at roughly half of what they sell for. So start from the price your customers already pay on your own site and halve it. A ceramic mug that sells for 34 dollars on your store becomes 17 dollars wholesale. If your landed cost on that mug is 7 dollars, you keep 10 dollars a unit, and the question is whether 10 dollars covers the pick, the pack, the carton, the freight you eat, and still leaves something.
Two things usually break here. The first is a product priced for direct sale only, where the cost is so close to half the retail price that wholesale is a charity. The second is free shipping that was baked into the retail price and now has nowhere to go. Both are fixable, but they are fixable at the product level, not in the pitch, and you want to know which one you have before you send an email.
Run the same arithmetic across your whole range and you will find that some products work at wholesale and some do not. That is normal. Your wholesale range is a subset of your site, usually the three to six things with the most room in them.
Step two: pick twenty stores, not two hundred
The instinct is to build the biggest list you can. Resist it. Twenty well-chosen shops you have actually looked at will outperform two hundred scraped addresses, because the reply rate on a relevant email is a different animal from the reply rate on a blast.
What makes a shop relevant is simple to check. Does it already carry products in your category at your price point? A boutique whose highest-priced candle is 18 dollars is not going to take a 34-dollar mug. Does it carry brands at your level, small and independent rather than only national names? Does it have a physical store, a stated address, and photographs that look like the last year rather than 2019?
You can build this list by hand from your own customer data. Look at where your online orders cluster, then look at what independent retail exists in those cities. Your customers already told you where your brand belongs.
If you want the list assembled for you, paste a product page into WholesalePilot and the preview shows the kinds of shops and distributors that plausibly stock something like it, which is enough to see whether there is a real retail channel for your product before you spend a month on outreach.
Step three: the line sheet is the whole pitch
A line sheet is one page, sometimes two, that a buyer can open on a phone and act on. It is not a lookbook and it is not your brand story.
It needs, for every product you are selling in: a clean photograph on white, the product name, a short line of description, the wholesale price, the retail price you expect the store to charge, the case pack, and the item code. Then across the top or bottom: your minimum opening order, your reorder minimum, your lead time, your payment terms, and where to send the order.
The retail price matters more than new brands expect. Putting it on the sheet tells the buyer you understand that their margin is the point, and it quietly protects you from a shop pricing your mug at 45 dollars in one town and 29 in another.
Case packs matter too. Selling singles invites a buyer to order one of everything, which is a picking job that costs you more than the order is worth. A case of four mugs at 17 dollars is a 68-dollar line, and six such lines is a real order.
Step four: the email that gets opened
Buyers at small shops read email between customers. Write for that.
Three short paragraphs. The first says who you are and what you make in one sentence, and names the shop specifically, ideally something true about why it fits: a product they carry, a neighbourhood, a display you saw. The second gives the two or three facts a buyer needs, price point, wholesale terms, lead time, where the product is made. The third asks for one small thing, usually permission to send the line sheet or a sample.
Attach the line sheet anyway. Making a buyer reply to get information is a step you can remove.
Do not open with your founding story. Do not send a press kit. Do not open with three hundred words of pleasantries. A buyer deciding in fifteen seconds is deciding whether your product fits a gap on a shelf, and everything that is not about that is noise.
Follow up once, about a week later, with two sentences. Then leave it. A shop that is not buying in September may be buying in January.
Step five: the first order should be small
New brands often set a high opening minimum because a trade-show consultant told them to. For your first ten accounts, set it low enough that a yes costs the buyer almost nothing.
An opening minimum of 250 to 400 dollars is a reasonable place to start for a small-format product. That is a few cases. It is an amount a shop owner can approve from their phone without a conversation with a partner. Once you have fifteen stockists and a waiting list, raise it.
Terms are the other half of this. Most small brands ask for payment up front or on a card at the time of the order for the first purchase, and only offer net 30 after a shop has bought twice. That is normal and no buyer will be offended by it. Say it plainly on the line sheet so it is never a negotiation.
When the order comes in, send a real invoice with an order number, a ship date, and the payment terms restated. The wholesale operations you set up now are the difference between a channel that scales and a folder of PDFs you cannot find in March.
Step six: make the first reorder happen
The order you should care about is the second one. A first order proves a buyer liked your product. A reorder proves a shopper did.
So do the things that make a mug sell off a shelf in a shop where nobody knows your brand. Send a small counter card or a shelf talker with the order, printed simply, with one sentence about the product. Include care instructions if the product needs them. Tell the shop, in the email with the tracking number, which product sells best for other stockists and where it tends to sit in the store.
Then check back at week four. Not "just following up" but a specific question: which of the three moved, and do they want the same again or a different mix. A buyer who has sold through will reorder on that email. A buyer who has not will tell you why, and that is the most valuable information you will get all quarter.
Tag the account in your records with the date of the first order, the mix, and the reorder date. Six accounts with reorder dates is a forecast. Six accounts without one is a mailing list.
What usually goes wrong
Three failures account for most stalled wholesale launches.
The brand prices wholesale off its sale price rather than its full retail price, discovers the margin is negative at volume, and quietly stops. The fix is upstream, in cost or in retail price, and is covered in the profitability comparison between the two channels.
The brand sends two hundred identical emails, gets three replies and concludes retail does not work. It works; the list did not.
The brand lands eight stockists and then goes quiet, because fulfilling wholesale orders by hand is tedious and the DTC side is louder. Six months later none of the eight have reordered. Wholesale is a relationship channel with a slow clock, and the brands that win it are the ones who treat a reorder as a thing they cause rather than a thing that happens.
If you are not sure your brand is ready for any of this yet, the readiness signals are worth checking first. There is a version of "too early" that costs a year.
Questions brands ask before the first pitch
Do you need a separate wholesale website? Not for the first ten accounts. A line sheet attached to an email and an invoice you send manually is enough. Build the portal when the manual version is annoying you weekly.
What if a store asks for exclusivity? For a single small shop, decline politely and offer a radius instead, for example that you will not sell to another store within a mile for a season. Exclusivity across a city or a state is a thing you trade for volume, not something you give away to your third stockist.
Should you go to a trade show first? Not before you have sold to a handful of shops directly. A booth is expensive, and the brands who get the most from one arrive with a line sheet that has already been tested on real buyers.
What about consignment? A shop taking product without paying is not a wholesale account, it is a storage arrangement with sales risk you keep. It can work for one local shop as a trial. Do not build a channel on it.
How long does the first account take? Plan for six to eight weeks from the first email to the first shipment, and do not read silence in the first two weeks as rejection.