Finding stockists & retail buyers
The first five stockists are hard and the next fifteen are not. That is the shape of this, and knowing it in advance is what gets a brand through the first six weeks, when the work is entirely input and the output is silence.
What follows is a ninety-day plan a one-person Shopify brand can actually run alongside everything else: two weeks of preparation, ten weeks of weekly outreach with a defined follow-up cadence, and a final stretch that turns opening orders into reorders. Three to five hours a week, in fixed blocks.
Weeks one and two: make yourself orderable
Do not send a single email until a buyer who says yes can be served the same day. A warm reply that hits an unprepared brand goes cold within a week.
Six things need to exist. A wholesale price that survives halving your retail price and still leaves margin — the arithmetic is in how to calculate wholesale price. Case packs that make sense on a small shelf, usually six or twelve, not twenty-four. A minimum order that is worth producing, commonly a couple of hundred dollars for a small brand. A one-page line sheet with photos, prices, case packs and minimums, covered in wholesale line sheet. Stated lead times you can actually meet. And terms: paid up front on the first order, thirty days from the second if you choose to offer it.
Then the two things people forget: barcodes if your category expects them, and packaging that reads from a metre away on a shelf rather than in a photo on a phone.
Spend the rest of week two building the first hundred qualified shops, using the sourcing routine in how to find stockists. Qualified means each row has one line of evidence about why that shop fits. Rows without it will produce generic emails.
Weeks three to twelve: the weekly block
Same days each week, three to five hours, four blocks.
Sourcing, about an hour. Add fifteen to twenty-five new qualified shops. Do it first, because it is the block that feels least urgent and matters most.
First contacts, about ninety minutes. Twelve to fifteen emails, each opening with a specific observation about that shop, one ask, no attachment. The anatomy is in how to approach a store to sell your product.
Follow-ups, about an hour. Everything sent five working days ago and unanswered, plus anything engaged and gone quiet.
Accounts, half an hour. Anyone who ordered six to eight weeks ago gets a note asking how it is moving. From week nine onward this becomes the most valuable half hour of the week.
Twelve to fifteen a week sounds slow next to a mail merge. It is deliberate: the ceiling is how many you can follow up on properly, and most orders arrive on a second or third touch.
The follow-up sequence that works
Assume silence is the default and design for it. Four touches over about five weeks, each carrying something new.
Touch one, day zero. The first email. Their shelf, your product, the numbers, one small ask.
Touch two, day five. One new fact, two lines. A shop nearby that just started stocking you. A product that has been selling. A seasonal line arriving next month. Not "just checking in", which adds nothing and asks them to feel guilty for not replying.
Touch three, day fifteen. Change the shape of the offer rather than repeating it. Offer a sample posted to the shop, or a smaller opening order as a one-off. A physical object in the shop restarts conversations that email cannot.
Touch four, day thirty-five. Close the loop in one line: you will stop emailing, and you will send the seasonal update if they would like it. This message produces more replies than touches two and three combined, because it arrives with no weight on it.
Then stop, mark the row, and diary them for the next season. A shop that said "ask me in January" is not a rejection, it is a booking.
The first five are the hard ones
Expect the first month to produce almost nothing, and plan around that rather than being surprised by it.
Two things make the first five faster. Start close to home, because a walk-in with a product in your hand converts better than any email, and a local shop can see the brand is real. And start with shops that already stock small independent brands at your price, which you find by reading the stockist pages of brands that sit beside you without competing.
When you get the first yes, do three things immediately. Confirm the order in writing the same day with quantities, price, delivery date and payment terms. Ship on the date you promised. And ask, once the stock has landed, whether they mind being named as a stockist. That permission is the single most useful asset in the next fifty emails you send.
Weeks six to twelve: clustering
Once two or three shops in a region carry you, stop scattering and work outward from them.
Build the next batch of leads around those shops geographically. The first line writes itself — "the deli on Union Street has been selling these since spring" — and reply rates change noticeably. Shop owners know each other, talk to each other, and are far more willing to take a risk on a brand that a peer has already taken.
This is also when to start asking each account which other shops in the area they rate. They answer generously, and the names they give you are shops that pay their invoices, which no directory can tell you.
If you have run out of obvious candidates in a region, paste your store or product link into WholesalePilot and look at the preview of retailers and distributors stocking comparable products to see where the next cluster might be.
Turning opening orders into reorders
An opening order proves nothing. A reorder proves the product sells, and the whole economics of wholesale sit on the second order.
Diary six to eight weeks after every delivery. Send one question and one concrete suggestion: "how has the amber been moving — in shops about your size it usually goes first, so it may be worth adding six with the next order." Never a bare "just checking whether you need more", which puts the work on them.
Help the sell-through rather than waiting for it. A small counter card explaining what the product is. A suggestion about where it works best in a shop, near the till or on the gift table. A photo you can send them for their own posts. Brands that do this get reorders from shops that would otherwise have stalled, and the placement decisions are covered in retail placement.
If a shop does not reorder, ask once, plainly, why. Price, placement, or they sold out and forgot — and two of those three you can fix in a sentence.
What to expect by day ninety
With a properly qualified list and a kept cadence, ninety days is roughly a hundred and twenty to a hundred and fifty first emails, three or four hundred touches in total, a handful of samples, and somewhere between three and ten opening orders. A few of those will have reordered by the end, and a couple of them will become the accounts you point at for the next year.
That is a genuine start, and it is also slower than any paid channel a DTC founder is used to. The difference is that the accounts do not switch off. An ad stops the day you stop paying; a shop that has sold through three cases orders a fourth without being asked.
The pipeline discipline that keeps this running past day ninety, and the four numbers worth watching, are in wholesale sales.
Questions DTC founders ask about getting stockists
How many emails before a shop is a lost cause? Four touches over five weeks, then a seasonal revisit. Anything more inside one season damages the relationship.
Is a walk-in better than an email? For a shop within reach, yes. For scale, email. Do both, but never both to the same shop in the same week.
Should I offer consignment to get the first one? Occasionally, for a flagship local shop, with a written stock list and a date. As a general policy it caps the channel and slows your cash.
What time of year should I start? Any, but know the calendar: gift buying is decided in late summer, spring resets in January. Approaching during a shop's blackout period is fine if you reposition the ask to a later date.