Finding stockists & retail buyers
A retail buyer meeting is thirty minutes, and roughly eight of those minutes are actually about your product. The rest is logistics: whether you can supply, what it costs them, how it gets to the shelf, and what happens when something goes wrong. Brands prepare for the eight minutes and lose the meeting in the other twenty-two.
The way to think about it is that the buyer has already decided whether they like the product — usually from your line sheet, before the call. The meeting exists to find out whether working with you is going to be a problem.
What to have ready before the meeting
Three physical or attachable things, and one rehearsed set of numbers.
Samples of three products. Not the whole range. Your best seller, the one with the widest appeal, and one that shows the range has depth. A buyer handed eleven items will pick none of them, because choosing is work and declining is not.
A one-page line sheet, printed and as a link. Item, variant, wholesale, suggested retail, case pack, barcode, lead time. One page. If yours runs to four, the meeting version is a summary. The full build is in how to make a line sheet.
A terms sheet. Opening minimum, reorder minimum, payment terms for a first order and for a reorder, freight policy, damages policy, lead time in working days. Written down, so you are not inventing an answer under pressure.
The numbers, memorised. Your unit cost, your wholesale price, the retail price, the margin the buyer earns, the case pack value, and your monthly production ceiling. A founder who has to look up their own case pack value loses credibility instantly, and it never comes back in that meeting.
If it is a video call, put the three samples in frame and hold each one up. Buyers judge weight, finish and packaging, and a photograph does not carry any of those.
The thirty minutes, in order
Minutes one to three, context. Let them talk first. Ask what they are working on for the coming season and which part of the category feels thin. Whatever they say becomes the frame for everything you present next. A brand that talks for the first ten minutes has thrown away the only useful information in the room.
Minutes four to twelve, the product. Hand over the samples one at a time, say the two facts that matter about each — what it is made of, what it retails at — and then stop. The buyer will pick one up and ask a question. The question tells you what they care about.
Minutes thirteen to twenty, the commercials. Wholesale, retail, margin, case pack, minimum, lead time. Say the margin out loud in dollars per case, not as a ratio: "a case of six costs you seventy-two and retails for one hundred and forty-four." Buyers think in dollars per facing, not in multipliers.
Minutes twenty-one to twenty-six, operations. Lead time, reorder speed, whether you can hold stock, how damages are handled, what your production ceiling is if the product works. Volunteer the ceiling honestly. A brand that promises unlimited supply and then misses a reorder does not get a third order.
Minutes twenty-seven to thirty, the close. Ask for something specific. Not "let me know" — a named next step with a date.
The questions buyers actually ask
A short list, and they come up in nearly every meeting. None of them are about how the product was made; all of them are about shelf risk, which is what a retail buyer is measured on.
- What does it retail for, and are you holding that price on your own site?
- What is the case pack, and can it be split?
- How fast can you reorder, and what is the lead time in the busy season?
- Who else carries it locally?
- What happens if it does not sell?
- Do you have barcodes on the units?
- What is your production capacity in a month?
Two of those deserve a rehearsed answer.
Who else carries it locally is really a question about exclusivity. The honest answer is a list of nearby stockists and a statement of your distance policy, if you have one. Inventing one on the spot to please a buyer is how a brand ends up with a promise it cannot keep to a shop two streets away.
What happens if it does not sell is a question about risk, not returns. The strongest answer is not "we will take it back" — it is a swap offer: after ninety days, exchange unsold units for a different variant at no charge, with the buyer paying freight. That costs you very little, because the stock comes back saleable, and it removes the buyer's fear without training them to expect refunds.
Reading whether it is going well
A meeting going well has a particular texture. The buyer starts using the words "we" and "here", as in "we would put these near the till" or "these would sit here". They ask about lead time unprompted. They pick a variant and ask whether you do it in another colour. They ask about your capacity.
A meeting going badly is polite, general and full of compliments. "Really lovely, send me the line sheet" at the end of a meeting where you already sent the line sheet is a no with a soft edge.
When it is going badly, one question rescues more of these than anything else: "is it the price, the category or the timing?" Asked plainly, without defensiveness, it usually gets an honest answer, and one of those three answers comes with a date attached.
How to close without pushing
The close is a specific, small, written ask. Three that work:
The assortment close. "Based on what you have said, would four cases — two of the speckled, one of each other glaze — be the right first order?" You have done their planning for them.
The trial close. "Would it make sense to run this in two stores for one season, with a reorder if it sells through by the end of it?" This is the right close for a chain, and it reframes the decision from a commitment to a test.
The date close. If they genuinely cannot decide, do not leave with nothing. "Shall the order land with you the first week of February, before your spring reset?" gets a date, and a date is a thing you can follow up against.
Write the outcome down before you leave the room or end the call, and send it in an email within an hour. Not a thank-you note — a two-line summary of what was agreed, with the order or the date in it. Meetings evaporate; short written summaries do not. The wider follow-up etiquette, including what to do with the buyer who goes quiet, is in buyer meeting tips.
After the meeting
Send the summary email the same day. Ship samples the same week if you promised them. If an order was agreed, send the invoice or order confirmation within twenty-four hours while the enthusiasm is still there, with the lead time restated.
If it was a no, ask for one referral. "Is there another shop this would suit?" costs nothing and works surprisingly often, because buyers know each other and a recommendation from one skips the cold email entirely.
Put every buyer who said not now into a calendar entry at the right point in their buying cycle, with a note about what they said. A brand that comes back in five months saying "you mentioned the twenty-dollar gap in your ceramics — this is that" is a different proposition from a cold email.
If the problem before the meeting is that there are no meetings, the bottleneck is the list rather than the pitch. Paste your product link into WholesalePilot to see a preview of the retailers and distributors that stock comparable products, and work from the ones whose assortment your product genuinely fills a gap in.
Questions brands ask about buyer meetings
How long should a first meeting be? Thirty minutes. Asking for an hour makes the yes harder to get and does not improve the meeting.
Should you bring a deck? Only to a chain or head-office buyer. For an independent shop a deck reads as overhead, and the line sheet plus three samples does the work.
Do you leave the samples behind? Yes, always, unless they are genuinely expensive. A product sitting on a buyer's desk for a week is a reminder that no email replicates.
Should you discount to win the first order? Lower the opening minimum instead of the price. A discount on the unit price becomes the expected price forever, and undoing it later costs you the account. The reasoning is in opening order.