Finding stockists & retail buyers
A wholesale pitch is not a story about your brand. It is a short, boring document that answers four questions in order: what is this, will it sell in my shop, what do I make on it, and how do I order. A buyer who gets all four answers in under a minute will consider you. A buyer who gets a founding story first will not get to the fourth.
DTC founders find this hard because everything about direct selling rewards the opposite. Your product page exists to create desire in a consumer. A pitch exists to remove risk from a business owner. Desire and risk are not the same problem and they do not respond to the same copy.
The four jobs, in the order they have to happen
Say what it is. One sentence, plain nouns. Hand-poured soy candles in three scents, eight ounces, in a reusable ceramic vessel. Not "an olfactory journey". The buyer is sorting fifty emails and she needs to categorise you before she can evaluate you.
Prove it sells. This is the job everything else hangs on and the one brands skip. A buyer is not deciding whether the product is good, she is deciding whether her customers will pick it up. Proof is other shops carrying it, units you have sold direct, a repeat purchase rate, a scent that sells out, a waiting list, a local following.
Make the margin obvious. Wholesale price, suggested retail price, case pack, minimum order, shipping terms. Not a link to a portal. Numbers on the page.
Make ordering easy. One clear next step: reply to this email with the quantities, or order through this link, or tell me and a sample is in the post tomorrow. One step, not three options.
Everything else — the founding story, the sustainability credentials, the press mention — is supporting material, and it belongs below the four answers, not above them.
What "it will sell" actually sounds like
Proof has a hierarchy and you should use the highest rung you can reach honestly.
The strongest is named shops. "Three shops in the county carry it; the one in the next town reordered twice since April." A buyer can verify this in thirty seconds and it answers her real question, which is whether someone like her has already taken this risk and survived.
Next is sell-through at a shop. "The gift shop that took six cases in March is on their fourth reorder." Reorders are the only number in wholesale that cannot be faked, and they are worth more than any total revenue figure.
Next is your own DTC data, stated as counts rather than adjectives. Units shipped this year. Repeat customers. The fact that one of your three scents sells double the others, which tells her which one to weight her order towards and shows that you actually read your own numbers.
Weakest but still useful is audience and local pull: the mailing list size, a local market where you sell out, customers in her town. A brand with forty customers within five miles of a shop has a real argument to make to that shop.
If you genuinely have none of these, you are pitching too early. Sell direct for another season, or start with the shops where you have a personal connection.
The one-page pitch
The artefact is a single page, sent as a PDF attachment or a plain image, never behind a login.
Top third: one product photo that shows the item as it would look on a shelf, plus the one-sentence description. Styled, in daylight, with something for scale. Not a white-background cutout, which tells a buyer nothing about how it merchandises.
Middle: the price block. Wholesale per unit, suggested retail per unit, case pack, minimum opening order, lead time, who pays freight and above what order value it becomes free. Six lines. A buyer will read this block first and the rest second, so make it easy to find.
Lower third: the proof. Two or three sentences with actual numbers and shop names, if you have them.
Bottom: the next step and your contact details, including a phone number. A phone number on a wholesale document signals a real business more than any logo.
That page is a compressed line sheet, and once you have more than a handful of products it becomes one. What a full line sheet contains is in wholesale line sheet, and worked layouts are in line sheet examples.
How the pitch changes by channel
The four jobs stay the same. The packaging changes.
Cold email. The body carries jobs one, two and four in about a hundred and twenty words, and the attachment carries job three. Do not paste the whole price block into an email, it looks like a form letter and it reads badly on a phone.
In person. The pitch is the sample in her hand plus about sixty seconds of speech, and the printed page is what you leave behind. She will not read anything while you are standing there.
A trade show or market. The booth does job one before you open your mouth. Your job is two and three, and the order form is job four sitting on the table.
A marketplace listing. The platform handles three and four. All your energy goes into the photography for job one and the description for job two, because you get no email and no conversation.
The same underlying page adapts to all four. Write it once, properly, and stop rewriting the pitch every time you contact someone.
The mistakes that lose a pitch before it starts
Leading with the founding story. Save it. Put one line at the bottom. A buyer who is interested will read it; a buyer who is not was never going to be converted by it.
No prices. "Contact us for wholesale pricing" adds a step that most buyers will not take. Publish the numbers.
A minimum that is too high. The pitch can be perfect and still fail on a thousand-dollar opening minimum from a brand she has never touched. Two hundred to three hundred dollars is where most independents will take a first risk, and the trade-off is worked through in minimum order quantity.
Margin below keystone. If your wholesale price does not let her roughly double it to your suggested retail, nothing else in the pitch matters. Check that first, using how to calculate wholesale price.
Too many products. Twenty SKUs in a first pitch is a decision she has to make twenty times. Lead with three, and mention that the full range is attached.
A pitch that could go to any shop. One sentence proving you looked at her shop is the difference between the pile she reads and the pile she deletes.
How long should a wholesale pitch be?
The email: under a hundred and fifty words, and it should survive being read on a phone between customers.
The attachment: one page for a small line, two or three for a full range. Never a twelve-page brand deck, which is a document made for investors and it reads as such to someone who just wants to know the case pack.
The in-person version: sixty seconds, then stop talking and let her handle the sample. The silence after you stop is where the questions come from, and the questions are where the order comes from.
Testing the pitch before you send three hundred of them
Send the first twenty by hand and read what comes back.
If nobody replies at all, the subject line or the sender reputation is the problem, not the pitch. If people open and do not reply, job two is weak — you have not made them believe it will sell. If people reply asking about price or minimums, the price block is buried or missing. If people reply positively and then vanish, the next step was unclear or the minimum was too high.
Change one thing at a time, in batches of twenty, and keep the version that produces samples requested and orders placed rather than the one that feels best to write. The rhythm for doing this without a sales team is in wholesale outreach.
If you have the pitch ready but do not know who to send it to, paste your store or product link into WholesalePilot and look at the preview of retailers and distributors that stock products like yours. Having the right list is worth more than another rewrite of the same paragraph.
Questions brands ask about the wholesale pitch
Should I attach the line sheet to a first email? Yes, as a PDF under two megabytes. Links to file-sharing sites get ignored, and password-protected portals get abandoned.
Do I need a look book as well? Only if your category is visual enough to need one, like apparel or jewellery. For most makers, good photography on the line sheet is enough.
Should the pitch mention that I also sell direct? Yes, briefly, alongside your stated retail price policy. A buyer who discovers later that you undercut her online will drop the line and tell her friends.
What if a buyer asks for terms in the first reply? Answer plainly: prepayment on the opening order, terms available on the reorder. That is standard and no reasonable buyer objects. What the first order should look like is in opening order.