Wholesale and retail lead generation
Taking a D2C beverage brand into 300 retail doors with outbound
A direct-to-consumer beverage brand had strong online reviews and rising ad costs. Growth needed wholesale: independent grocers, gyms, cafés and regional chains. We built an outbound engine to buyers and owners, with samples and sell-sheets handled by workflow, and the brand opened hundreds of retail doors without a field sales team.
- Client
- Functional beverage brand
- Region
- United States
- Scale
- 25 to 40 employees
- Timeline
- Live in 2 weeks, measured over 10 months
Representative engagement. Client details are anonymised and figures reflect typical outcomes from comparable deployments.
What the client got
0
Retail doors opened
In ten months, with no field sales hires.
0%
Of sampled stores placed a first order
Local demand data made the pitch concrete.
0
Regional distributors signed
On the strength of the door count the outbound engine created.
The bottlenecks
Bottleneck 1
Customer acquisition cost was climbing
Paid social CAC had doubled in eighteen months. Online growth alone could not fund the business.
Bottleneck 2
Wholesale was founder-led and slow
The founders pitched retailers they could reach personally. There was no list, no sequence and no follow-up after samples went out.
Bottleneck 3
Distributors wanted proof of pull
Regional distributors asked how many doors the brand was already in. The answer was not enough.
What we built
Step 1
Retail target mapping
Independent grocers, specialty stores, gyms and café groups were mapped by region, category fit and proximity to existing online customers (the brand’s own order data showed where demand already existed).
Step 2
Demand-backed messaging
Outreach to each store referenced the number of the brand’s online customers within a few miles, the margin structure and a free sample case. Buyers at chains received category data and velocity from comparable stores.
Step 3
Sample and follow-up workflow
Replies requesting samples triggered fulfilment, a delivery notification, and a timed follow-up sequence with reorder links. Nothing was forgotten after the case shipped.
Step 4
Wholesale CRM and reorder tracking
Every door, order and reorder was tracked, giving distributors a live door count and the brand a view of which regions and store types reorder fastest.
The automation workflow
D2C to retail door pipeline
From online demand data to reordering store
Questions clients ask about this engagement
How did you use online customer data without sharing it?
Only aggregate counts by postcode area were used in outreach. No customer was identified or contacted.
Does this work for non-food D2C?
Yes. The same pattern applies to beauty, pet, home and apparel brands selling into specialty retail; the target list and sample logistics change.
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Have a similar bottleneck?
Tell us how the work happens today. We will show you the workflow we would build and prototype it on your own process.