Washington-based Hugh and Crye started selling online in 2010. The founders saw a gap in the market for selling shirts that fit men who were fit (to put it bluntly), styles that didn’t billow at the chest and waist the way the typical size-denominations tended to do.
It took under three years for the company to garner enough market traction to open a small storefront, to let customers size before buying.
There are now Hugh and Crye customers throughout the US and in 30 other countries, and the company anticipates sales will reach US$3 million this year, with 95% of that still online.
The Hugh and Crye story might give aspiring and growing wholesalers food for thought when developing a strategy to expand sales channels. How important will brick-and-mortar be to your business, and should you even bother with your own store, or rely more on trading partners to complete your supply chain?
The truth is, not everyone is cut out to be a retailer, and your heart and mind may be completely devoted to the product you’re bringing to market, and not meeting every end-user in the supply chain face-to-face. It might be important, when you’re starting out, to develop your first customers through pop-up stores or farmer’s markets, depending on your product, but that doesn’t mean you want to get into the business of retail yourself.
More importantly, owning a retail sales channel may add complications if you are also selling through retail trading partners, specifically in making sure that you aren’t competing with trading partners at a brick-and-mortar level.
Entrepreneur.com provides a great starting point for companies beginning to develop their retail chain. Generally speaking, it’s important for you to identify the right trading partners, beginning with a field trip through the stores near you that sell products that are similar to yours.
It may be that the best retail partner turns out to be a big retailer, which will most likely require more time to cultivate. As Entrepreneur points out, large retailers tend to deal with many thousands of suppliers, which means you have to get in front of a product or category manager, enter a sometimes-lengthy application process and ensure you meet the particular requirements called for to become a vendor.
“The bigger the chain is, the more specific their vendor requirements will be,” Entrepreneur writes. This will inevitably include specifications for processing purchase orders and invoices.
For high volume trading partners, this nearly always means implementing Electronic Data Interface (EDI).
The advantage of EDI to an expanding business is immense. Despite continued pressure on brick and mortar stores from eCommerce competition, the majority of sales is still in the physical retail space. That means, depending on your business model and what you sell, you will gain more access to more customers through brick-and-mortar chains than you would without them.
Hugh and Crye has done pretty well for itself without brick-and-mortar. Sales this year are expected to be 35 times greater than when it started out in 2010.
But, it should be noted here that expanding sales channels through big eCommerce companies like Amazon entails similar application processes and development, including, you guessed it, EDI.
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