Reimagining Wholesale: How Vanik is Changing the Game for Brands

Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Yeah, for sure. I’d be happy to do that. My background blends retail with e-commerce. I started my career in grad school working at Converse, the sneaker company that’s owned by Nike. And after that internship, I went to a sports apparel company named Forty Seven. So they make a lot of licensed headwear and apparel for pretty much every major sports league in college. And one of my tasks there was to build an e-commerce website. And so I was very early in my career, 23, 24 years old. My boss had left the company. I became the most senior marketing person in the company. I knew nothing about e-commerce. And one of the founders of the company said, Hey, Dan, you’re going to build an e-commerce site. And I knew nothing about it. He said, What do you know about e-commerce? And I said, Nothing. And he said, You better learn it. And so this company, Forty Seven, was typically selling to big retailers It’s like a Dick’s Sporting Goods Sports Authority back in the day, they’re no longer a business. They’re Burns & Noble, and they weren’t used to shipping an individual hat or T-shirt to a customer.

So I worked with our internal creative team to develop the look and feel of the website. And then When the website launched, I helped set up the operations of the website. And I ran everything from the logistics of it to the marketing to the practice or something. And I started to get interested in e-commerce. And I’ve always wanted to start my own business. When I ran that website, I felt like I was running my own business. And so that got me interested in e-commerce. And so then after Forty Seven, I decided to go to a bigger company where I worked at Duncan Brands, like Duncan Donuts. And I headed up their website, the content on their marketing website, and also managed the agency that ran their e-commerce business. And so during that time, Duncan was a little bit different than Forty Seven in the sense that I was managing the agency as opposed to doing the work myself. And I was hungry to do something. My sister was in retail consulting. We put our heads together. We launched a side business, a SOC business, and a neon bandit, which I’ve been running with her for the past nine years.

It’s not me thinking like, maybe I’ll do this full-time, but we launched a Shopify website. It was a great experience. We started selling D2C, and then we started selling to retailers. Today, we have over 300 different independent retailers’ retail accounts and have noticed the pain of collecting a reorder myself. And so I’m like, there has to be something better out there. And then to fast forward, I transitioned from the brand side of marketing to e-commerce software. I joined Klaviyo, which is a marketing automation software. Before they raised any money, I focused on a business unit. So businesses that do less than a million dollars a year in e-commerce revenue, my job was to understand who these merchants are and drive revenue for that segment. And so was there for their astronomical growth, then left to join Shopify, and I headed up a couple of different product marketing teams there. During these relationships, I kept talking to brands, and they were selling, obviously D2C, but also selling to retailers, and I kept hearing the same thing. Very manual process for them to collect reorders, and manage that. I was like, this is interesting.

And then a couple of years ago, I left Shopify and I joined a seed-stage startup within the Shopify ecosystem that enables subscriptions for Shopify stores. And that was on the D2C end of it. But a lot of the brands that were using the software also sold wholesale and were digging into it and kept hearing how big of a pain point it was for brands that are selling to retailers to get reorders, to manage their relationships. And that got my curiosity spiked and led us to start to explore what is now Vanik.

Yeah, I know for sure. So to back up, I guess the problem we’re solving right now is Power Mountain any brand. A brand could be selling to Whole Foods Target or Walmart. And so those stores have their systems that you need to deal with. But that same brand could also have thousands of independent retail accounts. And the way that that is managed today is brands are either tracking their accounts in a Google spreadsheet or they have some nurture set up in HubSpot to say, Hey, it’s time. Do you need a reorder? And then if the retailer responds, there still needs to be a manual effort done to collect that reorder. And so right now there’s a lot of energy, time, and focus spent by brands trying to get those relationships to a point where they can get a reorder. And it’s just creating a lot of overhead for the brands. And so what’s out in the market right now is there’s a lot of marketplaces. I don’t know if you’re familiar with fair.com, but Mable is another one. And so these are marketplaces where a retailer can go on and discover new brands to stock in their stores.

And so similar to Amazon, what’s happening in these marketplaces is Fair and Mable, they don’t let the brand own the relationship. Everything has to go through the individual, the marketplace. And so what happens is the marketplace takes a hefty commission. They own the relationship and they have all of the data in terms of customer data, email information, and stuff like that. So if a marketplace is to change its commission structure, and reduce the number of messages you can send to the retailer, the brand then loses control of that relationship. And so it’s really important for a brand right now to own their customer. When we say own the customer, we mean having a direct line of communication with their customer, understanding what they’ve purchased in the past, understanding how much money they’ve spent, and understanding the cadence of their purchase. So the brand can create that personalized relationship the same way they do on the direct-to-consumer side, but on the B2B or wholesale side.

Yes, It’s really interesting. So when we first started out exploring this, we thought brands have a lot, and have all their direct-to-consumer information on Shopify. And Shopify has made a lot of improvements over the past couple of years on the B2B side of it. And so if you’re on Shopify Plus, a lot of brands are on Plus that sell B2B have the B2B Shopify component, meaning that their B2B information is stored in Shopify. But what we’re finding is a lot of brands, even on the larger end of the spectrum, who are Plus brands, don’t necessarily have that information Shopify. And so what we’ve done is we were breaking out the product into two separate swim names. So we have a Shopify and a non-Shopify customer. So for brands that use Shopify, we would integrate directly with Shopify the same way Klaviyo, for example, would integrate with Shopify, and we would bring all that data into our platform. And so if a brand doesn’t have Shopify, let’s say they just run their business through Quickbooks or they have all the information in a CSV somewhere, we would be able to upload that data from the CSV into our platform.

And so then our platform would become the brain of the wholesale operation, having all the contact information, the purchase history, and purchase amount, so we can be smart about when to send a reorder reminder.

Yeah, so we can’t get into too much of the product roadmap right now just because we’re not live. But right now, what we are marketing is the reorder aspect of it. And so the way it works now as I said, it’s a very manual process where if I was a brand and you were a retailer, the way it would work is we would email back and forth for a week or two to determine the reorder, I would need to go in and send an invoice through Quickbooks or Shopify for you to pay it. The way our system will work is we’ll know that you order from us, say, every 30 days. On day 25, you would get an email saying it’s time for a reorder. And on that reorder email would be a click-through to a landing page where the retailer can add or subtract products to it and check out on their own without needing to email me back and forth. And so it creates a direct-to-consumer-like experience for brands that are selling to retail. And so there are a lot of platforms out there where a retailer would need to log into a platform to place a reorder.

We are not doing that. Ours is an email from the brand to the retailer where they can click through and check out. We don’t want to create a lot of friction. There’s not a lot of solutions in the market that are doing anything like we’re doing. There’s a lot of clunky solutions where you can piece together what we’re doing, but it’s not as frictionless and seamless as what we’re building.

Yeah, so this is an interesting question. I want to be doing more. But as a founder, I’m a co-founder as well. We don’t have a lot of money for marketing and that type of stuff, so we’re having to be scrappy. I think that the interesting thing is there’s a lot of information out there on LinkedIn about how to build your business from zero to one and all this type of stuff. Really what we’re finding is the most successful tactic to get conversations with brands is cold outreach on email, but developing a personalized note. It’s not some AI-generated note. It’s taking 5, to 10 minutes for each prospect, to learn a little bit about their brand, and write a really short, concise, personalized message to them, showing that you’re interested in their brand, you know what they are, and differentiate from all the AI emails out there and reaching out directly to them. We’ve been successful so far in doing that. Yes, it takes a lot of time, but anything good takes time. Our plan is once we get brands who are committed to the platform, using the platform, who will then be able to have a little bit more fun and do customer stories and that thing.

We’re leading the customers to tell the story, not ourselves. We think since we’re solving a problem that a lot of brands have, they will do the heavy lifting for us once we get that story out there.

Yeah, no. I mean, SEO, I had a lot of success with it in my previous job, and we know it’s not something that you can just turn on tomorrow and expect to see results. So we’re trying to hold ourselves to publishing one article every week, maybe one article every two weeks as we get further into this. But we know it’s a really important strategy, and we’re trying to develop content around the problem space that we’re looking to solve and just educate people who are searching around marketplaces like Fair and Enable and stuff like that, what some of the benefits and cons are of operating in those marketplaces. So creating content around the space we’re looking to solve for. So we can establish ourselves as thought leaders and experts in this particular space.

Yeah. So I think the biggest challenge we’re going to have is a lot of brands in retailers are comfortable using fair. They might be hateful, but they’re comfortable using it. And so we’re having to educate some of the brands. For example, we talk to a lot of brands that maybe have 500 different independent retail accounts, and they have 300 of those are kept in fair, and 200 of them are directly managed. We have to start to educate brands on why it’s important to try to migrate those 300 brands to a more direct line of communication so they can own the customer, so they won’t be paying the 15%, so they can establish a personalized relationship with them and use our software to manage those relationships. So there will be some education level of why it’s important to start to migrate retailers off a fair to more of an owned channel.

So it’s interesting. So B2B or wholesale, whatever you want to say, has been around forever. And it was not hot a couple of years ago because all these D2C brands like All Birds and everyone was blowing up. So all brands wanted to be the next all birds. But what’s happening is D2C is a lot more challenging now. The cost of advertising has gone up. Seo is harder to achieve. The cookie-less advertising is making it difficult for brands to grow profitably. So a lot of them are starting to move back to selling retail because it’s more profitable, they can move units faster. And we see more brands starting in retail, starting you’re going wholesale and then maybe eventually moving to D2C. And there are no tools out there like we’re building right now that allow a brand to own a relationship from day one after it’s been established. So we could potentially be a large part of how brands manage their relationships moving forward at the retail level.

Yeah. So I mean, this is my first founder of a software-type thing. I I mentioned, I had a side hustle for the stock business. But what I’ve learned, whether you’re starting a physical goods product or a software product, is you have to do your research and talk to potential customers and listen to what the customers are saying. I’ve seen a lot of brilliant founders and product people build products that nobody wants. At the end of the day, it could be a brilliant product, but if nobody wants it, nobody needs it, it’s not going to work. Taking the time to understand deeply what the customers want, what they need, and how they want it is the most important part of the product, regardless of whether you’re technical or non-technical, you can take the time to do your research and understand the ins and outs of that.

I think so.

I come up with a lot of ideas when I run. So I’m a big runner, and that’s with the time that I think.

Most people procrastinate. I do the opposite, and I get way out ahead of things, and I put pressure on myself to get things done quickly. But then I have to go back and smooth things over. So whatever the opposite of procrastination is, that’s a bad habit of mine.

None. I don’t have any. I have a LinkedIn, but I don’t have social media. I’m not a social media person. I think it’s terrible for society. So I probably have to say LinkedIn, but I don’t have anything else.

Nope.

In school or academics?

Right now. I wouldn’t say most fascinating. Most concerning is the political stuff in the United States.

Yeah, I think it’s a great tool. It’s saved. Knowing how to use it can save you some time. And it’s a great starting point for building content or like that.

Oh, hold on a second. I can tell you. Let me look. Was related to a blog post that we’re about to publish on the Vanik website.

Thank you for having me. It was great to chat.