Field Notes
Short notes from the field: retail buying, merchandising, and category strategy, written from a decade of doing the work in-house. New notes land here as I write them, usually pulled straight from a pattern I keep seeing repeat across otherwise unrelated brands.
For years, footwear walls told a simple story: specialty product for the dedicated few, accessible product for everyone else. The assumption underneath it was that volume retail and premium price points couldn't share a shelf.
When a category slows down, the usual reflexes kick in: cut the assortment, discount the slow movers, wait for weather. I've sat in those meetings. The reflexes treat the symptom.
Every brand says it wants to protect its price. Fewer are willing to do what that actually takes on the buying side: a tight assortment instead of a broad one, balanced inventory instead of a big opening bet, and a replenishment program that keeps winners in stock.
The short answer: reach the right buyer with a proven item, a clean margin and logistics story, and real evidence of demand. Costco buys a tight, curated assortment, so a winning pitch is narrow and deep.
evo curates a tight action-sports assortment and runs a strict vendor routing guide; REI buys through category merchandisers and holds every brand to published sustainability standards. Most brands are turned down on readiness, not on product.
The short answer: meet the quality standards first, then reach the right regional or category buyer with a product that fits the store and proof it sells. Local is a real doorway, not a slogan.
The short answer: pick the right door — shelf, Target Plus, or an accelerator — and walk through it with proof of demand and an operation that can keep up. Target buys brands that already have momentum somewhere else.
The short answer: build proof of demand, pick the right entry door — Sparked, the marketplace, an accelerator, or a category buyer — and arrive with economics that survive beauty-retail margins.
A retail buying and merchandising consultant helps you decide what to sell, how to position and price it, which retailers and marketplaces to pursue, and how to build the operation behind it — from the buyer’s side of the table.
Plain definitions of the retail terms behind the work: market access, assortment and category strategy, MAP policy, full-price sell-through, replenishment, and more.
These aren’t roundups of someone else’s research. Every note starts with something that actually happened in a buying meeting, a launch, or a category that went quiet, distilled down to the part worth remembering. Most of what lands on a retail buyer’s desk rhymes across categories, even when the products have nothing in common.
If a note here sounds like your situation, that’s not a coincidence. Read it, see if it fits, and if it does, the next step is usually a short conversation, not a pitch.