Getting from DTC to Retail Without Wasting Time and Money, with Paul Jarrett

With Laurier Mandin and Paul Jarrett

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• Paul’s background in advertising and path to entrepreneurship (02:00)
• The origin story of their subscription box business (05:00)
• Creating subscription programs for major brands like Disney and Crayola (10:00)
• How the pandemic forced a complete business pivot (12:00)
• Solving the B2B/DTC fulfillment gap that no one else addressed (15:00)
• Signs a DTC brand is ready for retail expansion (23:49)
• Common pitfalls that kill promising products in retail (25:00)
• Why inventory visibility is crucial for multi-channel success (31:00)
• Strategies for getting better shelf placement as a new brand (37:34)
• Three essential steps for DTC brands planning future retail expansion (41:21)

 

Episode Transcript:

Laurier Mandin: Hey, product people! If you sell direct-to-consumer and dream of getting your product onto retail shelves, this episode could save you thousands in costly mistakes. Welcome to Product: Knowledge, the podcast about creating and marketing products people truly need. I’m Laurier Mandin, President and Lead Consultant of Graphos Product, and author of “I Need That: Creating and Marketing Products People are Compelled to Buy.” The path from direct-to-consumer to retail success is something many product makers dream about, but it’s also where countless promising products have gone to die. Bad logistics choices, bloated inventory. Unnecessary costs can sink even great products before they ever reach a store shelf. Paul Jarrett has come up with a way to help brands bridge this critical, normally very risky, gap. As co-founder and CEO of Bulu, Paul guides emerging inventor entrepreneurs and established consumer brands through the complex maze of fulfillment, distribution, and retail strategy. His expertise helps product makers maximize efficiency and profitability while avoiding the expensive pitfalls that often come with retail expansion. From optimizing DTC fulfillment to building strategic retail partnerships, Paul knows exactly what it takes to scale successfully in an unforgiving retail landscape. I’m delighted to have Paul as today’s guest on Product: Knowledge. Paul, welcome to the show.

Paul Jarrett: Thanks for having me on, man. 

Laurier Mandin: Yeah, I’ve been looking forward to this for weeks. So I’ve got so much. I want to ask you, but to start out with, you’ve got an amazing backstory alongside your wife and business partner, Stephanie, why don’t you start by telling us briefly where you come from yourself, how the two of you met, which blends with your early careers and how all of that brought you to where you are now with Bulu? 

Paul Jarrett: Actually, the first time that we connected, was at the University of Nebraska. And I joined the advertising club and she is the advertising president. And as soon as I saw her kind of running the show, I was like, Ooh, I want to, I want to get in on that. So, stuck with advertising club.

Our careers started in the actual ad agency world. She was a designer and I was kind of on the account side. And, we started by, I think some of our first projects were product packaging.

I remember trying to get a photography of an olive, which is just almost impossible to make an olive look good with a photograph. You need to get 3d rendering. 

Laurier Mandin: It’s not photogenic at all. 

Paul Jarrett: At all. And so, you know, we really like earned our chops there, local agency. I had done an internship in New York city with Nike.

So we moved to New York worked there. Phenomenal experience. I just summarize my New York experience with there is not a whole heck of a lot separating a New York city advertising agency meeting from a local Lincoln, Nebraska advertising agency. But like, you always think there’s like some masterminds behind, you know, everything working in New York city and working in LA and wherever, and it’s still a lot of the same, like, should we do blue or green?

I don’t know. Like go, go do the research to back it up. So, we did that. we had a lot of success. We actually flip flopped a lot. So she went to the account side. I became a copywriter. But between the both of us, I mean, media buying, account management, copywriting, package design, design user interface design.

We kind of did it all. And we’re kind of became known as this wrecking crew of, if you put the Jarrett’s on it, it’s going to get done correctly, Moved to San Francisco. Not because, you know, a lot of times in New York City, if you’re not good enough, you move out to a different satellite office, right?

We chose to move to San Francisco just because we wanted to, right? So we’re working in San Francisco and, I’ll be, darned. We were located above a coffee shop called Epicenter Cafe. And I remember. going to this coffee shop and you know this guy from Foursquare would come tell me about his deal old Dennis, his name was the founder There was Sam from Postmates So there’s all these people that are there kind of you’re just a random person and you know usually your startup or a VC and I was an ad guy and so we would go down there and just look at all these ideas and learn about it.

And once we learned that they were raising capital, and like I always say, like I grew up in a trailer park in Lincoln, Nebraska, and my wife grew up in Wahoo, Nebraska, a town of like 2000. But once we learned that people were willing to, put millions of dollars into your idea. And if it failed, you know, you weren’t getting your trailer towed off, right? Repossessed.

I kind of looked at her and said, you know, like we, we should try this. Like, one of the biggest challenges that these folks are facing is like product market fit, advertising, marketing design. And we understand that. And so. Our wheels were turning. We had, we had a couple ideas. We learned very quickly, like the importance of speed to market, which is a whole nother conversation.

But we had a couple ideas that we just took too long on. But one of the ideas that we had, we were running a half marathon and we got done with the marathon and we received all these samples and I thought to myself, this is crazy that none of these brands are, you know, saying like, giant white dude , you know, puff and puff 

Laurier Mandin: Because you ARE a giant.

Paul Jarrett: Yeah. Yeah. I’m a large Nebraskan. You know, what’s your email? You know, um should, what kind of shoes you’re wearing, none of that. It is just samples given to us. And so, we got back and it’s probably one of the first times where we’re both pretty pretty sore from running and we’re sitting there.

I kind of think to her, I go, you know, there’s a real solution in understanding what the return on investment is on a sample. Like that’s a problem worth solving. And we’re always kind of hardwired problem-solution, right? Like what’s the problem if you can solve it, there’s money behind it. And so. We started looking around and we actually stumbled on Birchbox, which at the time was a brand new subscription box.

It was four to five premium makeup samples. Buy it for ten bucks and then you can select what you like and get full size sample set. And my background being in the ad agency world and also working a lot on vitamins, supplements, healthy snacks, I knew That vitamins and supplements were a fast follower to make up.

So I actually started searching for I always share like with people, how many ideas do you have? And then you go to Google and you’re like, dang it. There’s 20 of them that exist already. 

Laurier Mandin: It’s always amazing, 

Paul Jarrett: is, it’s, it’s, almost like, you know, it’s just heartbreaking, right? Imagine searching for something that you believe is a great idea and it’s not there on Google and you go, wait a second.

You know, my first thought was, did I spell supplements wrong?

Laurier Mandin: Yeah, exactly. Am I using the wrong words? Because I’m sure this is going to show up when I spell it right.

Paul Jarrett: Yep. And then I thought, 

Laurier Mandin: me that feeling. So your hopes got up. 

Paul Jarrett: totally, totally.

And then I thought, okay, maybe it’s a terrible idea. And there’s a reason people aren’t doing it, but you know, everything pointed. And, And, we have a saying, if you’re 80 percent or more sure, you should probably just go for it.

Right. You’re never going to be a hundred percent sure. So looked and looked and we did. We saw like, wow, there’s room in this market back in the day. We call them sample boxes, not subscription boxes. And so we thought there’s room in the market for a vitamin supplement, healthy snack box. What if we go get free samples from brands?

Sell the box for 10 and, you know, have them come back for full size and sell our own products in the mix too. So we ended up doing that. We raised a million dollars. We had no customers. We had a one page website. I cannot believe people gave us a million bucks, right? But we’re off to the races from that.

And so, you know, here we are every month trying to find enough samples for these boxes. We’re getting the boxes out. building the website. There was a really good rewards feedback loop. Then we started manufacturing our own products. We manufactured, I think, under my belt, I’ve done about 100 different products that I’ve helped manufacture.

So we’re selling our own private label within the website as well. And that went really well. And I tell people this, and it’s hard to believe, but our customer acquisition cost was like less than a dollar. I mean, it was just by Google AdWords. They’re their end of story, right? Well, pretty soon within a couple of years, we were the sixth subscription box out there within a couple of years, there was over 14, 000.

I mean, you can find a subscription box for anything. And so very quickly, our customer acquisition costs went to over 10, which in a subscription, all that really matters is. Your customer acquisition costs against your lifetime value. Really? That’s all kind of the formula matters. Cocktail TV ratio, they call it. And that kind of went. You know, sideways, we raised some more capital, but the writing was on the wall that it’s like, look, if you aren’t going to raise a hundred million dollars, like a dollar shave club, like a beauty box you know, make a box or whatever. You’re just not going to be there. And at the time. There had been no big acquisition. Dollar Shave Club hadn’t sold for a billion dollars, right? There was nothing out there. And the subscription box world was really people started looking at it as kind of like the group on coupon savings thing, right? And so we raised capital writing was on the wall and we said, you know, we have all these big brands calling us asking how we’re doing the fulfillment to retail, how we’re doing the fulfillment on subscription, how we’re managing inventory.

We’ve ignored them all, but what if we picked up the phone and did these boxes for big brands and instantly, you know, first company that we talked to GNC, they wanted a box as part of their membership program. So we did that. We made way more money, right? And the simple thinking was big brands. Already have the marketing budgets.

I mean, just on the added value marketing alone, if you could just get them to kind of say, by the way, we have a subscription box that’s enough to make a profitable box. Right. 

Laurier Mandin: Yeah, that’s More traction from that than startups get from all the marketing effort and spend they can put out there just because you’re leveraging the attention they’ve got. It’s this huge …

Paul Jarrett: Yeah. One email from GNC to their customers was worth millions of dollars in years of marketing is that’s the, you know, tough truth. 

Laurier Mandin: plus the cred, right? It’s not try our new startup. It’s try this other great thing we also have.

Paul Jarrett: exactly. Yeah. And so then we just, you know, we made a list. I know Disney was number one, Crayola was two. We just thought, what are cool brands we want to work with? We just picked up the phone. We just pestered brands and we said, let us come give us an hour. We’ll present a concept, a business model.

That was a big thing is we’re enlightening them to what a subscription could really mean for their finances. We quickly found out we were selling the CFOs on the concept because, getting a CMO to say yes is one thing, getting an operations person to say yes is one thing, but if you get a CFO to say yes.

Nobody else matters. Like even the, you know, the CEO doesn’t care. They’re just like, go do it. Right. So we did that talk to those brands. We built program after program. We built over 50 different subscription type consumer packaged goods program. It was ton of fun, three projects for Disney Crayola, Lululemon, Clorox. I mean, you name it, you know, they were probably in the queue waiting for us. So everything’s going well. Pandemic hits. Tough lesson. And this is good for your viewers to hear. Big brands don’t care about contracts in a global pandemic. They really don’t. There’s nothing you’re gonna do. You know, you’re, you’re probably tiny.

You know, we’re working with lots of miracle. You know, I think we had a couple of programs that were making 10 million plus and it 

Laurier Mandin: You’re afraid of the legal costs. They are not. 

Paul Jarrett: 100%. My whole pandemic was spent on the phone with lawyers, right? So all of these up and down and, and we used to not share this because frankly it was embarrassing, but now we’re we’re proud of it, right?

Cause we made it through, but up and down all of those big brands, paused, froze, or stopped their program. And it was really, really, really, difficult because, you know, we’re talking, you know, the pause button, or if they just closed down their retail store and people weren’t getting the boxes in store, I mean, we’re talking millions of dollars in revenue, just gone, vanished overnight per brand. Right. And so our investors and, you know, I’ll just say. Our investors thought we should do one thing while Stephanie and I still saw this opportunity because we have a huge warehouse. We have all the software figured out all the people figured out all of the hard things over 10, 12 years have been figured out.

This machine was operating, making money, but it was just. You know, kind of the, the key piece of the customers were just gone. Right. And so we actually cut a really great, great, great, deal with our venture capitalists. So we acquired the company a hundred percent in October of 2023. It’s embarrassing to say, but we still weren’t sure what we were going to do.

Like it was such a long battle, you know, negotiating the terms, getting all that. We just didn’t have time to really figure out like, okay, you have this warehouse and logistics company, who’s your audience, what are you going to sell to? So unknowingly or rather quickly, we. Get the documents and we get to sign and acquire the company and we kind of turn around and we’re still hemorrhaging money and we’re like, Oh, no, what are we going to do?

And so we just did the thing that we always do, which is pick up the phone. Identify different, target audiences, call them up and say, Hey, what problems are you encountering? Right. it probably took us about 150 calls until we started to go, wait a second. There’s a big problem that consumer packaged goods brands of all size have, and it’s so blatantly obvious, but it can’t be that simple.

Can it? And so we called a few more, changed up our marketing. We kind of got a little mini ad campaign running and really what we discovered. Was how to help these smaller brands ship like the major brands. And what that means is most consumer package goods companies, they’ll start out and they’ll do their shipping, themselves, they have their Shopify website, they do it themselves.

Then maybe they get like an Amazon person that like, don’t worry. I know somebody that knows Amazon. Right. And then they might grow big enough where they go and get a 3PL or a third party logistics company maybe a ship bob, ship monk or, or ship fill in the blank. Right. those typically only can handle direct-to-consumers homes.

Or direct to retail and so we went well wouldn’t it be interesting if we could ship both to retail places And to customers homes and take the social media orders and really integrate everything into one dashboard So people can manage their inventory levels because that’s the biggest thing that we see as a challenge in logistics is not just getting the price to where it makes sense, but actually managing your inventory So we picked up the phone.

I think we were down to about six small clients. We picked up the phone and we started saying hey This sounds crazy. We’re in Lincoln, Nebraska. You can give us all your inventory. We can go B2B, whatever amount, whatever type of product, any way you want to do it. You know, cut the deal with target to do wacky packages, end caps, whatever.

We can go to customers homes and we can take your TikTok orders, your Amazon orders, et cetera. And that really doesn’t exist and so we’ve grown out over 60 clients and, you know, since pretty much January of 24, grew really rapidly and it’s basically, we’re just focused on shipping B2B, D2C, taking those social media orders and Amazon.

And the thing that really has helped a ton of our clients is. We encouraged them to test different packages, different packing types. So, we have a pancake brand that on their website, they sell variety packs, but on other websites, they’ll only sell individual pancake mixes. Right. And that’s really the thing that we found.

That’s really helpful for entrepreneurs is on the fly. it’s always afterthought of like, oh, no, you know, cyber monday is coming up or, oh, no, it’s the holiday season. What should we do and them to be able to put together holiday packages or different gifts or whatever, and do that on the fly and have us be able to deliver it to any location, any amounts that’s been huge and are, I’ll leave it at this probably the biggest.

Opportunity that we see the brands that we work with. I almost would say exploiting or taking advantage of is with us. What they’ve been able to do is call mom and pops retailers and say, Hey, you don’t have to buy a pallet. You don’t have to even buy a case. You just go to this link and you pick out five blueberry, two lemonade, and Boo is going to get it out by the next day.

So, those mid sized market kind of grocery chains or mid sized stores, their ability to order exactly what they need from those brands versus, a pallet or whatever, that’s been probably the biggest opportunity we’ve seen our partners doing.

Laurier Mandin: On both sides too, because for the brands, they don’t want to fulfill huge orders to retailers that aren’t going to sell it all. And then you have this problem with returns and in product that’s getting stale dated and all those other things in the case of pancakes. So I find just the amount of flexibility. In what you do, it blows my mind. It doesn’t seem possible even to me. I mean, and that’s, that’s a good thing because the kind of problems you and Stephanie solve and your, resilience is just remarkable to me too. Your resilience, your boldness, the fact that you would do what some agencies I know might, you know, create our top 50 dream list of clients.

Well, you’re calling those people and securing the business and, then things go sideways with the pandemic.

And you just think, well, okay, let’s just reinvent our business entirely. I’m 80 percent sure. Are you okay? Here we go. 

Paul Jarrett: Yeah. Ignorance is bliss. when we first started with our subscription box, we thought. For sure that people wanted to know what the return on investment was with a sample packet, but actually all they really wanted was to get their product in front of buyers. Like that’s really what we found out that they were trying to do is just be seen.

And, most entrepreneurs, the way that they think they’re going to make money, probably only about 10 percent of them actually make money that way. It’s usually. In that process of doing and really listening and asking questions that you find out like, Oh, this product needs to be sold out of a doctor’s offices, right?

Or, I’m breaking even at retail, but I’m making my margin at my website, right? that’s the thing that like, I really wish entrepreneurs. I’ve just seen too many of them fail where they’re just so hard at it about, I’m going to make money this way and I’m going to do it this way.

This person and this person, well, odds are, you’re probably not going to make money the way that you think that you are. We didn’t think over 12 years, we’re going to evolve into a logistics brand, but just by listening and looking for that hard problem to solve that, that’s what always has kept us alive for another day.

Right. 

Laurier Mandin: Yeah. When we talk about your resiliency, I think that’s the biggest part of it is you have the openness that a lot of entrepreneurs and even smart business people lack is to be able to look around, to be very sensitive to what doors might. You’ll be able to kick open and then giving that a try because saying there seems to be something here are you noticing what I am? let’s try that corner and going over there.

Paul Jarrett: Yeah. There’s a lot of, I tell people, there’s a lot ego death, right? There’s, there’s, some of the, 

Laurier Mandin: Between ego and the paralysis that comes out of that.

Paul Jarrett: Some people call it courage. My wife would call it my shamelessness, but, there’s, been plenty of those phone calls where, I ended up looking back on them and kind of cringing quite a bit, right.

But there were plenty of phone calls where. You know, net net, the end of them was like, I don’t know. What, what would you do if you were in my shoes? I got this logistics, I have a hundred thousand square feet. We have all the software, we have everything built. Like you tell me what you think we should do.

There’s even been times where it’s just like, Hey, help me out here, toss me a bone, toss me some business. Right. But the cool thing is, If you have the, right intention of those things and you can kind of always look back and like laugh at those times of like, man, we were really down and out and, we had to do whatever we could to survive.

But I do think that openness and vulnerability and everybody that I talked to, for the most part, they want to see entrepreneurs succeed. Right? Like they want to be part of the story. They want to, help you any way that you can. And you can’t go into every single thing acting like you’re the cat’s meow.

There’s definitely sometimes where you’re just got to go, we know a, and we know Z, but we need your help. Or we need somebody’s help to help us fill in those blanks. And yeah, that’s really how we discovered this lack of B2B D2C fulfillment, which is just wild even to this day, there’s.

Very few places doing what we’re doing.

Laurier Mandin: And when we talk about failing fast, I think a lot of entrepreneurs imagine that means fail the business, as opposed to admitting that this approach isn’t working, let’s try these alternate ones. try these other directions and keep ourselves open to doing that. Let’s let the existing things we’re doing continue, but try these other options and just keep on working these alternate opportunities in the background to see if we’re going to start to catch and get traction on one of them.

Paul Jarrett: Yeah, absolutely. That whole, you know, you have to really surround yourself with great people and really understand when, you know, we always talk about the model when the business model isn’t working right. Like in, in the model might be to make, you know, a profitable business where you have some freedom and might be to scale to a billion, but you really need to understand like, is the work that I’m doing now Building a model out or I always feel like there’s a big difference between a hustle and a model, right? 

A lot of people can hustle and make money but can you actually do a scalable repeatable thing and that’s really hard when you work in a direction and you get there and the painful realization of like Ooh, this, this isn’t really a business model that.

I, will ever be able to see succeed at the level that I want to. And that’s, that’s tough. Like saying no and admitting, you don’t necessarily have to fail the business, but I would say. We had three or four business models fail, right? So in a way, those are almost like those business models within the name of Bulu failed.

But yeah, you’ll, you’ll figure it out 

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Laurier Mandin: I’m sure a lot of listeners are wondering, would this work for me right now with what I’m doing? So how do you know? when you’re looking at potential business partners, customers, What are the key indicators you would look at to know a DTC brand is ready for retail expansion for using Bulu? And on the other side of that, what are the red flags that would tell them you’re not ready now? You should be patient. Don’t take the leap quite now. Work on a few other things first.   

Paul Jarrett: Yeah. We talk to, man, we talked to dozens of brands a week and we don’t get paid for it, but we’re a lot of VC firms, a lot of people, even buyers, they call us and kind of go, you know, what do you think is going to work? Is this smarter? Is this not smart? And I would say, the first thing that comes to mind is one of the biggest mistakes I see is people go into retail way too soon.

They can’t really afford it. They think just because they get on Target’s shelves, things are going to be magical and it’s all going to work out. And I’ve seen retail be the kiss of death for some of the best products, right? the number one thing that we look for hen we work with smaller brands, so we work with some brands who, probably ship, you know, we we’ve, we’ve had some brands that were on Kickstarter.

We have a computer company and it was kind of a roll of the dice of like, should we work with them or not? And it was, it, it paid off well because there was a hole in the market for this thing. And, and it worked out, but I would say the number one thing that we look for is like how involved are the founders or the people that are really driving the final decision making, do they know the product?

Do they understand, do they have a plan? Right. it’s amazing how many people finish their product and they think that’s the finish line. And I’m like, Oh no, no, no. That’s. the, you know, the running bib. You just got the number to begin the race. The other thing that we really look a lot at is like, do they have their heads wrapped around manufacturing?

We get into, you know, for smaller brands that we’re really unsure of, we look and see, what are they selling the product for? What are they getting made for? How are they getting it made? Do they have multiple facts? So almost in a sense, we start to probably look like retail buyers for some brands.

the other thing that I would say that we really look for is the flexibility of the product, right? Is this product able to be relabeled and marketed as something else? Is it able to be sold in different channels? The things that are probably the red flags are, too many products, right?

Like, just, too many SKUs, too many variations, too much dead inventory. When we quote a project out, we require from a lot of brands that they send us their historical, shipping volumes. So we can put it into our machine and understand how it’s going to sell. This is a new one as of recently.

If people don’t have a retail strategy, it’s really hard for us to say yes, which is very different than. Even five, six years ago, right? Like you could be an e commerce only and there are plenty of brands that can be like e commerce only, but if there isn’t a plan eventually to get into retail or they’re not thinking about it or they say, no, I’m, never going to go into retail.

We kind of like run the other way. Right. 

Laurier Mandin: That’s really interesting. When you talk about having a retail strategy, because a retail strategy with Bulu is different from what a retail strategy without Bulu would look like. So how do you advise them to map that out, not having had any retail experience yet, and also recognizing they’re getting into something that’s different from what they’re going to read about if they go researching how to develop a retail  strategy. 

Paul Jarrett: Well, we want to see who they’re working with. You know, what companies like almost, I would say, like, we don’t have to agree with the strategy. We just need to see that they’re thinking about it. Right. And I would say a lot of people have taken kind of that retail strategy that we’re offering them of selling any amount to any brand.

And this is the dream for us there’s a client that’s shipping, you know, anywhere from 500 a month to 5, 000 units a month. Right. And they’ve kind of topped out and, and they’re just doing e commerce. They’re just doing online. They’re doing Amazon. They’re doing all those things. But we get the founder on the phone and the founder. Is not shy to pick up the phone. I’m thinking of we have a client called Heavenly Waffles, right? 

Laurier Mandin: Saw that. 

Paul Jarrett: Yeah. You know, the founder wants to get into retail and there’s a big difference of a founder pitching retail versus like a broker or somebody else. I mean, founders that I know, they don’t give up easily.

Right. And a lot of those buyers really like to see that. And when we could unleash Bob at Heavenly Waffles with. Hey, you can go to Costco. You can go to any of these small mom and pops brands. You can go sell any amount and we’ll get them out the next day. I mean that there’s almost like this light bulb goes off and these founders are like, wait, I can go sell any amount to anybody and you guys will fulfill it.

We have brand, I love this guy. Actually, he’s out of Canada. It’s in a ChapStick case, but it’s a mosquito repellent. He comes to retail buyer events in the United States. But on his way, he drives his car and he hits up every retailer he can find, and he just walks right in and goes and tells them, like, here’s what it looks like, here’s X, Y, Z I’ve seen this guy over a two-year period, get into about 600 stores just by doing that strategy alone. 

Laurier Mandin: that’s amazing. That’s what you’re looking for in a founder, right? It’s someone who is just willing to do that and is able to. So it’s not just the willingness, but it’s that ability to get these retailers to understand why. And it’s just a tiny amount of shelf space. You’re going to sell these things, get this much great margin, and it’s not a product that really matches anything else they’re buying. I can’t imagine, it sounds fantastic to have an insect repellent that’s just spot-precision like that. 

Paul Jarrett: Exactly. And it’s almost, you know, it’s the same, you know, us having pitched for capital or pitch for business, it almost comes down to that. Like, man, if we can find that founder. That has the problem, the solution, you know, and they got kind of the key pieces and were able to take the headache of logistics off of them.

You know, game over. Yeah, there’s, and there’s, a few other ones, that run a little bit different strategy, but I’d say for the most part, when we find that founder, that’s willing to pound the pavement and to make the sales and they got a good solid pitch. And then the retail buyer sees that they’re working with us and we can handle EDI compliance and whatever else they need.

That’s really kind of the magic formula.

Laurier Mandin: It is, and when you talk about expanding, Into this whole brave new world, how do you suggest that entrepreneurs look at and plan, forecast, manage their inventory?

How should they approach forecasting and cashflow differently when they go into balancing both DTC, which they’ve been doing at a fairly decent level to be able to work with you and retail channels now? 

Paul Jarrett: I can’t emphasize it enough of how, and it pains me to say this cause we’ve built and sold a software and I’d argue that at times we’re more almost software minded than we are logistics minded. But I really can’t convey to people how archaic the logistics industry is.

Right. I mean, there’s still a lot of companies that do what we’re doing and they’re running on Excel, which I think is crazy. There’s a lot of companies that have paper processes within their warehouses. And I think the thing that we see and the biggest pain point that we see is Nobody has a firm grasp on their inventory, and especially if they have expiration dates, that gets really scary.

So one of the key things that people need to make sure, and it’s really simple, is they need to make sure that whoever they’re working with There’s APIs or in data that’s flowing in real time, because like with us, you get a portal and you can see what we’re doing, when we’re doing, how we’re doing it.

But, and we set it up for our clients where when inventories levels run low, that they get alerted to go make more, manufacture more product and probably the biggest. Thing that I’ve seen a lot of people run into is they’re doing a little shipping here. They’re doing a little shipping themselves. They store something here or there and inventories just get completely out of whack.

And I’m talking to even some of the bigger brands that we work with. So I think so much is lost on, bad tracking of inventory that would be if I was had a consumer package goods product and I was looking to distribute, sell, et cetera, I’m not okay with emails going back and forth. I’m not okay with a CSV or Excel file going back and forth.

I need to see that things are all connected and it’s all leading to one platform where I can track everything. 

Laurier Mandin: That single source of truth, right? Where you know it’s accurate.

Paul Jarrett: That is exactly right. Yep. You’re going to be pushed with logistics companies to not have that. And they’ll say whatever they can.

The logistics industry is notoriously shady and frustrating. And, we’re one of those few that we didn’t intend to go into it this way. But what’s crazy is just running a business that does what we say that we’re going to do, and we just want to make 10 percent margin because.

We want to push all that money back to our clients for marketing because we know they need those extra dollars for that. But I would say that inventory is the number one thing that people, and I’m not just talking about their product. I’m talking boxes, packaging tape. Like they really need to get a firm grip on all of that because if they run out of boxes, that’s, for some people just as bad as running out of the product. 

Laurier Mandin: I find it just amazing to think about, the range in the businesses that you’ve worked with, from Disney, Crayola, Lululemon to the startup insect repellent on a stick.

Paul Jarrett: Yeah.

Laurier Mandin: What are the unique challenges that the smaller brands face when they’re entering retail compared to the larger established brands like the fortune 500s that they’ve got this customer base, they’ve got all that brand awareness, and now I’ve got these little unknowns that are The first time a customer ever hears of the brand may be seeing it in a retail store, which we buy like that all the time.

But how can these small operators plan for that and overcome the challenges that they’re going to face being new and unknown? 

Paul Jarrett: The thing that comes to mind is like you have to have a grip on cash flow. You have to have a grip on terms. The big brands have that flexibility to kind of sign checks and have different terms and whatever. But for the smaller brands, man, like you need that to know when your payments coming to know when you’re going to be able to buy some more.

You need to have all of that cash flow down because if one of your partners gets off a little bit and they’re not giving you the right terms, it’s really easy for brands to run out of money, even if they have a great product. Right. So that’d probably be the number one thing that I see is everybody with the smaller brands, they get really excited about these opportunities, but they haven’t thought about like, oh, you got to pay for the shipping or you got to do this or you got to do that.

And it all looks like it works out. But they have bad terms of, you know, 14 or, or, you know, pay up front or whatever. And that really sends things out of whack. And, and we’ve, I feel like we’ve gone above and beyond to help, even at times negotiate on our brand’s behalf to get those terms the right way.

But that’s really difficult. your first time around and you need to really find partners that you trust and really say, like, what would you do? Why don’t you give me those terms? Like, why not give me the same terms as Disney because you’re competing with them. And I’ve always found that line of thinking of like, Hey, how can I ever compete with Disney if they have these terms and I have these terms?

Why not give ME these? And I think people would be surprised how many things you know, UPS, FedEx, other people would be willing to be flexible, especially for a certain amount of time again, because they’re kind of willing that it’s like they want to see the entrepreneurs succeed, right? Everybody kind of wishes they were in the lines, the trenches with them.

So that’s probably one of the big things that I see. And then, like I was saying before. Man, there’s just sometimes those entrepreneurs will agree to certain things and they turn around and their manufacturers can’t make things the way that they think that they can, right? And then a really silly one is like a lot of entrepreneurs don’t think about returns and customer service, right? 

That’s always a big heartache for some companies, like some fulfillment companies and 3PLs, they won’t even take your returns, right? So can you imagine you get everything all set up and you sign a contract and you get locked in And then all of a sudden, you know, they don’t take returns and then you get dinged by Walmart or whoever it is, or customers get frustrated. really big thing that I see is people underestimate the customer service and the returns, right? Like after you sell the product, it’s not over.

There’s going to be challenges that you need to handle. And I think that’s really important again to sink in the data. With the fulfillment companies that you’re working with, we take returns and there’s even a couple of companies. We work with a furniture company where we open up all the packaging, polish it down, et cetera, et cetera, and repackage it and we’ll sell it as new.

And that’s called the reverse logistics. And sometimes people have a whole nother 3PL just to handle their reverse logistics, whereas we’re kind of like, it should be all in one. So that they can go sell and not have to worry about all the afterparts.

Laurier Mandin: Such important stuff in there. I’ve had clients that think they won the lottery when they end up being at Walmart or Costco or Lowe’s only to find out it’s the kiss of death. And I’ve got clients that would never go back to those places.

I’m interested in, how you manage when you have this distribution network that is all of these smaller businesses trying to determine where to place the product on shelves. Because that’s another challenge that new brands have going into retail. They assume they’re going to be placed at the end of the shelf or at the cash register.

And they find out that they’re impossible to find in the store because brands pay to be in those premium locations, and those locations are worth money to the stores. So they have to really have a reason to put you in a great spot. In a nutshell, because that’s a huge question. That’s a podcast episode for sure

in and of itself, but how do you advise new partners to get to understand that and to end up coming into it in a way that’s going to be successful for  them?

Paul Jarrett: Yeah. I think there’s a lot of ways to answer that question. And, the thing that I would focus on is as silly as it sounds, the relationship with the buyer, I would really work on that relationship, find out what their needs are, you know, everybody puts these buyers on a pedestal, on a platform. Right. And they’re kind of got the magic wand of, they can put you wherever, but when’s the last time as a brand, you went and looked at their planogram or ask them, what are your goals? What are you trying to accomplish? had a brand that did that and they The buyer was like, I’m really got to work on my Christmas items and whatnot. And we were able to put together like an advent calendar with different snacks together specifically for that purpose. And I think they sold something like 80,000 units.

Right. put yourselves in the shoes of the buyer and to kind of understand, you know, not what they need today, not what they needed yesterday, but also like, what would they be thinking of in the future? And, how awesome would it be if you’re a buyer for somebody to say like.

Hey, I know Valentine’s Day 2026, right? We’re thinking about doing this thing. What do you think? And the thing that I have learned about the buyer world is, man, if you get a good relationship with the right kind of buyer that’s networked in, they’re going to, they’re going to, put you on with other people.

I attend ECRM. I don’t know if people are familiar with ECRM Range Me. We actually built a software that became rangeme.com. We act as a buyer at a lot of conferences because of our background and what we’ve seen and how we’ve developed software for buyers.

So I feel like in a way I’m kind of in that buyer circle and in that world and it just without fail, Buyers get favorites and they develop good relationships with people and they’ll tell them and they’ll help them along the path. But I don’t think it should be one of those things where, you work with a buyer, they tell you what you need.

You got to, okay, done, you know. End of story. One product I remember was doing terribly in the candy section and I just kept pushing this person to talk to the buyer and I was doing email intros. I’m like, go talk to him, go talk to him. Finally, they added protein to the gummy and they put it in the sports nutrition aisle.

And the thing sold like crazy as like sports, nutrition, protein gummies. Right. And it really wasn’t that hard for the person to change our product, but it was just really sitting down with the buyer and listening to like what they need, what their needs are and the person not being married to their product being a candy, but they were open to making it a little bit different.

And so, that’s what I, would do, is I’d really. focus on trying to develop my relationship with a few key buyers, do well for them, and then ask them to do some intros for you and to put you in front of other buyers.

Laurier Mandin: That’s a brilliant answer, and just recognizing being flexible, even if reformulation sounds like a really big step, but if you’re making a product like that, you don’t even have to reformulate the core one. You can create a little spinoff of it and try that, and see how that flies in this different category.

Paul Jarrett: And if it doesn’t work, a lot of them will take care of you too. You know what I mean? Like if they’re like, Ooh, that was a bad recommendation or whatever. 

Laurier Mandin: I think they’ll respect you for trying different things and saying, well, you know, we’ve got this new thing that we’ve got a sense is going to work. Can we give this a test in some of your stores? There’s a lot of appreciation for bold entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs that are willing to be flexible and aren’t just gonna bang their head against the wall until either the wall caves or they collapse themselves. 

I’ve got one wrap up question. for all the DTC people that are listening, who know retail expansion is in their future, but maybe not tomorrow, maybe they’ve got to take some steps first. And that might be a lot of brands, that are thinking of doing this. 

What are the most important things they should start doing right now to set themselves up for success when the right time comes and be ready for the questions you’re going to ask them when you’re qualifying them to work with Bulu?

Paul Jarrett: I would say number one, start again, like developing relationships, not even with buyers, with fulfillment companies, with manufacturers pick up the phone because it’s really hard. To go out and sell and then kind of try to make up the back end of it. Right. You want to have your backup manufacturers, you want to have your backup suppliers, you want to have those ready.

One thing I would do is talk to other brands that have got on shelves, right? Like surround yourself by people that have already done, what you’re trying to do and really listen to those people. And is like, get into those circles, work in getting those relationships because.

Some of the manufacturers and packaging people and logistics people, they are your best way into the you know, and people just never think to ask that or know that. Right. Get in surround yourself with people that have done what you’re doing. Right. And ask them for tips.

And as wild as it sounds, I’ve seen a lot of success, and and went with brands where, you know, Expo West is coming up and some other stuff is coming up. Like, don’t worry so much about having a booth or. Kind of being part of that show, just go attend the show and like float around, ask questions, network because then when the time comes, now you have like connections in the manufacturing industry, the logistics industry.

You’re talking to brands that have done what you’ve done. They’re giving you tips and then people I, I don’t know if this is the case for other people, but the relationships that I’ve developed by attending trade ventures have been. Exponentially helpful. And following up with those people. And not always just asking people for something, but just, dropping somebody an email and saying, Hey, Brad, we met three months ago at Expo West.

You had mentioned this. I saw this article. Here you go. no no questions asked. And those, those are the things that I would be doing is almost like setting up the table. So then when you are about to hit retail, You have phone lines to people that are going to help you because it’s almost inevitable when you get in retail, something is going to happen where you need to pick up the phone and get some help from somewhere.

And you don’t want to be in a rush when you do that. You need to go like, Oh. I know I call Paul on this logistics thing and he might not be the answer, but he’ll know where to get the answer. Right. Oh, I can call Brad. Like, he has a line on a cranberry ingredient that I needed. Right.

And, and he might not know the cranberry ingredient, but he knows people in that industry that I can talk to. Because as much as think, want to believe software technology, a great product sells itself What I found is still in this industry is relationships are a big deal and knowing where to go to get answers.

And then having those people help you learn what questions that you should be asking. That’s, really important. And I think by doing those things. You’re armed with the knowledge of like, Oh, I know what I should be asking the logistics company. What I should be asking other people.

Oh, I don’t know what to do. I’m going to talk to this person that I know and ask them to point me in the right direction. And, so much of my days are spent connecting people to the right people. And in turn that takes care of all the business that we Like If you can become one of those people that people go to. And they know that they’re not going to get jerked around and they’re going to get directed to the right spot. Opportunities tend to flow your way.

Laurier Mandin: Yea, that’s all great advice. Get off your island, build a network, get out there going to shows where you can just flutter around and find those conversations and meet people you can help and who can help you and so you can do what that true network does. So you have phone numbers to call And people to fall back on that, that’s all hugely valuable advice.

And it comes naturally for someone like you, Paul, being an extrovert and being as bold and adventurous as you are. And for anybody who isn’t, they’ve got to recognize that, you reach down into yourself and find that part of you that can do it, because that is what’s going to bring you the success that you want to have your product or your products and to make it all work. 

Paul Jarrett: I have to share this last part. I always go to these events and network with people on that. And they’re like, how do you do that? I’m like, Oh, trust me. It’s, It’s, awkward. You never get over it. But here’s the thing. People at events or people that you pick up the phone and call them up they’re in the same position.

Right. Like they’re, they’re at the show trying to do the same thing. They’re networking, they’re trying to do this. So I think if you remind yourself of that, it’s always going to be a little bit awkward or a little bit weird, but odds are people are relieved that somebody just comes and talks to them or they pick up the phone.

Right. And so we’re all trying to do the same thing and developing that network and people on your team is just valuable. 

Laurier Mandin: We imagine that our heroes, the people that we see that are killing it haven’t gone through the pain that we are that, we’re the first to experience this stuff and chances are they’ve been through it more times than you have. And that pain is a friend of theirs too. They just know how to push through it.

Paul Jarrett: That’s right. 

Laurier Mandin: That’s it for this episode of Product: Knowledge and my conversation with Paul Jarrett, co founder of Bulu. Find out more about Bulu at bulugroup.com and Paul’s work at pauljarrett.com. You’ll find links in the show notes. Be sure to also visit graphosproduct.com where you’ll find all the podcast episodes with transcripts and get insights from our blog. And you can subscribe to my daily emails or buy “I Need That” at lmandin.com. Thanks for listening, I’m Laurier Mandin.