but there's three main ways to meet buyers across all categories the first is there's things called brokers brokers are people who have their ear to the ground on the up and coming brands and they kind of soft picture the buyers up front so that's what happened when i launched is a couple of brokers reached out and said hey i actually know that this buyer is looking for a brand that's doing exactly what you're doing do you want me to soft pitch them on your behalf what does it take to get your product on the shelves
at major retailers like target and walmart well you're in luck because today's guest has been a buyer for many years and now has created a product of her own that she's been able to get on shelves at target so if you're interested in hearing how she did that keep on listening hi there it's sawa and welcome to another episode of the she's off script podcast for today's episode we meet jasmine as i mentioned she's been a buyer for many years at amazon target general mills and now that she has her own product it's called be
rooted it's a stationery company that's inclusively designed so if you would like to hear the steps she went through to get her product at target keep on listening we're going to be talking about how to find buyers how to get their attention how to stay on shelves how she got her influencer strategy together and so much more so if you think this will be helpful for you as you create your own brand keep on watching also don't forget to subscribe and hit that notification bell so you don't miss our next episode alright let's go ahead
and jump in jasmine foster welcome to shoesoft script thank you for being here thank you so much for having me so for any of our listeners who haven't heard of you could you share who you are and what you do yes so i am a long-time lover of retail i spent most of my career background either growing developing or coming up with inclusive assortment strategies for some of your favorite major retailers like target and amazon um and i am also now the founder and owner of the rooted which is an inclusively designed stationery brand created
to uplift and celebrate women of color so how did you initially get into the retail buying space yeah so i was a business marketing major at the kelley school of business at indian university and i always thought i was going to be one of those people that went into advertising and i was going to move to new york and come up with amazing commercials and then i found out that target was coming on campus to talk about the retail path and after chatting with them a little bit i was like wait like there's people that
actually make the decision behind what ends up in stores like i never really thought about all the upfront work that had to go into that and i was like that's really cool like i can get to pick what goes on shelves what you know people get to see meet amazing brands and also like make a decent amount of money and i have to live in new york with like four roommates in a small like 200 square foot apartment so that's right wow so i kind of stumbled upon um about half through an internship opportunity and
then fell in love with retail from there so i feel like working in that retail buying space you are uniquely positioned not only to learn from the emerging brands you're working with but also to see the gaps in the market so why was stationary the gap that you chose to fill yeah i mean you're absolutely right the one the last jobs that i had was i led the multicultural beauty strategy and also led the multicultural doll strategy and so i was able to see firsthand the impact of having inclusive assortment strategies um and the white
space that like it just is crazy to believe that we've gotten to be this far and there were still products that weren't for everyone's hair type and for everyone's complexion and skin care that didn't work for dark spots and just like all of these gaping glaring holes and one area that i always asked if i could work on was home like when i walked the home aisles of target um you know in all of your major retailers when i looked back at like what my homes look like i never felt like there was really that
one brand that got my aesthetic that was really speaking to me and at the time i was asked to just focus on dolls and beauty but it was something that really stuck with me um i've always been a long time lover of stationery but when you look at the category it's usually very whimsical and cute but the wording is just like slightly off to what maybe what me and my friends would use and if there was ever anyone adorning the cover she didn't look like me and so i wanted to create a brand that felt
really truly truly authentic to me myself and my community and that for young girls to be able to connect with now from the background you've described you clearly weren't in the production space so how did you make the leap from having the idea and seeing the gap to actually executing i think when i first came across you you had a spiral journal and stickers so how does one even go about producing those things yeah that's a really good question because it's people will tell you oh you can just google but like google doesn't give you
all the answers by any means um when i first started off it was a lot of trial and error so it was finding um factories or producers and that could produce to the specs and the qualities that i was looking for and i found that domestically there really wasn't the printers that could produce the type of quality that i was looking for and so that is that's an emerging theme i hear from a lot of founders is we went straight to asia yeah you know i think that there's certain industries that have been historically in
the united states and so there's been lots of investment in technology and manpower behind them and then there's certain industries where there's not so for example beauty beauty you can absolutely find your your manufacturer here in the us there's tons of amazing uh chemists and labs here that like produce really high quality formulas here in the us you may get packaging overseas but you can produce beauty products really well here i find that at least in the paper industry a lot of paper printing and packaging happens in asia and since the majority of my product
is paper based as i was able to scale i ended up needing to leverage the expertise of where the majority of paper printing was happening and so that's how i ended up finding a supplier in china now i've heard you talk about the importance of leveraging your network so were you able to leverage not only your network but perhaps even some of the founders that you had worked with as a retail buyer in order to kind of navigate those initial steps oh absolutely um i was super blessed with i had a friend of mine who
also happened to be my soror who was in the stationary industry and when i was looking to expand abroad i was able to leverage her network to ask her hey has have you you know who's the factor that you really trust and that you loved working with and she was able to pass along a couple of names to people that she had worked with and had i had not had that initial kind of connection i'm sure i would have been able to find somebody at some point but at the moment in time that i needed
it um having that network is so important but even just small things throughout the process of me you know needing to work on my p l and wondering if you know who had a you know a really good cfo outsource cfo that worked with or hey i'm considering doing this you know what how would you approach it i've leveraged my network so deep and i think it's so important to be not be afraid to ask those questions because they help you make less mistakes you're going to make mistakes but they help you make less than
a six up right yep you've got to shortcut it however possible um and i mentioned i i think i came across you either on instagram or on google but when i google your brand today there's already a lot of media about you what was your media and influencer strategy for increasing that brand awareness because clearly that has made a great impact for your brand yeah um well thank you so much for saying that it's so funny that you said that you can google and find my brand because if we were this time last year if
you googled and tried to find my brand that was not the case um truthfully from all of my years of being in retail i would have told a brand hey like spend the first year to really owning your audience you know develop your social network build up an email list and then getting into then get into retail because it's going to be really important for you to have that brand equity prior to getting into retails that you're able to drive your consumer there however i got the opportunity to pitch to major retailers a couple of
months into owning my brand that it was so fast and i certainly was going to ask you about that so because of that i knew that if i said yes to one of those opportunities i would not have the um the email list and the grand social media following that i would have normally recommended to someone prior to entering into retail so for me i said their options on the table are invest in the pr agency invest in influencers or go do the what i think is a little bit inauthentic is buy the followers and
buy the email list that helps nobody is just buying thoughts they're not going to buy me so very early on i ended up investing in pr who also also runs my influencer um as well and it's a bipart owned pr agency called disrupt and they were very very incremental uh or instrumental excuse me in um creating that brand awareness up front so i knew that i didn't have this i think when i launched in retail i maybe had 2 000 instagram followers and even less email subscribers and i knew that that was a buyer i
guess putting on your buyer hat what kind of stats would you have expected one of your emerging brands to have had i will tell you this as a buyer there was always four things i was looking for do you have sales traction somewhere so do you have traction on your website do you have traction on independent stores somewhere do you have some cell attraction the second thing would be what is your your um social following so if you don't have a mint social you know cell attraction yet do you have people that like believe in
what you're trying to do and then i would say the third thing is do you have an amazing story um and you know i want to be the buyer that breaks you and then the last thing is if none of those things hold true or if some of those things hold true do you really cater to a niche that is that my assortment is missing and so i think that what benefited be rooted is that we really care to a niche that was missing in their assortment and so even though maybe some of those other
things were lacking because there was that true white space that's why we got the nod to get the opportunity um but kind of to go back to your original question is it was truly that upfront investment and i was paying for pr influencer before i was even really making the sales to keep up with paying a pr influencer but i knew that that upfront investment would pay dividends that if i started to build some traction prior to the launch i would already have somewhat of a recognition with the editors so that when i was able
to go into that target launch they weren't just hearing about me for the first time they had already started hearing about me through holiday they would get excited about this news and so i knew the upfront investment will hopefully pay off and i think it worked i think so too but what was that upfront invest investment if we're thinking about budgeting and allocating our money for lunch how much do you allocate towards the pr and influencer effort yeah so you know not to speak directly to the rates of the agency that i worked with but
because i i did um i did interview several different agencies up front and so what i would tell brands is that for anyone just getting started out if you're working with a smaller agency that's you know typically dedicated to working with smaller brands they're looking for anywhere between like two and a half to four thousand a month okay and then once you become a bigger agency or once you become a bigger brand or like a medium-sized brand you know pr agencies can go anywhere between like you know four to ten depending on where you are
so when you're thinking of even on the lower end you know 2000 that's a fair amount of spin especially if you're not quite generating that much in sales yet so you're digging out of your nine to five pocket yeah and so you just have to really decide you know what's important to you and i think that's the beauty around marketing is that there's so many different levers on the spoke of you know what you can do to help drive your awareness and promotion strategy and i wasn't at that point able to have all things firing
but i felt very passionately that because of where i was and where i knew i was going that pr and influencers was the place that i should focus on so when it came to influencers what were you what was your ask of them who were you approaching from an influencer perspective so upfront it was very much so just gifting so hey you know and finding i think it's really important to be authentic and defining the approach in which you know you can't just go you know have a list of 100 people and say hey here's
my product will you please post me you have to find that connection and so we spent a lot of time up front thinking about a strategy like who are celebs or you know macro level influencers who always talk about self-care who which one of them's already have a passion for journaling which one of them's already you know have a passion for supporting black owned businesses and so you know i think for any brand if you're out there kind of trying to consider how to go after your influencer strategy if you're looking for someone to do
it on a gifting basis and you know and having them posting their stories on their feet you have to take the time to figure out what that connection is um i find that you're able to get much more um people saying yes if you tie it into something that's already important to their their values okay that's fair i think if you do the scatter shot method people are either not going to respond to you and you wasted your effort or you will find people that are not aligned and the people they bring your way are
not your ideal audience but earlier i think we alluded to the fact that your journey into you know retail shelves was fairly fast so people listening now who are trying to do something similar may think okay she already had the connections because she's already worked in that industry that may or may not be the case you can let us know but for anyone trying to make similar moves how do you approach it for example how do you find the buyers how do you get their attention yeah so there's kind of two parts there one is
i absolutely have connections in retail like i'm not going to say i'm not going to pretend like that's not true because of my past experience but what i will tell you is that the majority of my connections are in beauty that's where i've spent the majority of my career so when people found out that i was launching a brand in the home category they're like jasmine wtf we would have definitely thought you would watch the beauty brand um and i i had never met the major players in that category where i was launching like i
still had to show up to the to the meetings you know like anyone else that was doing it without any prior connections i had never met that buyer before i had never met that buyer's boss before i had never met the planners in those spaces and so um i would say that having the retail background helped me prepare for what was expected in the meetings of how to prepare for a line review document how to ask those right questions um but i don't think it was the thing that like solidified the the yes because at
the end of the day these buyers have to be so critical of how they delve out their space because that space equates to dollars in their pocket and they are also um kind of scored on how well they built their assortment strategy but if you're a new brand out there looking to get in front of buyers i would say one do it when you're ready you're never going to feel completely ready but make sure that you at least have like you know you you know where you would produce if you got the opportunity you know
how to get bar codes if you got the opportunity like make sure you have some of that stuff done but there's three main ways to meet brokers i mean three main ways to meet buyers across all categories the first is there's things called brokers brokers are people who have their ear to the ground on the up and coming brands and they kind of soft picture the buyers up front so that's what happened when i launched is a couple of brokers reached out and said hey i actually know that this buyer is looking for a brand
that's doing exactly what you're doing do you want me to soft pitch them on your behalf so i wasn't i was actually too scared to go into retail that early like i wasn't even necessarily seeking it at first because i didn't think i was ready um the second way is trade shows so within every category there's typically common trade shows that buyers attend now it's we're in a virtual weird world right now but look those up for your category so if you're in beauty that you know there's cosmic prop if you're in food and you're
in a natural space um there's a big one that happens in california every year that's blanking my mind right now but there's there's the um the big um kitchenware show that is in chicago like there's these huge shows or buyers are actually going and looking and spending their whole weekends finding brands and then uh i wouldn't say the last place but the one that the last one that i'll note is a company called range me range me is a platform where you can upload your products your branding your pricing all of this and several major
retailers type in keywords to find specific brands so they might be saying like i'm looking for a natural deodorant brain and so all the natural deodorant brains will pop up and they'll kind of filter through your profiles so kind of treat that as like a matchmaking kind of um dating app for products and buyers yeah so those are kind of the three ways that i would say recommending for people to do there's obviously you know you can cold call or cold email um buyers i would say that doesn't work that often but um those would
be the three ways i would recommend you approaching it i like that you mentioned that the buyers also have a scorecard that they're getting rated on so from a kind of a an entrepreneur's perspective what are some of the kpis that you need to hit every month that you are asking your emerging brands to hit in order for them to maintain that shelf space because it's one thing to get in but it's entirely another to stay on the shelves yeah um the main one is productivity which can look different by retailer but it's typically um
looked at as dollars per store per week or units per store per week so when you look at units per server quick it's literally you know if you sold a thousand units and you're in you know 500 stores for that week that would be you sold two units per store per week and so each one of them have their own thresholds of like what is deemed as good for their category um some retailers and also have called um it's productivity per foot so it's literally looking at how much space you're taking up on the shelf
and they have a metric of how many dollars you need to produce per that space you're taking up on shelf so it really just depends by the retailer but it's typically some type of productivity metric that is king for the retailer ooh so you got to keep on working once you get in there we're getting in there is not the goal staying seems to be about the goal you should yeah getting in there is i don't want to say easy because it's absolutely not easy but it's maintaining and then growing that becomes the the hustle
once you're in so speaking of growing you launched with a set amount of product where are you trying to take the bee rooted brand yeah you know ideally i want be rooted to be the go-to stationery brand for women of color across all categories within stationery so we launched with journals because that's where we launched our website with but i hope that you guys will see us over the next couple of years really expand or cost more categories so that when you are looking to set up your office or you're heading back to school that
you're able to have a full be rooted assortment to take with you oh that's exciting and are you planning on expanding beyond target as you grow as a company you know that's a really good question you know i'm constantly trying to figure out and determine our distribution model to make sure that we're growing strategically in a way that we are keeping up with where our customers want to see us but we're also keeping up with the cash flow that we're bringing in to be able to support our retailers in a very good way and so
there's just a balance right you you can't say yes to everything and saying yes everything can get you broke but you also want to make sure that you are placed in the places where your customers are looking for you and want to buy from you and right now target is definitely the priority as um they are you know as we did a lot of research they're where our customers are buying that there are where uh who's really leaning into the multicultural consumer anyways yes um so they're our priority for right now but you know more
to come more to come well jasmine i really appreciate you sharing your journey with us and for anyone that wants to follow it and support where can we find you yes so you can follow us at b rooted co on all channels that's b-e-r-o-o-t-e-d-c-o if you found my conversation with jasmine helpful i want you to know i have over 140 audio episodes you can binge listen to on she's off script.com or anywhere else audio podcasts are available on your way out don't forget to subscribe and hit that notification bell so you don't miss our next
episode i release new ones every thursday all right we'll see you right back here for the next one bye
