A direct-to-consumer strategy can often align with a specialty food brand’s grocery initiative. During this Thursday's SFA In the Know webinar, titled “Perfect Pairs: How DTC and Grocery Can Support Each Other,” Ori Zohar, co-founder and co-CEO of Burlap & Barrel, a single origin spice company, will speak about best practices for each channel and review creative ways to build your audience. Register now.
SFA News Daily recently spoke to Zohar.
What is one mistake you see specialty food brands make when selling DTC and in-store?
Brands that sell the same products in-store and on their site are a classic missed opportunity. You need to give people a reason to visit your site and shop directly with you. For example, your site can have small batch or limited editions of your products or complementary items that'll help your best customers get the most. That's both a good source of R&D to see what kinds of things resonate with your customers and a way to delight the ones that want more.
Or maybe your site's job is to let customers get to know your company better and fall in love with your products. In that case, your site can give visitors an inside look at how they're made, get to know the different people on the team or your partners, and find out about meetups or join live Q&As with the team. Lean into the ways that DTC lets you build a fully immersive expression of your company, especially in areas where grocery shelves fall short.
Do you know any specialty brands that are doing a good job with bridging the gap between DTC and grocery?
It's been fun to watch Liquid Death build out its online and retail presence. They have clever merchandising in-store and through events (even retrofitting a coffin to use a cooler). Their site has unexpected products and merch, collaborations and video content, and all kinds of fun things for their best customers to dig into. Liquid Death is bringing its brand to life in really creative ways across DTC and grocery, and that makes the company really stand out.
What is one change you recommend specialty businesses make to their DTC strategy?
Most brands think of their site as just another retail outlet, but that's setting the bar way too low. If you already have a DTC presence, start by making sure you see every single order that gets placed, then reach out to each of your customers and see what ideas they have and what they wish they could get from your company. After about 10-20 conversations, you'll have a lot of ideas about what would delight your customers.
Do you have any tips for brands that have just launched at retail?
We're still in the early stages of retail, but we've seen good results starting with local specialty stores, where the buyers are often communicative and willing to try things out. It helps us to see what sells, see what support we can give, and how that impacts what sells. Then, we took what we learned and started expanding to regional specialty grocery stores, and now we're starting to wrap our heads around how to profitably approach distributed retail. We're in our 7th year, and our relationship with grocery has been evolving as we've been learning more. It takes time, but the best approach has been to grow slowly and make sure that we nail the execution each time we expand.
What do you hope attendees get out of the session?
I'm going to be sharing how grocery and DTC can work together. I will also give a lot of ideas and examples, both from Burlap & Barrel as well as other companies in the industry that are getting it right. Come by and leave inspired!
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