What’s The One Word Marketers Should Focus On When Transitioning From DTC To Retail?

Founder and CEO of Tiege Hanley, Kelley Thornton, delves into the importance of brand differentiators in the skincare industry. Understanding your unique selling points and how to stand out from competitors is crucial for success. Kelley shares insights on determining these differentiators and how they can impact your marketing strategies. Show NotesConnect With:Kelley Thornton: Website // LinkedInThe MarTech Podcast: Email // Newsletter // TwitterBenjamin Shapiro: Website // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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  Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world-class marketers that use technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's the host of the Martech Podcast, Benjamin Shapiro.

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  Welcome to the Martech Podcast. I'm your host, Benjamin Shapiro, and today we're going to discuss D to C marketing. Joining me is Kelly Thornton, who is the founder and CEO of Tej Hanley, which is a provider of uncomplicated skincare systems designed specifically for men, equipping them with essential skincare tools to confidently tackle their day. All right, here's my conversation with Kelly Thornton, the founder and CEO of Tej Hanley. Let's move on to our next question. What's the word? So what's the word marketers should focus on when transitioning from D to C to retail?

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  Ready. R-E-A-D-Y. Are you ready?

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  What does it take to get ready?

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  If you do not have enough organizational scale and strength of brand, it's going to be very difficult. So organizational scale, having the people, the places, the processes in place to support a retail or wholesale business. Your packaging needs to be ready. Your products need to be ready. You need to be able to have pricing developed, sales sheets developed. You need to be able to go to trade shows and bring your product there and be ready to talk about your product. And more importantly, your brand has to have enough presence that if you go in the store, you're not going to die on the vine. So people are going to have some idea, hey, I've seen that brand before. I'm at Fill-in-the-Blank store. I've seen that brand before.

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  Let me give that a try. Let me see that. So you have to be ready.

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  Yeah, it's interesting. I probably would have said distribution because I think with D to C brands, you understand how to get something to the last mile and get it to your customer. But now you're not delivering one-off orders. You're delivering in bulk to people who could sell the product for you. Like, that's the general idea is, I assume, most D to C brands, when they go from D to C to retail, that they're using an intermediary first before they're opening up their own physical stores.

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  Yeah, good point.

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  And so to me, mastering that distribution and getting somebody else to do the work for you in terms of the sales, so you can sell in bulk is the secret sauce. It's just drop all the products at one location and manage that relationship first instead of, hey, all of a sudden, we're going to open up a store in the middle of San Francisco and hope that we can train associates. Like, it seems like there's steps between just being purely online and we've got a flagship headquarters store.

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  That's funny. I think you and I might have said it in the same way. You have to be ready for distribution. You have to have things in place so that you can support distribution. When I think of the word distribution, one word was the question. I think the key to being successful in wholesale relationships is distribution. I believe you need to have distribution and the more distribution you can have, the more that you can put your hand, your product in the hands of consumers. I think ultimately on a broad brush stroke, that's the winning formula. The question of what you need, what is the one word that you need to go to retail? Is to prepare yourself and to be ready to actually ready to do that. We haven't been ready to do that. We are now, but it took us a couple of years to get there.

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  And that wraps up this episode of the Martech Podcast. Thanks for listening to my conversation with Kelly Thornton, the founder and CEO of Tiege Hanley. If you'd like to get in touch with Kelly, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes. You can DM him on Instagram. His company's handle is Tiege Hanley. That's T I E G E H A N L E Y. Or you can visit his company's website, which is just teige.com, T I E G E dot com. If you'd like a summary of this podcast, or if you'd like to apply to be the next guest speaker on the Martech Podcast, head over to martechpod.com. You can also find our video clips for the Martech Podcast on YouTube, Instagram and on X.

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  And if you'd like to contact me, let's connect on LinkedIn. My handle is Ben J. Shap, B E N J. S. H. A. P. And if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today, but until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy.

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  Thanks for listening to the Martech Podcast and I Hear Everything production. Looking to launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand? Then visit ihereverything.com.