Essays

The thinking behind the system.

Free to read, written from the supplier side of the desk. Start anywhere; they stand alone.

Economics

The margin you keep

A $5.99 product returns its founder about 89 cents. Here is the arithmetic that produces that number, and why the buyer already knows yours.

The Buyer

Your buyer is not a gatekeeper. They're an employee.

Fifteen years across the table taught a duller and more useful truth than the dragon myth: buyers have a scorecard, and your pitch either helps it or it doesn't.

The Pitch

The meeting is the delivery

The most expensive myth in food retail is that listings are won in meetings. They are won before them, and merely collected in the room.

Negotiation

Yes, if. Negotiating with people who negotiate for a living

Category managers negotiate daily, with training. Founders negotiate occasionally, with adrenaline. Closing that gap requires no talent at all. It requires a small system.

Margin

Growing broke: the promotional trap that eats good brands

There is a way to fail in supermarkets that looks exactly like succeeding, right up until it doesn't. It has a rhythm consistent enough to narrate from memory.

Launches

The second product problem

The debut gets all the care, and it works. Then success skips steps, and the range extension sails into a review it doesn't survive, taking the hero product's credibility with it.