With our increasingly mobile and flexible lives, it makes sense that many of us are turning away from reading and towards more mobile forms of consuming good content. While we’re avid readers, we’ve been getting tons of inspiration from podcasts recently, and the medium for content sharing is exponentially growing. 

Whatever your politics, the present feels like a time of both destruction and creation. It feels like a time to make a stand - to actively participate in creating a world that we want to live in, a world where all people can thrive. To take ownership of ourselves and our businesses and our process. Something in Elysian Fields post of the James Murphy quote “The best way to complain is to make something” just rings true, especially right now.

For makers, the emotional aspect of reaching out to stores is often the hardest. If you have taken the leap and reached to stores to introduce your work, you know it can be scary and even harder is knowing how many times to follow up.

We sat down with Olivia to talk about the pros and cons of three different wholesale outreach methods: email outreach, trade shows and walking into stores to introduce your work. 

When we first started Wholesale In a Box, there was nothing in the space or on the market that existed like it -- not a single company that provided this service, though a couple have since sprouted up. We knew the method worked, based on our depth of experience in related approaches with makers and artisans around the world. We knew makers wanted it because we created it in response to the dozens and dozens (now hundreds) of conversations we had with makers in which they said, "I want to grow my wholesale, but it's a huge hassle finding stores that are a good fit, I don't have a good system to stay consistent, and I don't know what to send to stores or what to do when they don't write back."

There's a book I really like called Women Who Run with The Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. It's got a poorly designed cover (see below) and an embarrassing title. But over the past few years, it's been my book. It's the book I go to when I'm inspired. It's the book I read in the morning with my coffee. It's the book I go to when I'm confused and feel weak.

As the holidays approach, we get this question a lot from the makers we work with:

“Things are crazy for me right now, and I’m not sure if retailers are even ordering. Should I even bother connecting with stores during this season?”

For store owners, this time of year is about trying to survive and high hopes for a great season. (Retailers often make 30% or more of their total yearly gross between November and December.) For makers, it’s a crazy combination of making, packing, and shipping goods for Christmas, doing holiday markets, and trying to lay the groundwork for sustained growth in the coming year.

When I was about eight, I went to camp for the first time.

As a fairly introverted person who loved hanging out with my family, summer camp ended up being hard. Thirty-two-year-old me would know exactly why it would be hard for me and in what ways; eight-year-old me was bewildered, as the camp seemed literally designed to have a good time around every corner and yet I felt kind of dazed from home sicknesses and nervousness about how to be around the other kids.

Here's the thing. You can't just send the same email to a bunch of stores and expect a positive response. Hear me when I say that efficiency does not equal spam. 

Almost every maker we talk to says, “I really want to grow wholesale -- and that, in itself, seems like a huge challenge. But even more than that, I want store accounts that are real relationships, and that place orders regularly over the long term.” 

oday we wanted to talk about a topic that’s always kind of squishy and discomforting for makers: when should I go to the expense and effort of sending samples?

Now, this is a topic with a lot of different approaches and opinions. Every maker is different, every store has different requirements, and there are no hard and fast rules. But today we’re sharing two simple perspectives that might help take the pressure off -- while also helping your products to rest happily on new stores’ shelves.

In the last few weeks, we’ve shared a bit about how to reframe rejections and what that bewildering email from a store owner might actually mean.

And this week we want to share the big outreach mistake that most makers make. When it comes to outreach to stores, many people take “no’s” simultaneously TOO seriously and not seriously enough. On one hand, most people are way too emotionally reactive about getting no's. Each silence or negative reaction causes a tailspin of fear and desperation.