If you've spent any time walking your own stores, you already know how much of what's supposed to be happening on the shelf isn't. Product sitting in the back room, tags that haven't been fixed, displays that never got built, resets done wrong and never corrected. None of it is from people being bad at their jobs. It's that the work that actually makes a difference at shelf is the work most people in this industry would rather skip.
What getting dirty actually looks like
Two stories come to mind.
Years ago, I lended a hand at a reset in Tribeca. It was an overnight job to relocate the entire bulk section. None of our brands were in bulk, so the work had nothing to do with anything we'd been hired for.
We did it anyway. We pulled all the bulk product, cleaned the bins, and lifted the foundation the whole section was sitting on. Underneath, 10 years of fallen oats and seeds, some of which had actually sprouted in the dark. It was about as bad as you'd expect. But we did the job, the store noticed, and we built capital we'd draw on for years.
Here’s another example: When I first got out to Northern California, I had an account that was not familiar with the idea of a vendor wanting to help. He told me and my rep at the time, "I'll work with you, but I need your help every Wednesday morning at 6 a.m. I need you to come in and clean four feet of dairy.” If you’re in grocery, you know that working in dairy is notoriously disgusting.
But we wanted the account, and so we did it. Every Wednesday at 6 a.m. we pulled all the product off, wiped the shelves down with soapy water, put everything back, and then started our own actual work day.
After about six or eight weeks, the dynamic shifted. The store opened up, and from that point on, whatever we needed, we got. The dairy cleaning was the “toll,” and we paid it willingly because we understood what it bought us. We were showing them that we'd do whatever it took to help them succeed, and that they could trust us to keep showing up. After that, supporting our priorities was an easy yes.
Retail runs on this kind of trade-and-barter system that's never written down. I help your team during a reset, you find time to talk to me about the placement issue I've been flagging for three weeks. The brands and reps who understand this dynamic do well. The ones who don't tend to struggle.
There's another kind of dirty work that builds the same capital, and it's the everyday version. Customers come into stores and ask brand reps where things are. A typical rep says "I don't work here, sorry." Our team says, "let me help you find it," and walks the customer to the right aisle. If we can't find what they need, we find a store employee who can. The cost to us is two minutes. The signal it sends to the store is that we treat their customers the way their own employees treat their customers. This small moment, repeated across hundreds of visits, is what separates us from the brand rep who shows up, takes a photo, and leaves.
The hard part is knowing when to stop helping
There's a balance that has to exist, and this is where it gets harder.
We don't get paid by Sprouts, and we're not part-time labor for Albertson’s. If our teams spend four hours a week in one store doing the store's work, that's four hours they’re not spending in the next account, where brands are counting on them. So we have to be deliberate about when we go above and beyond and when we don't.
Why most people won't do this work
If this work is so valuable, why doesn't every merchandising company do it? It's hard, and the business model in most of this industry measures and rewards activity instead of impact. Most retail support is built around making visits and reporting on them. The KPI is visits completed, photos uploaded, and checklists filled. None of those metrics capture whether the rep actually moved anything forward.
The brands that figure this out late usually figure it out the expensive way. Their dashboard says everything is being executed, but their sales tell a different story. By the time they connect the two, they've lost months of momentum.
For brands trying to do this work themselves
If you're a young brand walking your own stores, here's what I'd tell you.
• Your job is to grow your brand, however that gets done. Merchandising your set, completing your visit, filling out the void report, all of that is a means to an end. The end is sales.
• When you walk in and see something that needs doing, you do it. Even if it isn't technically yours and especially if it isn't technically yours. The store notices and remembers the people who help. The people who say “That's not my job”? They remember those too, just differently.
• There's no software solution for building a CPG brand at the shelf. The work is hands-on and that's not changing anytime soon.
The reality is that retail rewards the people willing to do the dirty work, week after week, across hundreds of stores. That's how most brands actually break through.
