How to Find Retailers to Stock Your Product

Most product brands look for stockists through trade shows and wholesale marketplaces. Both work, but trade shows happen a few times a year and marketplaces put you next to every other brand in your category. If you want shops on board this season, the faster route is a list of retailers that already sell products like yours, with the email of the person who does the buying.

The method in five steps:

1. Find five to ten brands similar to yours and open their stockist pages.

2. Collect every shop and count how often each one appears.

3. Add independent shops in your target cities from map data.

4. Find the owner or buyer at each shop.

5. Send a short email with wholesale price, minimum order and a sample offer.

The stockist page method

Many independent brands publish a "stockists" or "where to buy" page. That page is a list of shops that have already said yes to a small brand in your category. They've given shelf space to an unknown name and sold it to their own customers. That's the hardest part of your pitch, done by someone else.

How to work it:

1. Pick comparable brands. Same category, similar price point, similar size. A candle brand should look at other independent candle and home fragrance brands, not at a department store label.

2. Collect the shops. Some stockist pages are simple lists. Others are map widgets that load locations from a script, which makes copying by hand slow but still possible.

3. Count repeats. A shop that appears on four of your comparable brands' pages actively buys in your category. Put those at the top.

4. Check older versions. The Wayback Machine often has a brand's stockist page from previous years, which shows you shops that stocked the category before.

Twenty shops that already buy from brands like yours are worth more than two hundred that might.

Four steps to a list of shops that already buy in your category.

Fill the gaps with independents near your customers

Stockist pages show you who already buys. Map data shows you who could. If your customers cluster in particular cities, pull the independent shops in those areas: gift shops, boutiques, delis, garden centres, concept stores, whatever fits your product.

Filter out chains early. Independent shops can say yes in one conversation. Chains buy centrally, on fixed review windows, which needs a different approach entirely.

Who to email

For independents, the owner's name is often on the shop's "about" page or in replies to Google reviews. Small shops frequently use one email address for everything, and the owner reads it.

What to put in the first email

Shop owners decide fast when they have the numbers in front of them. A first email should include:

• Wholesale price and suggested retail price. Many independent retailers expect to roughly double the wholesale price. If your numbers don't leave them a margin, the conversation ends there.

• Minimum order. Keep the first order small and low risk.

• Lead time and delivery. When stock would arrive and who pays shipping.

• A sample offer. Shop owners want to hold the product. Offer to send one.

• One proof point. Shops you're already in, a press mention, or a link to customer reviews.

Here's an example (replace the brackets):

Subject: [Product] for [Shop name]

Hi [Name],

I make [product] in [place]. I noticed you stock [comparable brand], and I think [product] would sit well alongside it. Wholesale is [price] per unit with a suggested retail of [price], minimum order [number] units, and stock ships within [number] days.

We're already in [a shop or two, if true]. Could I send you a sample this week?

Follow up once or twice over the next two weeks. Shop owners are busy on the shop floor, and a polite second email often gets the reply the first one didn't.

Trade shows and marketplaces still have a place

Wholesale marketplaces like Faire make reordering easy for retailers, and trade shows let buyers handle the product. Both are worth using. Direct outreach does a different job: it puts you in front of the specific shops you want, on your schedule, without competing with the stand next to you. Many brands use outreach to start the relationship and a marketplace or their own wholesale portal to handle reorders.

Doing it with ManyPI

Disclosure: ManyPI is our product.

You can describe the shops you want in plain words, for example "independent gift shops in Manchester and Leeds that stock small candle or home fragrance brands, with the owner's email". The agent reads stockist pages, shop websites and listings live, and records where each lead came from. For the map side, Map Search lets you draw an area and save the shops inside it, filtered to the kinds you want. Every email is checked before sending, and follow-ups go out from your own inbox and stop when a shop replies.

A stockist search typed into the ManyPI agent.

The wholesale leads page shows the whole workflow. The free plan finds 50 leads with no card, which is enough for a first round of samples.

Start with the stockist pages of three brands you admire. Write down every shop that appears on two or more of them. That short list is where your first wholesale orders are most likely to come from.