How Does RangeMe Help My Brand?
By
WeStock Team
·
March 16, 2023
If you have been to any CPG trade show, you most likely have seen the army of representatives in RangeMe t-shirts roaming the show and approaching your booth about their services. Maybe you even saw the RangeMe Verified table tent standing proudly at the neighboring brand’s booth and wondered if RangeMe was right for your brand.
Maybe you were on your dream retailer's website when you clicked on the “new vendor” link and it brought you to their RangeMe page. Like a bouncer sitting outside of the club, you submit everything they ask for and calmly wait to be let into the party.
It is already impossible for brands to get into new retailers that adding RangeMe into the mix might just seem like another middleman you have to get through to finally get your product on the shelf. But, RangeMe is here to stay and retailers will continue to use it as a way to sort and discover new brands. Therefore, it is crucial that your brand understands how to use it in relation to your other sales efforts.
We get the question all the time from our brand partners and from prospective clients...What is RangeMe and does RangeMe actually help brands grow?
We love how many tools and platforms there are for CPG brands to grow their business with right now, but RangeMe definitely sits above the rest with over 250,00 brands on the platform and almost every retailer in the country also on the platform.
It might be best to start with the basics, like what is RangMe and how does it work?
“RangeMe is the leading product discovery and sourcing platform where retailers and suppliers discover, connect, and grow their business.” -RangeMe.com
We prefer to call them a dating site, where brands and retailers can meet each other. Retail buyers can search through their endless pages of brands to find new products that they feel would be a potential fit for their stores. While brands can submit their product to various retail buyers or wait for them to be discovered organically from a buyer as well.
It is fairly easy to get set up as a brand and the best part is that it is free to join! What is harder to figure out is the benefits of being a paid brand vs a free brand on RangeMe. We have heard a lot of different reviews from brands about the paid features and it is hard to pinpoint if paid brands are really getting more retail interaction than free brands.
The other difficult part is understanding how truly engaged buyers are on the platform. We have discussions with buyers on a daily basis and there is definitely not a standard for RangeMe usage across different retailers and buyers from what we can see. Some buyers love the platform and use it religiously while others simply have accounts because it is mandated by their employer.
From our experience both selling products into retailers and using RangeMe as a customer, and now working closely with brands to see how they approach retail growth, we believe that RangeMe is a necessary platform for your brand to be listed on, but brands should not approach RangeMe as the single source for retail buyer communication.
Instead, RangeMe has to be viewed along with your cold emails, cold calls, trade shows, and Linkedin account as just one way that you can get in front of the right buyer.
We have heard from hundreds of brands that they simply submitted through RangeMe and that was their extent of trying to get in front of a particular buyer. That simply won’t cut it. RangeMe should be a part of your retail sales stack, but not the entire process. You should also be working to reach out to buyers directly or through your broker partners.
Let’s summarize how brands should approach RangeMe:
We hope this was helpful! We love RangeMe and the other platforms in the space that give brands the ability to expedite their future retail growth, but we want brands to understand how to best use them.
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