Sisters Jordan Catapano and Jocelyn Dunn are truly examples of how persistence and tenacity can pay off for brand owners. Over the past decade, they went from bartenders to authors to owners of a bartending business, then became CPG brand owners with the launch of a line of cocktail mixers called This Girl Walks Into a Bar.

Then earlier this year they lost the bartending business to the Los Angeles wildfires. During this same time, however, they landed KeHE Distributors from a meeting at ECRM’s On & Off Premise Adult Beverage Session, which led to a deal with Total Wine & More. Most recently, they earned a Fast Pass at Walmart’s Open Call from a RangeMe submission.

In this podcast, you’ll hear how the sisters stuck with their passion through this wild roller-coaster ride and evolved their business over the years into the fast-growing emerging brand it is today.

Managing the Growth of CPG Teams: Founders Share Their Stories

Cosset, Global Beauty Care and Okay Pure Naturals each started with only two or three people, and over the years have grown their companies to dozens of team members. This growth comes with several challenges, such as deciding which roles to fill first, finding the right hires, grooming future leadership, and handing off the reins of certain responsibilities.

In this podcast, ECRM's Joseph Tarnowski speaks with the founding members of each of these brands, who share how they handled their respective growth journeys and what it takes to scale up a brand.

What's in a Name? A Lot, if You Ask Yes Honey Founder Heather Mincer

Nobody wants to enter “naked chicks” into their browser search while they are on their work computer. But that’s what people had to do to find the honey-sweetened sodas and drizzlers created by Yes Honey Founder Heather Mincer, when her company was originally called Naked Chicks Pasture.

When you know the brand’s origin, the name makes sense. It sold pasture-raised chickens with no chemicals or antibiotics on a small farm in Norwood, Mo. It had no online presence, and most of its sales came from word-of-mouth. Even when it started making honey-sweetened soda and drizzlers, the products were initially sold only at local farmers’ markets, so the brand name worked. It was catchy. (In fact, Heather still retains the title of “Head Chick” in her LinkedIn profile!)

But as Mincer’s sales grew and she looked to reach a broader audience of consumers and even retail buyers, it launched a website and became a RangeMe Pro subscriber.

That’s when things got a little … weird.

In this podcast interview with ECRM's Joseph Tarnowski, Mincer tells the story of her brand refresh, and how it led to an explosion of direct-to-consumer sales, as well as much more buyer engagement on RangeMe.

How Casey's 1st Innovation Summit led to 19 New Product Finds

Last August, Casey's teamed up with RangeMe and ECRM to launch its first-ever Innovation Summit in an effort to discover new brands that would attract a broader array of customers to its stores. The convenience store chain, which operates more than 2,900 stores across 19 Midwestern states, discovered 19 new brands from the Summit, and their products will be on the shelves this year.

In this interview with ECRM's Joseph Tarnowski, Casey’s VP of Merchandising Chris Stewart shares the chain’s initial goals of the summit, the process in which the final brands were chosen, and some advice for suppliers looking to get on the shelves at its stores.

How CPG Supplier Mekor 10Xed its Business by Listening Closely to Retail Buyers

When Mekor Corp. first participated in ECRM Sessions, they were selling just a line of functional teas with distribution of just a few thousand doors. Now its distribution is more than ten times that and has expanded to include products like supplements, cookies, aloe vera drinks, and spices.

Sapan Nainani attributes this growth to three factors:

- Building relationships by consistently getting in front of buyers;

- Listening closely to these buyers to best learn how he can serve them, and

- Having the patience and persistence to take a long-term approach to growth.

In this podcast interview with ECRM's Joseph Tarnowski, Nainani reveals his approach to buyer engagement and shows how listening truly can be a superpower when meeting with retail buyers.

Beauty Brand Skin Centrick Shows that 1+1=3 When it Comes to ECRM & RangeMe

Skin Centrick’s Founder & CEO, Chithra Kannan, is a perfect example of a brand owner who understands the power of leveraging both ECRM and RangeMe to engage with the buyer community, and because of this, the brand is already on a trajectory of success rarely seen in a consumer packaged goods startup.

Launched only last October, Skin Centrick has already landed deals with several retailers, distributors, and e-commerce platforms and attributes 90 percent of this business to connections made via ECRM & RangeMe.

But we can’t take all of the credit. It’s the combination of Kannan’s business analytics prowess (she has a degree in Business Analytics from Harvard), her marketing savvy, and her very buttoned-up yet adaptive approach to buyer meetings that have helped make the most of the exposure that RangeMe provides combined with the face-to-face access to qualified buyers at ECRM Sessions.

In this podcast, ECRM's Joseph Tarnowski speaks with Kannan, who shares how she applies her business analytics skills to the beauty market to uncover opportunities, as well as how she leverages both RangeMe and ECRM to effectively engage the retail buyer community.