Brand Restrictions Got you Down?
Watch this interview where Dan Meadors of The Wholesale Formula and I discuss Amazon’s brand restrictions policy and how we think you can PROFIT from them.
NOW, during the post-holiday doldrums — NOW is when the SMART sellers are creating systems, researching profitable products, building a team, and most importantly, LOCKING DOWN wholesale suppliers so you can simply place reorders when Prime Day and Q4 sales hit.
So it stands to reason he knows a few things about systems, scaling, finding products, and negotiating with brands.
Ready to Learn how to source Wholesale?JOIN THE FREE WHOLESALE TRAINING CLASS:
Starts August 6, 2018 – Closes August 16, 2018
Barbara Drazga: Hello, everybody. This is Barbara Drazga, aka The Deal Diva. You can find me on dealdivewholesale.com. Today, I’ve got the incredible Dan Meadors, drum roll please, from The Wholesale Formula. We’re going to dispel some myths today on how you can profit from brand gating. I know they sound like two completely different topics, but by the end of this webinar, Dan’s going to shed some light on how we can make money on all the new restrictions that Amazon is handing down. We’re gonna talk about a large brand that was just completely suspended. Like, huge, ginormous seller. Not a brand, seller, that was completely suspended. Dan’s going to talk about how we can profit when stuff like that happens.
So, Dan Meadors of The Wholesale Formula, a really quick hit. He went from, with his partner Eric Lambert, they went from a $600 credit card limit, $600 credit card limit, to doing $7 million in sales in 2016 just sourcing wholesale.
Dan Meadors: Yep, just wholesale products.
Barbara Drazga: So, Dan, go ahead and tell us a little bit about yourself, and let’s go straight into the topic of what do you do with brand gating.
Dan Meadors: Yeah, we’ve been selling wholesale since mid 2014. Honestly, we transitioned into wholesale from retail arbitrage and it’s been absolutely phenomenal. We went full time and wholesale in January 2015 and really hit them with that. It’s just such a scalable and awesome model. It really does allow growth at unparalleled rates. It’s super exciting.
Barbara Drazga: Yeah, and it totally beats driving from store to store to store. I used to hook up my minivan. I took all the seats out, I hooked up a trailer to the minivan when I first started two years ago, and I was going from Walgreens to Walgreens to Walmart. Boy, I was exhausted. I was just completely exhausted. My living room became a warehouse and I sold my couches, no lie, sold my couches during Q4 2015 so I’d have room for all the stuff I was bringing in, so I’d prep it overnight and get it into FedEx the next morning. It was insane. And then I switched to wholesale in mid 2016 and my life has changed significantly for the better.
Dan Meadors: I can only imagine how hard you went at this. Because you’re so upbeat and you have so much energy. I can’t imagine. And selling your furniture. That’s so hardcore. That’s crazy.
Barbara Drazga: Hey, furniture can be replaced, and I wanted a different color anyway. So I didn’t order the furniture for eight months and I turned off cable too before Q4 to see how much more productive I could get. It was insane. My first Q4 was absolutely insane, great, but boy I was just beat. I was honestly beat, so I knew I had to find another way. And that’s when I discovered you guys in 2016 and switched to 100% wholesale, and now I’m about 74% wholesale, 25% private label. So it’s all because of you. Love you guys.
Dan Meadors: For us, it was a similar thing. We leveraged arbitrage. And I still think it’s a viable model for what it’s worth. It’s still a very viable model and we made great money doing it. It was just at some point, like you said, we were just up against the wall and didn’t really have the energy to keep doing it.
Dan Meadors: Because we’re in Kentucky. There’s not a lot of stores and it’s not a retail hotbed. So we were driving literally all over the country. We drove to New York. We were all over Illinois and Ohio. This was every week. We were out every single week driving around, picking up products, sleeping in hotels, bringing a van full of product back, processing it, spending a day with our family, and doing it again.
Barbara Drazga: Yeah I remember watching your initial videos. I’m like, these guys are hardcore.
Dan Meadors: But that’s the thing. We did make great money. We did make good money. But it was at the expense of very hard work.
Barbara Drazga: Well it’s not just hard work, but what are you giving up in order to do that, in order to invest that time? For me, it came down to asking myself one question: what’s the lifestyle I want to have?
Dan Meadors: Exactly. That was the same question we asked ourselves. We both have kids. We don’t want to be gone as much as we are. We want to find a way to be in the office more. And when we started with wholesale, our hope was that it gave us most of the summer at home. We still expected to retail arbitrage to be a huge part of our business, more than 50%, and most of that was going to be obviously in quarter four. But we expected, our hope was maybe we can stay home in the summer and spend time with the kids and do stuff. But it did so well. That first three months, it was just … well first off, the first three months was really hard because we were really bad at it. But even though we were so bad, that’s one of the things. We’re very persistent people. We get hit in the mouth and we keep moving forward, and that’s just our mentality. We were very bad at it. But we just kept on doing it. We’re going to keep trying and try to develop new strategies and antics and things like that to become good at this. And even though we were bad, that first three months we saw so much success. And it’s not just straight monetary success. It was just how fast it was growing versus how fast we had grown previously. And it’s like, man.
Barbara Drazga: Yeah with retail arbitrage, you’re going to hit a wall. You’re going to hit the point where you can’t scale anymore. You only have so much time and energy, unless you start hiring people to do it. It comes down to, I’m going to invest this much time and resources in my business. Now if I invest this much in this model and it makes me this much profit, but I take the same amount of time and energy and invest it in this model and it makes me this much profit …
Dan Meadors: Exactly. Exactly.
Barbara Drazga: Wholesale for me was, okay I’m going to invest the same amount of time and energy and passion and go getter-ness into my business. Now I need to choose the right venue that’s going to leverage that time and energy and assets the most. And wholesale was it for me.
Dan Meadors: I mean, you said the perfect word. That’s exactly what it is. Both of them can be outsourced. Retail arbitrage can be outsourced. But when the return you’re going to get from outsourcing it versus outsourcing wholesale is so small comparatively. There’s just so much leverage in wholesale because it’s all systems. It’s all A+B=C. That’s how wholesale works. And that’s how our model works. We’re very formula-oriented. We’re very system-oriented. I don’t source products anymore. I legitimately don’t do anything in our business anymore, to be perfectly honest. But that was what we wanted. That was our goal. We wanted to create something that we could outsource and hire people and just generally grow without us being involved in the day-to-day operations. And it’s done everything. Like I said, my goal was to be at home more. So far this year, me and Eric, we’ve spoken at five events. We were gone for a week in Vegas. I’ve taken two vacations for more than a week.
Barbara Drazga: That’s awesome. Let’s be honest. We are in it for the money as entrepreneurs and business owners.
Dan Meadors: But what good is money if you can’t spend it?
Barbara Drazga: If you can’t enjoy it, feed your lifestyle with it. So for me, it’s a balance of I want my freedom and I want a lifestyle that if I want to go out … I’m a foodie and I love great wine. If I want to go out to an amazing restaurant and enjoy an incredible dining experience, I don’t want to have to think about, oh well I don’t know if I can afford it. I just want to do it. And I don’t live an extravagant lifestyle. I live by The Millionaire Next Door … if you’ve never read that book, you have to. I drive a minivan still. I have zero debt. I live in a middle class neighborhood. I don’t have anything to flaunt. But I employ half of my neighbors, by the way. They do some prep for me. They do some listing for me. So I bring prosperity into my neighborhood. This is the kind of lifestyle I want. But if I want to hop on a plane first class and go to Venice or go to anywhere in Italy actually, Rome, I can. And it’s that freedom of knowing that I’ve got a business that’s going to run if I want to go play. Mostly I love to work, but you know, if I wanted to, I could.
So that’s the lifestyle that is my goal. It’s not to be a gazillion dollar seller and have a giant warehouse. I don’t want a warehouse. Up until recently, I had a 20-foot container in front of my house. I used it for fourth quarter for bringing pallets in. We prepped everything, sent it out. I sold it eight months later, saved on the storage fees, and made a $200 profit on the container, in addition to saving on the storage fees. So there’s ways to do this without being huge and without having a huge staff and a warehouse. I’m not saying it would be bad, but choose what lifestyle you want and then build your business around that.
Dan Meadors: I mean, for what it’s worth, we wouldn’t have a warehouse either if we were restarting our business now. We didn’t know that prep centers were an option. They either didn’t exist or we hadn’t heard of them whenever we were really getting started. And at this point, we have all the infrastructure and we have employees, and we love these guys. At the end of the day, we’re not going to go to a prep center now because we have …
Barbara Drazga: You already have the infrastructure in place to kind of be going backwards. But you know, I also have several of my suppliers will actually send the product now directly into Amazon.
Dan Meadors: Yeah, we do that.
Barbara Drazga: And I have 20 cents each to have Amazon put the labels on it. So I don’t even have to touch that product. And one of my suppliers, I’ll send him … I bundle a lot of products. I’ll send him a bundle item, have it mailed directly to his warehouse, and his staff put his product together with mine and don’t even charge me for it, and then mail those bundles into Amazon, and I have Amazon labels.
Dan Meadors: If you can tell me that supplier just so I can get him to prep my items, that’d be great.
Barbara Drazga: No, you know why, because none of his stuff is on Amazon at all. They want nothing to do with … they sell on Fingerhut and Wayfair, so they’re a completely different business model. They’re importers. I bring their product to the Amazon marketplace and they don’t want to work with anybody else. I’m their gal.
Dan Meadors: I just want them for prep. I’m not trying to …
Barbara Drazga: Oh, no, no, well they wouldn’t do that because they know that they’re going to get sales from me on their products if they help me sell more product. I appreciate that, but sorry. I don’t reveal my sources. I like you, but … go ahead and give me your list of wholesalers and your contact for the sales, and we’ll talk.
Dan Meadors: All right.
Barbara Drazga: Let’s dig right in. Let’s just dig right in. A lot of people on the Facebook group’s going, brand gating, there’s a lot of fear. I understand a huge, huge seller just got suspended. Who was that?
Dan Meadors: Well BigFly just got suspended a few days ago.
Barbara Drazga: Gone.
Dan Meadors: Yeah, we’re going to pause that. When you say a big seller got suspended a few days ago, that doesn’t sound that … But if you look at how much money these guys have probably lost in the three days that they’ve been suspended, I wouldn’t be shocked … I’m sure that BigFly does over $100 million [inaudible 00:11:52] on Amazon.
Barbara Drazga: Yeah, easily. I think so too. They had 500 SKUs just in the US.
Dan Meadors: Right. Yeah. I mean, it’s crazy. It’s a crazy amount of SKUs.
Barbara Drazga: We don’t want to scare you. We’re telling you this to show you that Amazon’s not picking on you as a small seller.
Dan Meadors: No.
Barbara Drazga: They’re not. But let’s figure out … I know Dan has the mindset of a solution-oriented approach to problems, as do I. So let’s talk about when something like this happens, how do we leverage that? How do we make profit out of potential problems?
Dan Meadors: Let’s look at it first from the prevention side, because that’s important. If you’re not taking care of your account, this proves that it can happen to anybody. I don’t care if you’re selling a million or 10 million or 100,000 or 5,000. It doesn’t matter. The fact that they suspended probably the top five seller on their platform shows that they will suspend anyone if you don’t follow the rules. I think it’s a great precedent, to be perfectly honest. Because honestly, we are so passionate about dealing with any account issues that come up that it’s crazy. We have two virtual assistants now that literally all they do is make sure our account is in compliance with Amazon standards. And it’s because we never want that to happen. Think of it this way. If I were suspended, my sales, god forbid … BigFly, I can’t imagine where they’re at right now. But if I were suspended for three days, that’s $60,000 in sales. That’s a lot of money. That’s a lot of money to be missing out on. And I still have my employees. I’m sure BigFly is in the same boat right now. They have their employees. What are they doing?
Barbara Drazga: And infrastructure and fixed costs.
Dan Meadors: That’s the thing. In the Amazon business, you don’t own a playground, but you know the rules. That’s the thing. BigFly, just like us, they knew the rules. I promise you, Amazon did not suspend them without giving them ample warning. Amazon always gives you the warning. They’ll send you the alerts that say your return rate’s too high for this, you’ve got a claim against the product. You can deal with it. You always have to deal with it. If you get correspondence from Amazon, answer it.
Barbara Drazga: Don’t ignore it. Yeah, it’s not going to go away.
Dan Meadors: Right. That is the thing. We got one the other day. We got a really weird message that told us that we had failed to meet a drop shipment deadline. We don’t do any sort of drop shipping at all. It was just an alert from Amazon. I was like, do you have any idea what this is? No, man. Contact them immediately and find out what’s going on. They said it was actually sent in error. But you have to do that. We knew in the back of our minds that that message had to be an error or had nothing to do with us. But you have to resolve it. You need to go and get it in writing. Get writing that says this was an error, it’s not something you guys did. You just have to deal with all the issues that come up.
Barbara Drazga: Communication is key. Don’t ignore anything you get from Amazon. I was just looking through one of the groups this morning, the wholesale groups, and somebody was saying that there are some companies that are now submitting fake documents to Amazon saying that their … Did you see that post? There’s now this thing where some companies trying to get around brand restriction by submitting invoices from suppliers from the brand owners, but they’ve doctored these invoices. They’re not real. They’ve just made them up.
Dan Meadors: In my opinion, all you’re doing is ensuring that you will be suspended at some point.
Barbara Drazga: Yeah. So what I’m saying is, don’t do that. Don’t do that. Follow the rules. It’s their sandbox. It’s Amazon’s platform. I consider myself privileged to be able to sell on this platform and have access to their customers. Don’t try to rig the system. Just find out what the system is, get on top on the system, and play it better.
Dan Meadors: That’s the thing. It’s kind of ridiculous when you start looking at it from that perspective. People spend a lot of time trying to come up with shortcuts. They spend a really long time trying to come up with shortcuts when they could just do it the right way. That’s the thing. Early on when we started our business, we realized that there were shortcuts, there were ways that we could make more money in the short term. We could be dishonest. We could lie to vendors. We could do all this other stuff, right, and make more money in the short term. We chose not to do those things. We wanted to be completely above board. And it’s so we don’t ever have to worry about something like that coming back to bite us in the butt. I’m never going to get suspended because they’re like, “Hey you falsified these documents.” Because I don’t do that.
We tell people actively, please don’t do that. Please. Just do it the right way. I realize it can be annoying. But once you’re through the gate, once you’re through that hurdle, you don’t have to worry about it again. Just stop being shady. Stop thinking of shady solutions. Go the long way. Because you know what? Really, nobody else does that. Nobody wants to go the long way anyway anymore. Nobody wants to take the long trip. Those are higher hurdles. The higher the hurdle, the less competition. And these people will get suspended at some point. You say, “You know I saw Jill do this the other day and she didn’t get suspended.” It doesn’t have to be today. But what’s Jill going to do in a year from now whenever Amazon-
Barbara Drazga: Yeah and if Jill’s jumping off a cliff, are you really going to follow her?
Dan Meadors: Exactly.
Barbara Drazga: So I don’t want to beat you guys up. We’re not trying to terrify you. But this is the reality of Amazon. In order to be a third party seller, we want to help you figure out how to profit when stuff happens. So the brand gating is huge. It’s stumped a lot of sellers. How do we profit from the brand gating, suspensions? How do we make money off of the negative?
Dan Meadors: Let’s switch it around. Let’s talk about instead of being scary people, let’s talk about the fun part, like making more money. Here’s the thing with brand gating. If you have good relationships with your suppliers, it is very easy to get approved. It is very easy. You may run through this process the first time and you may get denied seven times. But eventually you will get in. This is what we always tell people. The reason we say it is because we do it in our own business. We encountered these same challenges the first time we were starting to be brand gated. I’m pretty sure we got denied 14 times. We were just trying to find the exact document that they needed to see. But here’s the thing. If you do things the right way, it will always work out in your favor. Always. It may be an annoying process, it may be challenging at first. But it will always work out in your favor if you do things the right way. We know that.
Barbara Drazga: Let’s say suddenly brands are selling in, you’ve got inventory in the warehouse, it suddenly goes gated, and you’ve got that dreaded email. What do you do?
Dan Meadors: The first thing is, Amazon wants one of two things. They want three invoices from that manufacturer, and they have to be correctly laid out per Amazon’s space. It’s not just any invoice. Amazon’s actually fairly rigid on the type of invoice you can use. Or as an alternative, they’ll let you do a letter of authorization. They’re also pretty rigid about how that has to be laid out and things like that. With the letter of authorization or the invoices, what we do, the first thing we do is we always try to get ungated with invoices because it’s easier because we’ve already bought the product. So we’ll send them our three invoices in and try to get ungated that way, and then Amazon will tell us if they’re going to deny that invoice or not.
Generally, as long as it’s within an acceptable range of what they’re looking for, they will accept it because they understand the invoice is very [inaudible 00:20:35]. But it needs to say the invoice. It cannot say pro form and it cannot say received. It needs to say that it was a paid invoice and the product was shipped. If it does that, then Amazon is generally going to do it. Also, it needs your … here’s where you can get in trouble if you’re telling vendors fake names or whatever with your business. It needs to match the backend of Amazon. It’s not your storefront name. It’s the backside, whatever you’re going in …
Barbara Drazga: Yeah your LLC, your DBA. Whatever name your company is registered with Amazon, your account, not your seller.
Dan Meadors: But it needs to match that. Your invoice needs to match that. And if you match that, if you do those things right and it says invoice and it shows that it was paid particularly, it’s great. I love when they send us the paid invoices.
Barbara Drazga: The stamp paid on it. You can probably even ask your supplier, “Look we need [inaudible 00:21:34], can you fax us one that’s stamped paid on it?”
Dan Meadors: Exactly. For what it’s worth, that’s the thing about having great relationships with your supplier. We’ve had them [inaudible 00:21:45] invoices. Every time Amazon won’t accept our invoices for whatever reason, we have great relationships with our suppliers and we’re like, “Hey for whatever reason, these silly willies aren’t taking this. Can you help us out on here? This is kind of what they’re looking for.” And every time, literally every time, they’re like, “Hey man no problem at all.”
Barbara Drazga: Yeah and it could be something as simple as it says, one case of a certain product, where Amazon wants to see that it’s 48 units of a certain product. We’re not talking about [crosstalk 00:22:15]. We’re talking about giving Amazon exactly the data they want on that invoice.
Would you say, Dan, we could probably ask when we get set up with a wholesaler or with a supplier, we’re ready to make our first order. Can we ask them, “Hey look, we really want to continue to work with you and move your brand on the Amazon platform. Can you write us a letter of authorization with the first order?”
Dan Meadors: We did that originally, but we stopped doing it because Amazon wants to see it the past 90 days.
Barbara Drazga: Oh, okay.
Dan Meadors: It’s one of those things. So what we did instead, we’re just really upfront and we try to always email this to make sure that it’s not just a phone conversation. We’re like, “Hey we do sell on Amazon, so at some point, we may need this. Is that okay? Will you work with us?”
“Yeah, man. No problem.”
You know? That’s the kind of response you’re going to get. And then you’re in the clear. They’re going to work with you and help you resolve it. We’ve been ungated on … we carried 30 gated brands at this point and it’s never been an issue ever. We have successfully ungated on all of them.
Barbara Drazga: I don’t know, but I’m sure it’s the same for you, but when I order something, my supplier emails me the invoice or I tell them that’s part of it. You know, send me the invoice so I can okay the shipping cost, whatever, if they’re not sending it directly to Amazon for me. So I make sure I have a copy of the invoice. Just make sure you organize those in your email or you downloaded each of those invoices into a folder in your hard drive that you can quickly find them. So if a brand that you’re selling does become gated, you’re not trying, oh my gosh where are those? I don’t know where I filed them. Just organize from the get-go. Create your systems from the first day you start ordering from that supplier. Would you agree with that?
Dan Meadors: Yeah. That’s actually what we do. We have an orders account. We have a correspondence account, which is weird, and then we have an orders account. Our orders account, email account, that’s all it does is it places orders.
Barbara Drazga: Okay so you have an email account just for placing orders.
Dan Meadors: Yes. And it’s called orders @ (our company name). We place our orders, it goes to that account, and one of our virtual assistants goes to that account daily and any new orders, she puts into folders just so they’re easily accessible quickly.
Barbara Drazga: Smart.
Dan Meadors: We have those invoices on hand within minutes if we get a claim or anything like that.
Now, how do we profit from this? It’s very easy. Okay so when you see a product restricted, here’s what happens. And we’ve got mounds of data on this so far. Obviously sellers come off. And what happens to the price? It goes up every time. Every single time. There’s one product that we carry that was pretty marginal and I think we were probably making a 25% ROI but it was good enough because it was consistent … or 20% ROI. We were on the border, the edge of cutting it. It’s one of those things where it’s almost not profitable enough. And then it went restricted. And it was like, yes, yes, yes. Because what happened? That product has a 40% ROI now and it went from 10 sellers to four sellers, and it’s beautiful.
Barbara Drazga: Did you have to pay to get unrestricted in that brand?
Dan Meadors: It’s generally only on super expensive brands, like Nike and Canon or somebody like that. Almost never on the small-
Barbara Drazga: But let’s say you did. Let’s say you did. Let’s say-
Dan Meadors: I would happily pay.
Barbara Drazga: Don’t look at that, “Oh it’s going to cost $3000.” Look at the numbers. What Dan just said was his profit margin went from 25% to 40%. And I don’t know, did the velocity increase?
Dan Meadors: Oh, and it went from 10 sellers to four sellers.
Barbara Drazga: So now you’re selling more at a higher profit margin. Do the numbers. How long will it take you to recoup, at that additional 15% profit, recoup that $3000?
Dan Meadors: Right, exactly.
Barbara Drazga: And then after that, it’s free money, that free extra margin, because you’re in.
Dan Meadors: Exactly.
Barbara Drazga: So look at all the numbers.
Dan Meadors: We would happily pay it. And honestly, if they introduced those as hurdles, that would be pretty exciting for us at this point because I know that a lot of people would get frustrated with it. Take that from theoretically 10 sellers to maybe two sellers. So some people weren’t willing to pay the fee, so to speak. For most people, you just don’t ever have to worry about it right now. It’s not a thing. Of those 30 brands, we’ve paid zero dollars to be ungated or unrestricted or whatever. That’s not commonplace. It’s actually far more uncommon than common. Now I’ve seen ungating in topicals. That costs money. If you want to get ungated in topicals, it’s $3000. But guess what? Can you imagine how many fewer people are selling topical right now? I promise you, that’s profitable. That’s a profitable [inaudible 00:27:29] at $3000. It may not be inside somebody’s budget if they’re a newer seller, but don’t get intimated by seeing that it costs $3000 to get ungated. The vast majority of the stuff you’re going to see doesn’t have that gate. And if it does and you can’t afford it, guess what? Go find another brand. That’s the thing. You don’t have to carry a specific brand of product. Never get overly attached to something.
That’s the thing about our products and why I think our mentality’s really good. Eric’s a former poker player. That’s what he did professionally. It’s all numbers. It’s all just numbers. So if things come on and they’re good, if the price drops, we could just sell out and don’t ever … We’re never emotionally attached to it. It’s always just a numbers game for us. Don’t become emotionally attached to a product. Don’t ever think that you have to carry this brand. You see a lot of people do this, particularly like, “Oh man, somebody’s running my price into the ground.” It’s not your price. It’s not your product. It’s a product.
I think that mentality has really helped us grow in wholesale. But it’s just not common. It’s not common. Don’t give yourself a reason to avoid these things, like ungating, because it’s really not a common issue or problem.
Barbara Drazga: Here’s another potential opportunity. Let’s say your brand gets locked down. It’s ungated, or it’s brand gated, and you’re hesitant to pay that $3000. Go Google their competitors.
Dan Meadors: That’s a great idea. I think that’s a great idea.
Barbara Drazga: Right? And then go, you know, do your chores, and go back on Amazon and see what their products are selling for. Maybe some of the competitors aren’t even on the Amazon platform yet and you can get them there. So there’s an opportunity.
Dan Meadors: I mean, that’s amazing. Like, who cares what leg hair brush I carry, right? That’s the thing.
Barbara Drazga: I thought you were going to say beard wax, but we’ll go with leg hair brush. I don’t want to see you at the beach.
Dan Meadors: Right, exactly. But who cares what brand I’m carrying? It’s a product. It’s a product that I’m making money with. And that’s the thing.
Barbara Drazga: And it’s a target market. If it’s a product that solves a problem or feeds a passion, there’s not just one brand in the world that solves that problem or feeds that passion. So go look into the competitor’s arm. Maybe that’s an opportunity for you to bring other brands to that niche.
Dan Meadors: It’s funny because I’m sure somebody’s going to watch this video and their mouth’s going to be wide open right now because we’re the guys that always talk about adding value, and I’m sitting here telling you that a product is a product is a product. Now the reason I do that we are not emotionally attached to a product until they are a partner of ours, until they are actively working with us. Once they start actively working with us, I’m significantly more motivated to help that brand. That brand actually means something to me. So that’s one of the things. We try to establish that relationship. We try to establish that bond with companies. But here’s the thing. If they’re not controlling the brand or the product, that’s going to be a limited lifespan. That relationship will be a limited lifespan. The brands that allow anybody to sell them will get chewed up and the price will go down and it is a product.
Barbara Drazga: Here’s another potential opportunity. Let’s say that you’ve been selling this brand for a while. It becomes gated and Amazon’s asking you for $3000. Could you potentially go back to that brand owner and say, “Look we want to continue making sure that your listing is optimized and bring this added value to your product on Amazon. Can you reduce our cost for our future orders by x% so that we can justify covering the $3000?” Or maybe ask them if they would split the fee. I don’t know. I haven’t tried it. But it’s another idea.
Dan Meadors: Even if they wouldn’t, let’s assume that they would not. Let’s assume that that’s not a possibility. You could advise that brand. You could become an advisor to that brand. Just be, effectively, an agent of them. So that’s an opportunity as well.
Barbara Drazga: Yeah you could consult for that brand and put it all in a monthly retainer.
Dan Meadors: Right, and build your capital that way until you can afford those types of opportunities.
Barbara Drazga: Which means you need to understand what value added value you can bring to brand owners. And that’s a whole other topic for another webinar. We’ll do it again. Awesome. Brand registry 2.0.
Dan Meadors: It’s so far incredibly exciting. We’re working with it now. It offers a lot more flexibility to brands. That’s the thing. Before, brand registry was kind of blah, you know? It allowed you to do some cool stuff like EBC, enhanced brand content. But outside of that, it wasn’t very exciting. Really didn’t almost do anything. You could control listings a little better and things like that. But with 2.0 there’s some pretty awesome features that allow you to control who’s selling products and who’s allowed to sell products for brands, which is really, really exciting because that’s a benefit of ours. That should only be scary if you’re not adding value to the brand you’re working with or you’re not a real authorized partner. If you’re not a real authorized partner, that’s kind of a scary proposition of giving brands more power. But for us, we expected it to only be amazing because it allows us to help them limit some of the yahoos that they don’t want to sell their product. It gives them more power.
Now, it is a little harder to get into because it requires a trademark. For brand register 2.0 they have to have a registered trademark and it has to be a written trade … the trade name.
Barbara Drazga: Yeah, you can’t just put a TM after and suddenly it’s trademarked. You actually have to submit the USPTO.gov, US Patent Trade Office, whatever.
Dan Meadors: USPTOC blah, blah, blah. It’s just a big long thing.
Barbara Drazga: Right. USPTO.gov I think.
Dan Meadors: If you get the trademark, you can go ahead and sign up for it. And here’s the thing. They can make you an authorized agent of their brand and you can register on their behalf, which is what we try to do a lot.
Barbara Drazga: What was that? You can be an authorized agent of their brand?
Dan Meadors: And register their brand on their behalf.
Barbara Drazga: In Amazon?
Dan Meadors: Yeah. I think we’re brand registered for six brands right now.
Barbara Drazga: Interesting.
Dan Meadors: That we don’t own. They’re all other company … companies that we carry their product and they wanted us to be able to help them with EBC.
Barbara Drazga: Yeah, this is next level stuff. This is next level stuff. This is exciting. Every time I talk to you, I learn a bunch of new stuff, not just one new thing.
I want to be respectful of your time. There’s so much we could cover. We could talk for hours. I love hanging out with you. I do want to give people a little bit of something they can go research on their own and start digging into. If you haven’t taken a look at sourcing wholesale yet and moving your business model to a sustainable model that is going to give you a lifestyle business, you’re building a business around a lifestyle that you want, so it’s supporting a lifestyle. For me, that’s sourcing wholesale and bringing my own bundles to the Amazon marketplace.
I know you guys have created a free workshop, five videos, and I know that during that workshop you’re going to be teaching something about how to start finding … how do you find the brand owners, how do you find products that you want to go sell. What are you going to be talking about during this free workshop?
Dan Meadors: When you attend this free workshop, at the end of it you will understand wholesale. You will understand the concept of how to find a product, how to find a manufacturer, the kind of conversation you should have with a manufacturer, and then how to place an order. Wholesale is not rocket science. It’s probably the oldest form of commerce in the world. But there are some things that people don’t inherently understand. And here’s the thing we’ve realized. When people don’t understand something, it’s an excuse to never move forward. Right?
Barbara Drazga: Yep.
Dan Meadors: And that was true for us. We didn’t understand wholesale when we got started and we probably delayed getting started about a year because we were afraid. So that’s what this thing is for. It’s literally designed to help people walk through that process, walk through those doors and be like, “Okay I can really do this. This is a model I can actually do.” And get their feet wet in it. So I think it’s going to be an invaluable tool for people. It’s going to be something that everybody should go through. The barrier to entry is correct, it’s zero dollars. And I promise you, if you don’t like it, we’ll give you a full refund.
Barbara Drazga: Very cool. So when does that start? I’m going to put up a URL in just a second here so you guys can go register for that free workshop. When does that workshop start, Dan? Because I know it runs five days, then it’s done?
Dan Meadors: The way the workshop works is it’s on the 17th to the 21st.
Barbara Drazga: That’s July?
Dan Meadors: Right. 17th to the 21st of July. It is going to be pre-recorded. Now we do have one live webinar scheduled in there where it is going to be live, but if you can’t make it, you can get the recording. But that’s only going to be available to people who register. Those recordings are only going to be available to people who register, and it’s only going to be available for a week. But it is free, 100% free. You don’t have to do anything. No credit cards. Nothing like that. You just go and attend it and take action. That’s what we want. But it’s not going to be available forever. It’s just going to be available for a week. So get in there, take action. If you can’t make it live, watch the recordings. And really, just see if this is a business model you can do. Because here’s the thing. It changed our life. Wholesale undoubtedly changed our life for the better. I think Barbara is the same. It’s clearly changed your life for the better.
Barbara Drazga: Yep.
Dan Meadors: Whole sale is amazing. It’s just a great form of business because it’s something you can grow without being in every single day. This is the best way you’re going to learn it and at the best price. It’s zero dollars. It’s free. Just go check out.
Barbara Drazga: It’s dealdivawholesale.com/free and it’s up on the screen right now. Go ahead and register now. Again, it’s free. It runs five days. It’s a wholesale workshop July 17 to 21. It’s dealdivawholesale.com. It’s for a limited time. Don’t miss out. Go ahead and take action, and go register for that free workshop, guys. I’m hoping to maybe do another webinar with Dan, asking him some more burning questions that I have about wholesale. Maybe we can corral him on another one. I’ll let you know. He’s a busy, busy guy. But I’m sure he’ll … I’m corralling you already, aren’t I? I’m sure he’ll have a little chat with us.
So I just wanted to thank you all for being on this webinar. If you’ve got any questions, you can find me on Facebook: Barbara Drazga. My Facebook group is Deal Diva, Wholesale and Private Label. Dan Meadors, where can they find you?
Dan Meadors: Check our Facebook page, The Wholesale Formula. It’s super easy. We’re always publishing content on there as well.
Barbara Drazga: Yeah, he’s got a ton of great articles. I’ll also put a bunch of his articles and videos up on dealdivawholesale.com so that you can keep educating yourself. Hey, it is mid-July right now. It is mid-July, beginning of July. So here’s the thing. As of yesterday, we’re 141 days from Black Friday. That is plenty of time to get your research done, get a wholesale account set up, get orders placed, and get positioned for killing it. I hate using war words, but truly ramping up your business and leveraging that fourth quarter insanity that is a very large percentage of my annual sales, and everybody else I’m sure. I triple down for fourth quarter. I absolutely triple down. You can wait until October to get started. Now is a perfect time to get started.
Go ahead to dealdivawholesale.com/free and watch Dan’s free workshop starting July 17. I will see you guys in the next webinar. Thank you, Dan Meadors, for being on. Again, I’m Barbara Drazga, Deal Diva. We will talk later. Bye.