What Brands Don’t Understand About Retail

What Brands Don’t Understand About Retail
by John James, Native Summit

I’ve run an independent outdoor specialty shop for nearly 20 years. In that time, I can count on one hand the number of conversations I’ve had with a VP of sales or director of wholesale who called to ask what’s actually happening with their products on our floor. How’s it selling. What are customers saying. What do you need from us. Nearly twenty years, and I can only remember one.

What I get instead are calls about sell-in. Requirements, orders, minimums, buy-ins for the next season’s line. Nobody calls about sell-through — about what happens after the box gets opened and the product hits the floor, which is the only part of this business that actually matters to a brand’s long-term survival.

When specialty retail is gone, it’s not coming back.

If shops like ours disappear, it’s not just a storefront that goes away. We’ve educated thousands of people on how to actually do this stuff — how to hike, camp, backpack, climb, travel. Where to go, locally and far from home. That knowledge doesn’t live in a product listing or a return policy. It lives in a conversation on the floor, every single day, with someone who’s done it and cares whether you have a good experience doing it too.

And none of that is profitable. It costs us time and margin to have those conversations, while the vendors whose gear we’re recommending are steering customers to DTC channels with better margins than we’re allowed to survive on. Or they’re handing their best products and terms to big-box stores that put nothing into education, passion, or experience, and whose staff couldn’t tell a customer why one pack fits and another doesn’t. We’re doing the expensive, unscalable work of curating this industry and turning people into outdoor users — while the economics increasingly punish us for it.

So when specialty goes away, it’s not just the gear that becomes harder to find. It’s the whole on-ramp. The next generation of hikers, campers, climbers, backpackers, travelers — the people who need someone to tell them where to start — won’t have anyone to ask. That’s not a hypothetical inspiration problem. That’s the actual one, arriving on schedule.

Trust isn’t purchased. It’s built on the floor.

When a product sits on our shelf, it inherits something no advertising budget can buy: legitimacy. A customer walks in already trusting us, because we’ve spent nearly 20 years earning that trust one honest recommendation at a time. The moment a product is in our shop, in our hands, recommended by someone the customer already believes — it’s real to them in a way no influencer post or paid placement will ever be. They can pick it up, feel it, try it on, ask a real person a real question and get a real answer. You cannot manufacture that with content spend, no matter how much you throw at it.

How many brands have we introduced to our customers over the years? How many have we elevated and grown, patiently, one conversation at a time, because we believed in what they were making? We tell your stories better than you could ever tell them yourselves — direct to your customers, in person, at the moment they’re deciding what to trust. And yet brands keep funneling resources into their own DTC channels, which compete directly with the retailers who built that credibility in the first place, while the margins that let us stay in business erode. If we’re gone, how exactly do you think those customers will get introduced to your next product?

Every day, someone buys your product because of a conversation on our floor. Most of them never saw your advertising. We aren’t just a customer on your sell-in report. We are marketing: real users with real expertise, talking to real customers about your brand, and often earning their trust more than any campaign can.

Wholesale relationships are transactional. That’s the whole problem.

We did this the right way. The way vendors have begged shops to do it for twenty years: invest in training, build real expertise, showcase the full line, treat the brand with the respect it asked for. We did all of it. What do we have to show for it?

In two decades, I can’t remember a single vendor really wanting to know what they could do to help us succeed. Meanwhile, we’ve absorbed every cost required to represent their brand well: months of training every employee, holding ourselves to standards brands never ask us to meet, spending our own money to showcase their highest-end products even when we know they won’t sell — because doing so creates excitement and elevates the brand. We pay to attend buying shows. We pay for product displays. We pay for demo units. All so we can sell someone else’s product, on someone else’s margin terms, with almost none of it reciprocated.

We’ve been called the most knowledgeable, most technical shop in our territory more times than I can count. It’s never once led to a vendor going out of their way to be here. They want to be talked about. They want to be sold. They really want to be pre-ordered. And they desperately want retailers to do business exactly the way we do business. But making that easier for us isn’t something most of them have ever tried.

This isn’t your reps’ job.

When I raise any of this with brands, I often hear some version of “that’s what our reps are for.” It isn’t.

First, we’ve had great sales reps and terrible ones over the years, and it matters a ton. Being a poor rep is easy. Being a good one is very hard: knowing our store, telling us the truth about the line, fighting for us internally. But even the good ones are increasingly reduced to order-takers, because that’s the only path you’ve left them. You don’t listen to them, and you give them no power to do anything other than sell us products. One person covering dozens of accounts has no say over margin structure, programs, or what gets built. Plenty of them have carried our feedback up the chain, and nothing came back.

The bad ones are on you too. Hiring a poor rep does more harm than having none. To us, that person is your brand, so every frustrating interaction widens the disconnect between us and you. It means fewer dollars spent with you and more headaches for us, and I can’t overstate how miserable it is to do business with a poor rep. We would rather have no rep than a bad one.

So don’t blame your reps for what’s in this paper. Blame yourselves. A great rep is an asset to us and should be to you, but an asset can’t replace leadership showing up.

The industry has an inspiration problem, and it starts with R&D.

Fifteen years ago, we felt connected to the brands we carried — their stories, their reasons for existing, the actual boundary-pushing products they were putting into the world. Every season used to bring something genuinely new, something that made us want to tell every customer who walked through the door. We don’t feel that anymore. What we see now is safer, smaller, incremental: another colorway of something that already has known sell-through data, because real R&D is expensive and a guaranteed 100,000 units is not. High volume has become the design criterion. The gear-geek-exciting, “look what they built” products that used to define this industry have all but disappeared, and with them, most of the reason to be excited about anything new.

Here’s what should worry you more than it probably does: we inspire customers every single day. That’s the job. We take whatever excitement we can find and hand it across the counter, over and over, to people who trust us to point them toward something worth getting into. But that only works as long as we’re actually inspired ourselves. What happens when the shelf stops giving us anything to be excited about? For fifteen years, that energy was real — no effort required. It has faded, and not because we stopped caring. It faded because the industry stopped giving us anything to be excited about. When it’s gone, your customers lose it first. They just won’t know why.

We have valued these products and these brands more than most of the brands value themselves. That’s not something I say lightly after nearly 20 years of doing this. It’s the conclusion the evidence keeps handing me.

We love what we do. We are not loved back.

I have real ideas about how this industry could work better — for brands, for retailers, for the people walking through our doors every day. I’m not the only one who thinks so. More than one of my own sales reps has gone to their VP of wholesale, to their heads of sales, and said some version of “you should call him, you should hear what he has to say.” Not one has picked up the phone.

I’ve consulted for other companies on exactly this — how to be a better partner, how to ease pain points, how to actually connect with your end user instead of just shipping product at them. Companies that wanted to hear it and acted on it. Unfortunately, those projects just happened to be outside the outdoor industry, which tells you something on its own: the people willing to listen to this kind of feedback aren’t in this room.

So, I’m not going to lay out a list of fixes here. I’ve got nearly twenty years of specific ideas about how to do this better, and I’m not interested in handing them over for free to an industry that hasn’t asked. What I actually want is simpler and harder: I want a brand to care enough about keeping us open — showing your product, telling your story, educating people on it, inspiring customers into it every single day — to pick up the phone and ask what that would take. Not a survey. Not a deck. An actual conversation, with someone who’s done this for nearly twenty years, about how to be the best partner you can possibly be to the people still doing this work.

Nobody is asking. That’s the whole paper, in one sentence.