The story
The client
With a dedicated team of 15 salespeople, 88 Acres is a growing company founded in 2020, focused on bringing nutritious and delicious seed-based products to market. Darien Brown, the National Retail Activations Manager, plays a key role in driving the success of their products, including seed bars, butters, granola, and protein bars, by facilitating endcaps and overseeing promotional planners and demo programs across retail channels.
It all started with Janice
Janice, a superstar salesperson from San Diego, consistently excels at her demos, often selling over 200 seed bars for 88 Acres. However, when only 4 boxes are available at the store, it’s a waste of her time and potential sales. This inventory misalignment was a recurring issue, affecting overall sales performance.
Optimize Your Wholesale with SimplyDepo—Start Now
The team couldn’t let her down
Whenever Janice is scheduled for a demo, they would email a retailer who would manually call the stores to make sure the product is available. But it didn’t work well, so 88 Acres tried to figure out ways to align their bulk purchasing with Whole Foods and other retailers to ensure the product is in stock.
Doesn't matter how great your salesperson or merchandiser is if your inventory optimization is bad.
Darien Brown
National Retail Activations Manager
The sheet file idea
Darien wanted to fix that and sorted all retail stores into two categories: red ones that never ordered well and green ones that did after 88 Acres had great demos there.
What he did was get all retailer schedules in one Google Sheet. Darien thought it would help the sales rep team to know whom and when to email or call. But the manual sheet was not enough.
What he did was get all retailer schedules in one Google Sheet. Darien thought it would help the sales rep team to know whom and when to email or call. But the manual sheet was not enough.
They needed better stock control
SimplyDepo helps brands and distributors easily manage their wholesale operations through simple automated tools. We help CPG brands optimize their sales, get bulk discounts, and increase revenue while handling all the optimization routine:
Get simple reporting and real-time market insights
Control your team’s distribution routes
Check analytics about inventory levels and pricing
Ensure each product is delivered on time
What’s changed with SimplyDepo
This is now a single place where 88 Acres stores all their retailer visits and contacts. Darien has been a client since February 2024, and SimplyDepo is on his screen all the time so he can track all the routes and his team's activity.
My social media team can go to the SimplyDepo gallery, hit Filter, go to tags, choose ‘June Secondary’, and see the huge B2B trade show that we won.
Darien Brown
National Retail Activations Manager
The team also uses SimplyDepo for better sales team management. Their sales reps are using our platform to have a contact list for each store. So when some of them are low on product, the reps will email wholesale suppliers directly from SimplyDepo and ask for replacements.
