Limited bandwidth
Founders and small teams often have too many responsibilities to maintain consistent retailer outreach.
Duo eBroker
An outsourced independent-retail sales team for emerging CPG brands.
Duo helps growing CPG brands reach independent retailers across the United States—with the hands-on attention of a small, experienced brokerage.
Add disciplined targeting, outreach, buyer conversations, follow-up, and account development without building a full internal sales team.
Human-led direct sales. AI-assisted market intelligence.
Outsourced sales capacity
- Independent-retail targeting
- Buyer outreach and conversations
- Sample follow-through
- Order and reorder development
Small brokerage. National reach. Deep category experience.
Duo stays close to the work while drawing on a broad base of experience across brands, products, and independent-retail conversations.
- 185+
- CPG brands worked with
- 70+
- product categories
- National
- direct-sales coverage
- Since 2017
- serving emerging CPG brands
The work behind independent retail
Independent retail rewards follow-through. It also demands a lot of it.
Selling directly to independent retailers is account-by-account work. Each opportunity can require research, outreach, buyer conversations, samples, follow-up, purchase orders, and continued attention after the first sale.
Stop-and-start follow-up
Promising conversations and sample opportunities can lose momentum when no one has time to carry them forward.
One account at a time
Independent retail does not behave like a single chain decision. Relationships must be developed store by store.
A complex internal build
Hiring, training, and managing a full sales team can add significant cost and complexity before a brand is ready for it.
Duo provides experienced sales capacity for this work without asking a growing brand to build the entire function internally.
Begin with context
Start with context, not a blank retailer list.
Brand context
- Goals and customers
- Accounts and channel history
- Sales, marketing, and prior lessons
Duo context
- Retail and category experience
- Store and regional knowledge
- Historical market observations
Combined starting viewA better-informed starting hypothesis
Duo combines brand-provided knowledge with its independent-retail and category experience to form a better-informed starting hypothesis about where the product may fit.
- From the brand — goals, customers, accounts, channels, history, and prior lessons.
- From Duo — retail patterns, category knowledge, store types, regions, and historical market observations.
Brand-provided context remains self-reported unless independently verified. It stays distinct from known facts and evidence Duo later observes.
Learn from the market
Every conversation adds to the picture.
- Human-led salesRelationships create the activity
Outreach · conversations · samples · follow-up
- Market responseReality supplies the evidence
Interest · declines · objections · orders · unknowns
- AI-assisted memoryUseful signals stay connected
Retained · organized · analyzed for the brand
Duo’s brokers conduct the outreach, buyer conversations, sample follow-up, and account development. Responses, declines, objections, store and regional context, orders, reorders, and insufficient evidence become observations the business can retain.
AI doesn’t replace the broker. It helps the business remember.
- People lead the relationship work.
- The market supplies the evidence.
- AI helps retain, connect, organize, and analyze what happened.
Brokers remain responsible for judgment, and retailers make their own buying decisions.
Improve the next decision
The longer we work together, the clearer your market becomes.
Retained evidence over time
- Evidence appears stronger
- Evidence appears weaker
- Not enough evidence yet
Next stepBetter-informed next decision
With enough activity and time, repeated evidence can make stronger or weaker store profiles, regional patterns, objections, messages, product attributes, order behavior, and remaining unknowns easier to see. The result is better-informed next decisions—not certainty.
- Market learning is cumulative. Early signals are not the whole story.
- Orders and reorders are stronger evidence, not guarantees.
- Retained learning can support decisions beyond immediate direct sales.
The resulting knowledge may support future distribution, chain, investment, brokerage, and internal planning conversations. It does not guarantee those outcomes.
No single sample, conversation, order, or reorder proves product-market fit. The advantage is disciplined memory.
The retained understanding built here belongs to the individual brand. Broader, privacy-safe category guidance is addressed under Compounding Intelligence below.
Retailers make their own buying decisions. Duo does not promise placements, orders, reorders, sales volume, or timelines.
Build the evidence before expanding the exposure
Direct sales builds the foundation broader growth can stand on.
Direct sales is not the complete long-term growth engine for every national brand. Distribution, chains, larger brokers, marketing, and investment may all become important as a brand grows.
Direct sales through Duo
- Works with individual independent-store buyers.
- Requires account-by-account outreach, conversations, samples, follow-up, purchase orders, and reorder development.
- Produces direct buyer and store-level learning.
- Builds a diversified base of independent accounts.
Distributed sales
- Works through distributors, warehouses, chains, or other concentrated relationships.
- May create larger or faster aggregate volume.
- Can provide less direct visibility into individual store behavior.
- Helps expand the canopy after or alongside the direct-sales foundation.
Larger opportunities can be more useful when a brand arrives with evidence about its positioning, buyer response, store fit, objections, opening-order development, and reorder behavior.
Duo does not replace distributors, chains, larger brokerages, marketing, investment, or an internal sales team. Its role is to help build the roots, evidence, judgment, and direct-sales foundation those next steps can draw from.
We know our place in the growth journey. Duo helps brands build the roots, evidence, and direct-sales foundation they can carry into larger opportunities.
Direct sales builds the root system. Distribution helps expand the canopy.
The engagement
A clear process, not a guaranteed funnel.
The work follows a disciplined sequence while adapting to the realities of the brand, product, buyers, and accounts involved.
Qualification and discovery
Duo learns about the brand, product, current retail position, operational readiness, and goals to determine whether there is a practical fit.
Brand and product onboarding
The team develops working knowledge of the product, positioning, wholesale details, supporting materials, sample readiness, and fulfillment capabilities.
Retail targeting and outreach
Duo identifies appropriate independent retailers and begins direct, account-by-account outreach.
Samples, follow-up, and account development
Duo coordinates sample opportunities and carries buyer conversations forward through questions, follow-up, and appropriate sales opportunities.
Orders, reorders, and ongoing learning
Duo works to develop appropriate purchase-order opportunities, supports reorder development, and carries useful observations into targeting, messaging, and account support.
Retailers make their own buying decisions. A disciplined process creates better follow-through and better information—not guaranteed placements or purchase orders.
Channels and geography
National reach, focused on independent retail.
From one small, hands-on team, Duo conducts direct-sales work with appropriate independent retailers across the United States.
- Natural grocery
- Specialty and gourmet retail
- Food co-ops
- Independent supermarkets
- Other appropriate independent-retail channels when product fit supports them
Channel names are a starting point, not a promise of fit. The right targets depend on the product, customer, price, positioning, fulfillment readiness, and the retailer’s own buying priorities.
Fit and readiness
Is Duo the right next step for your brand?
A responsible fit conversation should identify both when Duo can help and when a brand needs a stronger foundation first.
A strong partnership starts with operational readiness.
Duo is best positioned to help emerging CPG brands that are ready to support the account-by-account work of wholesale growth.
- The product has clear positioning and a defined customer.
- Wholesale pricing and economics are established.
- The brand can fulfill orders reliably.
- Samples and useful sales materials are available.
- The team has realistic expectations about independent-account growth.
- The brand will communicate promptly and participate in onboarding.
- The team is willing to learn from buyer response, including evidence that challenges an assumption.
The strongest fit is a brand willing to let reality improve the plan.
Some brands need a stronger foundation first.
Duo is unlikely to be the right next step when the operating foundation or expectations are not ready for independent-account development.
- The brand requires guaranteed placements, purchase orders, or sales volume.
- The product is not ready for wholesale fulfillment.
- Samples or usable sales materials are unavailable.
- The immediate goal is nationwide chain distribution rather than independent-account development.
- The team cannot participate in onboarding or respond to live opportunities.
- Expectations depend on rapid scale without account-by-account follow-through.
A “not yet” can be more useful than beginning an engagement before the product, operations, or expectations are ready.
Why Duo
Small by design. Experienced through repetition.
Duo combines the close involvement of a boutique brokerage with the reach and accumulated judgment developed through extensive CPG and retailer work.
Personal involvement
A small, experienced brokerage stays close to the brand, the conversations, and the practical details of the work.
National direct-sales reach
The work can extend across appropriate independent-retail markets in the United States without turning the relationship into a large-agency handoff.
Breadth across brands and categories
Experience with more than 185 CPG brands and over 70 product categories creates a broad base of comparisons and questions to draw from.
Compounding Wisdom
Real conversations, samples, objections, orders, missed opportunities, and reorders become better judgment for the next decision.
Duo Marketplace has served emerging CPG brands since 2017, built on brokerage experience dating back to 2010.
Experience improves pattern recognition and decision-making. It does not create magical certainty.
Compounding Intelligence
Private brand learning. Responsible category perspective.
What Duo learns while working for one brand stays with that brand. Broader guidance may draw only on appropriately aggregated and de-identified patterns across relevant experience.
Brand-specific learning
- Learning about one brand remains attached to that brand and is used to improve its work.
- Private buyer names, account lists, pricing, margins, strategies, and individual results remain confidential.
- Self-reported information remains distinct from Duo-observed outcomes.
Privacy-safe category intelligence
- Broader guidance uses only appropriately aggregated and de-identified experience.
- Known facts, observations, estimates, and insufficient evidence remain distinct.
- Category intelligence is responsibly supported and never presented with false precision.
Your brand stays private. The intelligence keeps growing.
Brand-specific learning stays confidential. Broader guidance is useful only when the underlying information is handled responsibly.
- One brand’s private results, strategy, buyer names, account lists, pricing, margins, and individual performance are never exposed to another brand.
- Self-reported information remains distinct from Duo-observed outcomes.
- Known facts, observations, estimates, and insufficient data remain distinct.
- Category guidance is aggregated, de-identified, responsibly supported, and never presented with false precision.
Evidence and reporting
Evidence should make the next decision clearer.
Duo looks beyond a placement count to understand how accounts develop, where follow-through changes the picture, and what the available evidence does—or does not—support.
What Duo observes
Buyer response, repeated objections, sample activity, opening-order development, reorder development, and differences among regions or store types.
What Duo distinguishes
Known facts, Duo-observed outcomes, brand-reported context, estimates, and situations where there is not enough data to draw a conclusion.
How clients receive it
Brand-specific results and learning are delivered directly as part of the service. The marketing website does not contain a client portal or public reporting dashboard.
Starting a conversation
Start with fit, readiness, and the work ahead.
Duo begins by understanding the product, the brand’s operational readiness, its current retail position, and what it hopes to build.
Engagement details follow a fit conversation.
If the fit is sound, the next step is a more detailed onboarding and engagement conversation. Engagement details follow that conversation so they reflect the brand’s readiness and the work ahead.
Ready to strengthen your independent-retail sales effort?
Talk with a small, experienced team that can support direct sales across the United States while staying close to the work, the brand, and the accounts being developed.