Jason here, Australian founder. Twelve months ago I shipped a toy garbage truck full of competitor product to a major US retailer’s HQ as a cold pitch.
Yesterday they went live with us across their top 50 stores.
Sharing the real story including the three months I almost lost the deal and just in case it’s useful for anyone else trying to break into US retail from offshore.
About a year ago I sent a custom box to a major US retailer’s HQ. My partner Lily designed it. She’s been a tattoo artist for fourteen years and runs her own studio, so her instincts on what lands with a tattoo audience are sharper than mine.
Inside the box:
Full size product samples,
A polaroid of me holding the box with a handwritten note from Melbourne,
A couple of guitar pin on the lid (the retailer is music and counterculture, so we leaned into it),
A green toy garbage truck,
The garbage truck was stuffed with tubes of Aquaphor, our biggest US competitor.
The handwritten card with it said: “We’re from Australia, and we came all this way just to say: Aquaphor belongs in the trash. This is the good stuff. Clean, plant-based, made by people who actually get tattooed. Let’s do it.”
I knew the buyer wasn’t a fan of Aquaphor.
We built the entire package around that one piece of information. That ink nurse was better than any petroleum product out there.
The wait
About a month went by.
Nothing. I figured it had landed flat.
Then the email came in. The buyer apologised for the slow reply. He said he wanted to actually use the cream on his new tattoo for a couple of weeks before responding, so his feedback would be honest.
Two weeks. On his own fresh tattoo. Before he even wrote back.
That was the moment it turned.
The garbage truck got him to open the box.
The product on his own skin got him to introduce us to his merch manager.
The flight
We then flew to their HQ on the East Coast. You cannot manage a relationship like this from Slack and email across a sixteen-hour time difference. You sit in the room. You stop being a logo on a slide.
I told them what we’re doing beyond the cream. New categories, new SKUs, our work with First Nations growers in Australia, our Tattooist Guild partnership, the science partnerships.
They didn’t buy a single product.
They bought the roadmap.
The disaster
Then logistics broke.
Cases went missing with UPS. The first order, the one the entire rollout depended on, was delayed by three months because UPS kept “losing cases”.
I sat in Melbourne watching tracking numbers go cold. The retailer had its own particular DC acceptance process I had to learn from the outside, in a different country, in a different time zone, on top of running the rest of the company.
Tariffs. Customs. Compliance paperwork.
FineLine ticketing requirements I’d never heard of and now know more about than I want to.
Multiple 3PLs. Sleep that didn’t happen.
It is the most stressful retail onboarding I have ever done. By a long way.
If Lily and I hadn’t flown over and built that relationship in person, I’m almost certain they would have pulled out somewhere in those three months. Buyers don’t wait that long for stock unless they actually believe in the brand. The trip was the thing that gave them a reason to wait.
Where we are
Yesterday they posted us live on their socials. Top 50 stores, testing the waters before a wider rollout and more SKUs to follow.
They posted “Australia’s number 1 aftercare is finally here at Spencer’s stores now”. It was quite powerful to wake up to see in my notifications on my phone at 6am.
It feels different than I expected. Not relief. Not pride. Something quieter than that. The feeling you get when something you spent a year carrying finally puts itself down. But now, we hope it sells, we hope it gets picked up nationally.
Three things I’d tell any founder trying to crack US retail from offshore
The package matters more than the pitch deck. We won the meeting with a toy and a handwritten note, not a slide deck.
You have to fly over. Whatever you think you can do over Zoom, you can’t. The trip is what survives the inevitable logistics disaster.
The buyer is a person.
Find out what they hate, what they like, what they’re into. Build the package around them, not your brand.
The retailer didn’t fall in love with our product page. He fell in love with the fact that someone in Melbourne had paid attention to him.
Happy to answer any questions about US retail entry, working with US 3PLs from offshore, or the actual mechanics of cold-pitching a major retailer with a creative package. Not selling anything in this thread.