7 months into building an FMCG startup distribution is growing, but sales aren’t consistent. What am I missing?
I’ve been building my FMCG brand for around 6 months now, and I’ve reached a point where I genuinely need advice from people who have actually built or scaled something in this space.
We’ve managed to get listed on multiple marketplaces and get our products into multiple retail stores.
Some retail partners are doing well and have placed repeat orders, while at some stores the movement is extremely slow. Marketplace orders also come in, but they’re nowhere close to consistent.
We’ve tried Meta ads as well. Money gets spent, traffic comes in, but we haven’t been able to turn it into a predictable sales channel.
The confusing part is that product feedback hasn’t really been the issue. We haven’t received any major negative feedback. The one concern we heard was pricing, so we took that seriously and reduced our prices.
But even after all this, we still haven’t cracked consistent sales.
Now there’s another real challenge: a portion of our current inventory has its best-before toward the end of October. So we essentially have around 2 months to significantly improve sell-through without just burning more money on ads or giving everything away at unsustainable discounts.
And currently, it’s basically just me handling everything retail, marketplaces, sales, marketing, follow-ups, inventory and operations.
I know 7 months is still early, and I’m not expecting some magical growth hack.
But I’m also not looking for the usual “run more ads, make reels, work with influencers, watch XYZ YouTube videos” suggestions. I’ve been trying these things.
I’d really like to hear from founders, FMCG operators, retailers or anyone who has actually been through this stage:
If this were your brand, you had limited capital and roughly 1.5 months to move the inventory what would you actually do?
Would you double down on the retail stores already working? Corporate/bulk orders? Sampling? Gyms/cafes? Marketplaces? Something I’m completely overlooking?
And more importantly, how did you go from occasional/random orders to consistent sales?