🧭 Focusing on Independent Retail as a Strategy to Expand Your Brand into Channels Beyond Amazon

If you’re an Amazon-native brand thinking about wholesale, chances are your mind jumps straight to the big players—Target, Whole Foods, CVS. That’s the dream, after all: Go big and add millions to your bottom line in a few short years.

Not so fast.

Before you waltz into the offices of the national players, there’s a smarter, leaner, and frankly better place to start: independent retail.

Going to major chains first will lead to a lot of failure and frustratingly slow growth. In fact, you’re more than likely to make some mistakes that cause irreparable harm, like alienating a key account through your inability to execute.

For Amazon and DTC brands making their first move into physical stores, the independent channel is where you learn, where you experiment, and where you grow without blowing up your business.

But to explain why I feel this way, it’s first important to define what independent retail actually is—and why it’s the best training ground for long-term retail success.

🛍️ What Is Independent Retail?

Independent retail includes:

• Mom & pop shops

• Specialty stores and mini regional chains

• Often family-owned, where the owner is the buyer

These stores aren’t part of national chains. They don’t have corporate buyers, centralized planograms, or 10-step onboarding portals.

That’s a good thing. It means you generally are speaking with an owner, or, at the very least, someone with the power to make decisions. You are not selling to a committee with a grading rubric at their back. You are talking to a person. This makes selling much easier, and provides you with valuable feedback about how these operators feel about your product.

🆚 How Independents Differ from National Chains

Operationally, independent retail is far less burdensome. This is crucial for businesses that are capital constrained. Here's what makes independent retail uniquely founder-friendly:

✅ No EDI systems or complex onboarding
✅ Simpler payment terms — often credit card, usually no net terms
✅ Lower MOQs (minimum order quantities), which means less inventory risk
✅ More flexible on pricing, bundles, packaging

But it’s not all easy wins:

⚠️ Smaller volume = lower total revenue
⚠️ Orders are inconsistent and harder to forecast
⚠️ Higher time spent/order by selling one at a time
⚠️ No national reach or scale

Still—when you’re learning retail from scratch, these drawbacks are features, not bugs.

🧪 Why Start With Independent Retail?

If you’ve never sold wholesale before, independents are where you build the muscle.

You get to test everything:

• MOQs, bundling, case pack structure

• Wholesale pricing and margin strategy

• Packaging effectiveness on real shelves

• Sales policies, return handling, and logistics

And you do it without betting the farm.

If you lose a key account, you’re not sitting on 3,000 unsellable units. If something’s not working, you tweak it. No freight chargebacks. No retail compliance nightmares. No meetings with a buyer’s assistant’s assistant. If you ship someone the wrong product, you eat the $150 in cost, let them keep it, and send the right thing. Then they like you even more! That’s a $10,000 mistake at Walmart.

🗣️ Real Feedback Beats Raw Data

One of the underrated benefits of independent retail? The on-the-ground feedback.

The store owner knows what’s moving and what’s collecting dust. The floor manager hears what customers are saying about your product. You’ll learn:

• Where your product fits in a real retail set

• What customers compare it to, and what they do/don’t understand about it

• What the buyers wish it did differently

These are insights you can’t get from a spreadsheet. You are trying to understand how to translate your Amazon success into retail success. You know the product is good, but you must master how to convey that without the support of a PDP. This is largely qualitative work at first. You can optimize sales later when you are confident in what you are putting on the shelf.

🧰 What Kinds of Products Work Best for Independent Buyers?

Not every product thrives in this channel, but many do—especially in these categories:

🛍️ Gift: Think impulse items, seasonal products, shelf-friendly packaging, travel items
🏕️ Outdoor/Recreation: Seasonal gear, specialized hobby equipment, consumables
🏠 Home: Boutique decor, kitchen goods, cleaning, stationery

Even niche products can work—like small-run consumer electronics or hyper-specialized pet accessories. Just remember: your addressable market will be smaller, and you’ll have a smaller range of accounts to sell to. That’s not always a bad thing, though.

📈 Learn Fast, Then Scale Smart

A strong first year in independents might get you to $100K+ in wholesale revenue—but the real win is what you learn from all those transactions. The improvements you make early have a compounding effect on current and future sales.

After 12 months:

• You’ve validated your pricing and packaging

• You’ve cleaned up your ops

• You’ve got testimonials from real buyers

• You’ve built a retail pitch that actually works

That’s when you go pitch the big guys—with confidence and a real story to tell.

🔜 What’s Next?

In a future blog, we’ll talk about how to actually get into independent retail—including outreach tips, pricing strategy, and how to be where the buyers are.

For now, if you’re considering a retail expansion and want help mapping out the stages, feel free to reach out. I work with Amazon and DTC-native brands to make smart, scalable moves into retail—with fewer mistakes and faster wins.

Let’s get your brand off the screen and onto the shelf.

Here’s our Contact Form

Or reach out to me directly at Michael@CrossStratinc.com