The product isn’t sold until your partner sells it
Linus Bohlin has bought brands, sold a brand, and is now building one. From all three seats, the same lesson keeps surfacing: the brands that resellers sell hardest are the ones that make their product data and content easiest to use.
Most people in this industry spend a career in one chair. Linus Bohlin has sat in three. He bought brands as a category manager at Nordic Nest, sold one as a Nordic country sales manager & Global e-commerce partnership lead at Tom Dixon, and is now building Duni Lighting Solutions, launching this September.
From every seat he kept arriving at the same conclusion. Whether a brand got sold hard by its partners or left on the shelf came down, more than to anything else, to how easily its product data and content could be put to work.
Linus Bohlin
What the buyer rewards
At Nordic Nest, Linus ran around seventy lighting brands and ranked them in tiers. The ranking was never only about money.
“My top five suppliers were not the top five in turnover. They were the combination of what I believed in as a brand and how easy it was to work with them.”
Being easy to work with could earn a brand a place above bigger names. The opposite cost it one. The design-led brands often looked wonderful and worked terribly: a cool story, a nice product, and underneath it no structure and bad data.
“They don’t work for us. They work for themselves.”
His product coordinators uploaded two hundred new articles a week. At that pace, searching an image library by article number instead of guessing a product name is minutes per item, and minutes decide whether the week’s target gets hit. A brand that made that easy got onboarded faster and featured more often. A brand that sent a messy folder, or said the data was already online in the PDF, slipped down. We asked him directly whether how easy a brand made its content changed how hard he pushed it: Yes, it did.
When the content changed, the orders changed
The clearest proof came from the selling side. At Tom Dixon, Linus took on some of the brand’s biggest third-party e-commerce accounts, including one major account that was presenting the brand badly, with the wrong pictures, the wrong information, and no campaigns. His team rebuilt the product content, mapped the right assets to the right articles, and handed it over ready to use.
That partner then ordered more in the first quarter than they had in the entire year before.
Nobody changed the product. They changed what the partner, and the partner’s customers, could actually see. It is the whole argument in a single account. Give a reseller better content and the orders follow.
Duni Lighting Solution
What “easy” actually looks like
Strip away the strategy and it comes down to a person in a car. After a meeting, Linus would open his laptop and build a Selection: the catalog link, the price list link, and separately a SoMe content package. One click, and the customer downloads it all ready to drop straight into their own platform.
The alternative is what most teams still live with. Into a shared drive, the folder inside the folder inside the folder, a heavy set of high-resolution files, the download time eating the afternoon, reorganize it, then send it on so the next person downloads it all again. Even now, before his new setup is fully live, his team runs on hundreds of WeTransfers with no record of what went where.
It matters because the people doing this are not systems people. Sales guys are simple, as he puts it, and they do not like complex. They will not click through four folders to find one file, and they will not hand their customers a worse experience than that either. Asked what he would miss most if that structure disappeared, he answered in one word:
“The structure.”
The routine that turns access into sales
Access only pays off when resellers actually use it, and that is a habit you build. VOCAST recommends running a short routine before every reseller visit. Does this client have a login? Are they downloading? If not, get out our iPad and teach them, then watch the downloads climb. Across hundreds of wholesale partners that single discipline carries thousands of downloads a month, and increased sales is the logical consequence.
“That is exactly what we want to build here. At Duni the scale is larger, over a hundred salespeople across Europe, each making several customer visits a day, plus larger wholesale partnerships with their own hundreds of account managers can carry the brand into rooms his team will never reach. For any of that volume to convert, the content has to sit one click from the person doing the selling.”
There is a sharper reason to invest in it too. When a brand cannot win on price, content is how it wins instead.
“Open four near-identical listings for the same kind of product, and the one with richer images, lifestyle shots a shopper can picture at home, and data they trust is the one that earns the click. A brand with no picture of its own table cannot expect the internet to sell it.”
Linus saw it from the buyer’s side: the brands he wanted to grow were the ones he poured content behind, with extra photo shoots and inspirational articles, precisely because good content was what made them sell.
The point
None of it is complicated. If you sell through partners, you cannot just take the order and leave. You have to make sure the product can leave their shelf too, and that means putting your best content and data one click from the people doing the selling. Give them that, make it easy, then look at who is actually using it. The product isn’t sold until your partner sells it.
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