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- [00:00]
A
Akash, what makes retail so freaking expensive?
- [00:03]
B
There's a lot of hidden fees, what we call deductions brands receive when they enter retail. So for every single retailer or distributor that they work with, there's anywhere from 100 to 200 different types of fees.
- [00:16]
A
So you're pulling out more of your margin by running the discount.
- [00:20]
B
A brand is typically losing up to 5% of their revenue to invalid deductions. You know, we're very proud. We have a 91% win rate on deductions that we submit. You can be losing using half a million a year to invalid.
- [00:40]
A
Hey, I'm Mike Galb and this is Consumer VC where we break down what it takes to invest in and build scalable consumer brands and technology companies. If you're enjoying the show, hit subscribe on the favorite platform and sign up to the newsletter@theconsumervc.com in the newsletter you'll get a weekly roundup of the latest fundraisers, product launches all around the world for the consumer, and new episodes of the podcast. Our guest today is Akash Raj who is the founder and CEO of Glimpse. Glimpse is an AI powered end to end deductions management service that's focused on recovering revenue from Khe, Unfi, Amazon and Target. For consumer brands, they centralize deductions with backups. They fully handle disputing on your behalf, the brand's behalf and streamline the accounting process. They work with 100 plus brands that include Pure Hydration, Little Bucks, Sobs, and Much, Much, much more. In this episode we focus on the ins and outs of retail. So if you're a brand owner, I would highly recommend this episode for you as we discuss the ins and outs of retail, what makes retail so expensive for brands, how Akash had the idea for Glimpse, and how serious of a problem is deductions and which deductions are worth fighting for and which aren't. Without further ado, here's Akash. Akash, thank you so much for taking the time. How are you doing?
- [01:52]
B
I'm good. How are you? Thank you for, thank you for having me on this.
- [01:56]
A
Oh please. Thank you so much for, for being willing to come on. I really appreciate it. So Akash, you're a brand, you just got into retail. What makes retail so freaking expensive? What are some of the costs that are associated in retail?
- [02:14]
B
Yeah, I mean retail is a big black box for folks when they're first getting started. There's a lot of hidden fees, what we call deductions that brands receive when they enter retail. So for every single retailer or distributor that they work with. There's anywhere from 100 to 200 different types of fees that a brand can get hit with. There's two buckets. So one is trade. When imagine you're walking to a grocery store and you see a little hang tag discount. That is a fee that you then get charged, that's passed through. Or say you have a box.
- [02:54]
A
So there's a fee to actually run a discount.
- [02:58]
B
Yes, exactly.
- [03:00]
A
Wow. So you're, so, you're, so you're pulling out more of your margin by running the discount, but as well as you're actually spending too, in order to actually run a discount in, in the first place.
- [03:10]
B
Okay, exactly. Or say you're shipping a box to a retailer and your label is one inch off. That comes back as a fee as well. You have a fee for getting data in exchange for just to be even be part of the retail as a fixed fee, et cetera. There's hundreds of types, but typically for a brand, this can be up to 20 to 30% of their revenue.
- [03:39]
A
Wow, 20 to 30. Okay, 20, 30% of revenue. That's. That's pretty wild. When, I mean, well, how did you find out about deductions? Did you, or think about it, did you come from the brand space? How did you kind of realize that this was a problem?
- [03:56]
B
Yeah, of course. So I previously built a company in the space with two co founders. We would help brands sample their products through Airbnbs as a way to reach consumers. Imagine you're a coffee brand, and the coffee was sponsored by your brand in an Airbnb switch. We had built that business, got to meet a lot of brands in that process. And as we were thinking about what's next, we started talking to brands about their pain points. Talked to over 500 brands, and deductions were just one of those things that kept coming up. And it just seemed like there was no good way to actually solve the problem without putting a ton of human resources towards it for something that should not even take that much time away. And every brand wants to focus on the most important thing, which is growth. But having to spend a lot of time to actually deal with deductions, understand what they are, get money back, et cetera was a super sharp pain point. So we decided to build our company in that space. I think the biggest black box for the industry is the fact that a brand is typically losing up to 5% of their revenue to invalid deductions.
- [05:05]
A
So walk me through what are invalid deductions?
- [05:10]
B
Yeah. So we can use an example like this. Say you're a brand, you received a purchase order to ship 10,000 units to a retailer. You ship 10,000 units to that retailer, you have a signed document that shows that you shipped that in full. And three months later you get a fee for $5,000 saying that the retailer only received half of those units. That's an incorrect fee. A brand typically doesn't even have time to review all these fees and they go unreviewed many a times. But if you actually reviewed that deduction and you compared it to the internal documentation, you would see that you actually shipped in full and you can file a claim to get that money back. So for a brand. Yeah, up to 5%, they're typically losing to fees like this.
- [05:59]
A
Got it, got it, got it. Wow. So how. So talk to me in terms of when you were, when you were discovering that this was like a huge, a huge pain point for brands and you maybe wanted to build, what was your first kind of step in terms of building what, what became of Glimpse today? Because as you, as you kind of said previously, there's a lot of kind of manual, manual hours that kind of goes into it. Who, who also typically in the organization does that fall under? Is that usually like, like, like a CFO or even a fractional CFO if they're small? What, who's, who's typically hands are trying to figure out of the deductions what are actually valid and, and, and invalid?
- [06:41]
B
Yeah, it's, it's crazy. So yeah, this typically lives in the finance team because they're the ones that are receiving the payments and are tasked with reviewing this. But again, every single type of deduction could tie back to a different team. The finance team doesn't actually have context on the supply chain. The finance team doesn't have context on if a trade promotion activity ran properly. So then they have to ping the ops team, ping the sales team, wait to hear back and then make that determination. So it's a cross functional effort and there's a lot of silo in that process, which is one of the big pain points as well. So it typically lives within finance. And to your earlier point, the first thing that we did was acknowledge the fact that every single retailer has different processes and it's a big build. So we just hyper focused, we talked to brands and realized that we wanted to start off focusing on brands that sold through distributors, namely Kahi and Unifi, the two big natural distributors, because they were two of the distributed trading partners that our brand had that had a lot of Deductions. So we hyper focused just working with brands that sold through Cake and Unify and that allowed us to hyper focus on the problem.
- [08:03]
A
Got it. And why is that the case with those? Not to kind of call out those two retailers, but to also call out those two retailers? Why does it tend to be the case?
- [08:14]
B
Yeah, I mean it's a blend of things. So you know, ultimately one, the issue with the distributor is that they're a middleman. The value of a distributor is that they're middleman. So when you're a brand, you work with one of these distributors to get access to all the different retailers in the natural channel, all the way from a Whole Foods to a small independent retailer in the middle of Utah. And as a result, when a distributor passes back the deductions to a brand, a deduction can come in the form of 20 retailers being mentioned in one deduction document. So it becomes super teased to actually review and understand where the deductions are coming from. So it takes a lot of time. And the other thing is just ultimately they have a lot of different compliance programs, fees and are a little old school in the way they do things. So it's a lot of time for a brand to even get the data into one place to review the deductions.
- [09:11]
A
Well, and also, and also like in terms of fighting the brands, can you talk to me about how that communication even flows from brand to distribution distributors? Because if you're fighting it, even if you're a very small brand, right. And you're, and you're fighting it, probably the distributor is like, well, I also don't want to waste my time either. Right. In terms of buying all the deductions. So how do you think, how did you think about that process in terms of communication and fighting these, and fighting these deductions to make sure that one they're paying attention to you, these distributors and these very valid concerns when it comes to deductions and be able to kind of also move swiftly.
- [09:57]
B
Yeah, so I think one of the big things is that you can't really change the process that they have. So for Unify, you submit an Excel sheet with the disputes. For Kehi you submit something in the portal. So what we did was we actually built a team of deductions experts that are on team glimpse that come from some of the biggest industry leaders like Body Armor, Impossible Foods, et cetera and worked with them hand in hand with our engineering team to build out these automations with all of the retail specific expertise to become successful. So like what Evidence. Do you actually need to submit each deduction? And how do you actually review a deduction? That was a hand in hand effort with experts and engineers here at Glimpse. That's what allowed us to build a full offering.
- [10:48]
A
Okay, got it. That's, that's, that makes a lot of sense. And how do you think brands, I know that you say, you know, it could cost you, you know, 20%, 30% of, of your margins, which is massive, massive savings in terms of fighting them, fighting the deduction like that. But at the same time, to your also point, it also is a huge time. It also takes a lot of time in terms of fighting these deductions and looking over every single line item. How seriously do you think brands actually take, like, how seriously do brands take this in terms of fighting deductions at this moment in time?
- [11:28]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think the reality is aspirationally every brand wants to do this, but a lot of times they just don't have the resources to handle this. You're focused on growth, you're focused on your inventory, you're focused on opening new accounts, you're focused on closing the books. A lot of these things become priorities just to keep the business afloat and then it becomes really hard to actually focus this. So when we talk to brands all the time, they tell us that they want to review all their deductions. They just don't have the resources to do so. And ultimately, yeah, a brand is losing up to 5%. That means if you're 10 million, say you're doing $10 million in sales, you can be losing, yeah, like half a million a year to invalid deductions. And yeah, it's something that a lot of brands overlook or don't have the bandwidth for and is one of the big reasons that we exist.
- [12:24]
A
How. No, that makes that, that, that makes a lot of sense. How, how do deductions typically, do they evolve at all as a brand scale? Meaning do you find that, that brands as a, as a scale, they actually might get deducted less or, or, or percentage less just because they're, they're, they're a lot bigger? Or is there, are there any changes from, from that standpoint or, or not really?
- [12:55]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think the meta point is that deductions scale linearly as our business skills. If you're a brand doing 10 million, you'll probably have 500k in VAL deductions. If you're a brand doing 100 million, that can become 5 million. So it's a linear process that scales as your Revenue scales. I'd say that as you scale there's a lot more supply chain complexity. So you can have a lot more non trade deductions and your trade programs might become more sophisticated. Deductions typically evolve a little bit more as you expand retailers. Every single retailer has their own guidelines. So the root cause of the deductions can be completely different. So Walmart for example is obviously one of the largest retailers and a massive account for brands. They have one of the most rigorous programs for their shipments, their trade programs, et cetera. And a brand has to learn the retail complexities each time they launch a new retailer.
- [13:55]
A
What time, what kind of recovery rates do you typically see when, when brands start using glimps? To be honest, like had the. Obviously in terms of the manual side, you've also, you've also kind of sped up the process when it comes to on the line items. But what kind of, but, but also have, have you also been able to speed up for example when like on the communication side in terms of, in terms of when brands would actually be able to receive back those, the, that, that money from the distributors?
- [14:26]
B
Yeah. So you know, we're very proud. We have a 91% win rate on deductions that we submit, which is, you know, of the industry leading metrics. We've seen companies that try to approach things quite aggressively of disputing every single deduction, et cetera. But we have a very rigorous approach with our AI to do so. It gives us high confidence in every deduction we dispute. The other big hero metric that we have is we're able to increase dispute rate. So one of the big issues with deductions, especially when a brand has labor towards it, they set a threshold. Only if a deduction is greater than $5,000 will our team review it. Anything under $5,000 we won't review because it's not worth the time. With AI and with Glimpse, we're able to review every single deduction that a brand has in that same time at a fraction of the cost. We're able to increase the rate of disputes that a brand has.
- [15:25]
A
Got it. That's, that's really impressive. That's really impressive. And I mean what on the invalid deductions, on the invalid deduction side of the or, or, or the part. What are, what are some really easy wins that brands can even just make sure that hey, these are ones that you can distribute dispute.
- [15:43]
B
Yeah, so I mentioned this earlier, but there's two big buckets of deductions for a brand. There's trade Deductions and non trade deductions. Trade deductions come from the promotions that you agreed to, et cetera. Those are typically valid. A lot of the time our benchmarks show about 15% are invalid. But overall, a lot of times the trade promotion activities are things you've committed to. On the non trade deduction side, those are things tied to compliance, supply chain, et cetera. There's a lot more errors. There's one category called short shipments where you ship 10,000 units. A brand says you only ship 9,000 units. You try to reconcile the difference. We see up to, we see 50 to 75% of those being invalid. And it's a great opportunity for brands to recoup funds. And yeah, you know, there's a lot of other categories like that, but that's like a good example.
- [16:40]
A
Do you ever advise brands, hey, we like on the supply chain side, we're. This episode is brought to you by Glimpse. Glimpse is an AI powered end to end deductions management service that's focused on recovering revenue from Kahe, Unfi, Amazon and Target. For consumer brands. They centralize deductions with backups. They fully handle disputing on your behalf, the brand's behalf, and streamline the accounting process. For more information, check out try glimpse.com and let them know that Mike sent you. Seeing that you're getting a lot of kind of invalid deductions right here that. But we actually maybe could also improve things operationally a little bit in terms of maybe whether it's, you know, putting the QR code maybe on maybe where it needs to go and not be, you know, what one inch, one is different to actually then the next run of inventory, it actually you actually gets less deductions. Is that something that you all also could do or not really?
- [17:43]
B
Yeah, no, 100%. I mean I think one of the biggest value props of investing in a system like Glimpse is the fact that we centralize all the data and make the data usable. You know, one of the biggest challenges is these deductions come in a variety of formats like Excel, CSVs, PDFs. It's hard to harmonize that data into one centralized format. We do that, we pull all the historical data as well. And this allows for strong insights on the most common types of deductions your business receives. Were there any spikes in certain periods of time, et cetera. That's all stuff that Glibs provides. So for an OPS leader, not only does it become actionable in terms of recovering funds, but also becomes a source of insights on Ways to identify areas of improvement and process improvement overall.
- [18:36]
A
Do you. Do you think with the rise of Glimpse and the overall kind of industry, in terms of AI deductions, that it's making it so much easier for brands to fight deductions? Do you think at all, distributors or retailers might even change some of their habits? Because, hey, we're actually now becoming. I'm sure they're now getting a lot more inquiries that probably what they used to at a. At a much faster rate. But do you. Do you see it all like this market maybe evolving into. Hey, we're actually, actually kind of cleaning up the market for deductions?
- [19:13]
B
Yeah. You know, I'd say there's two perspectives on this. I think probably one of the bigger difficulties ultimately is just the power imbalance of retailers and brands. Like, at the end of the day, the brands sell through the retailers, et cetera, and they can get to control a lot of their policies as a result. I think the aspirational hope here is that the policies do get better. There's more visibility, at least more direct to resolve issues, et cetera. And then the more cynical take is it's an industry that has been unchanged for a long time and can continue to kind of stay in that way or maybe combat this on the other end, for example. But yeah, I think the goal here is that the policies get better over time and this becomes a cleaner ecosystem and Glumps hopes to be a part of that.
- [20:07]
A
Do you think that on the deduction process that actually you can make a case, right, that they're invalid and you actually can get some or all of your money back? Do you think that all of it. Do you think just in terms of deductions in general, do you think that actually everything will. Can be automated? Or do you think there still needs to be like a human touch moment for, for times that you could. That maybe you can still win back some of the bloody. But. But there kind of needs to be more of like a human involvement in, in. In. Because it's just a bit more nuanced.
- [20:44]
B
Yeah, I think there'll definitely be cases that require human escalation. You know, sometimes the brand has to work with their buyer, et cetera. But I do think that 99% of cases can be automated with AI in the coming years. And that's kind of how we're building things. I think that a business like this can only exist with the right blend of retail expertise. And it's really important to have folks on the side of Glimpse that come from the Retail industry and the CPG industry. But a lot of the tasks, I think can be automated with AI and it allows a business just to be more effective in general.
- [21:28]
A
It makes a lot of sense. That makes a lot of sense. It makes a ton of sense. What do you think are maybe some of the other big financial blind spots that you think that you feel like brands, that you feel like brands might be having when they're selling in. In wholesale?
- [21:50]
B
Yeah, there's definitely, you know, a couple of buckets, I think. So outside of deductions, there is this whole concept of trade and trade optimization. Right. Are your promotions actually effective? A big area that, especially when a brand is ramping up quickly, they just want to unlock velocity in retail. And a big part of that is committing to promotions, et cetera. Deductions help provide actuals. But I think that's one area for sure. And I think the other area is an inventory and where you get inventory from. The way I like to think about it is if you go to a public CPG company's 10k and you look at their P and L and you kind of stack rank by what are the biggest drivers of costs and what are trending. Those typically are the biggest areas of opportunity in a day and age with AI today. I think it all boils down to do you have an efficient way to grow your business and do you have an efficient way to keep streamlining your bottom line?
- [22:56]
A
Do you think that obviously 20, 30% is, is. Is huge, it is huge savings if you're able to get that money back. On the deduction side, in terms of growth, do you think that if a brand using Glimpse or just being able to. To win back deductions and get more money when they actually go into retail from the run, do you think then that this is actually, it's. It's enough, you're making enough more money that you're actually going to be expanding to re. To. To additional retailers faster because you actually have more money in the bank, or do you think that still it might not be as significant enough to actually make those. Those decisions?
- [23:45]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think ultimately, yeah. So if we can. Yeah, I think when you are on top of your deductions, yeah, you can get up to 5% of your top line back. That can be reinvested into so many different things. The finance term here is gross to net. And that delta, that 5% can be the difference in five new hires into growth initiatives that are increased by 5% in spend, et cetera. So I definitely think that It's a way to one stay on top of everything that allows you to have the infrastructure to scale to net new retailers. But there's so much use for funds like that.
- [24:28]
A
That makes sense. That makes total sense. And obviously it's much more like what are you finding when you actually talk to companies? Because usually it kind of falls into the. Maybe the CFO or the finance teams job. What like what has been, you know, how has this been on an unlock? Because I mean yes, it's money back, but also I'd imagine time is just such a huge saver. Like talk to me about. About some of the stories that, that it's a lot of like these. Some of their teams in order to. To do.
- [25:05]
B
Yeah, definitely. I mean I think the core is ultimately freeing up time to focus on more valuable things. A busy team has so many more things they like to do. So a couple of examples. A finance team, right. Ultimately the goal of a controller and a finance team is to close the books. If you don't have to deal with deductions, you can close the books on like by day one. By day two. Right now, teams have day 10, day 15 because of deductions Operations teams, they could focus on S and O P improvement and improving their processes and tackling bigger issues as a brand is growing and not on reviewing deduction claims. Sales teams, their job and what they get paid for is to increase revenue of the business. Any minute that's not focused on growth and is focused on deductions is a loss of money to the business because their job is to grow the business. So those are like just very tangible ways of right now. I've spoken to sales teams where the 20% of their time is going into validating deductions. That 20% time brought back could be focused on opening new accounts, focusing on targeting new retailers, et cetera. So every single person we've talked to always has 10 more things they'd love to do but can't because of the deductions problem couple.
- [26:32]
A
No, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, talk a little bit too about the differences working on the deduction side with, with E Commerce retailers versus brick and mortar retailers. I know for example, you have an Amazon product as well. What, what typically are the. Are, are the deductions pretty similar across the board that you're dealing with when it comes to E. Com versus brick and mortar? Or, or can they be quite different?
- [26:59]
B
Yeah. So I guess ultimately deductions primarily exist when you sell your products to a third party because deductions come in the form of B2B payment reconciliation.
- [27:11]
A
Yes.
- [27:11]
B
So in the case of Amazon, it is an E commerce retailer, but the relationship with the brand is still in the format of a third party channel or party channel. Yeah, yeah. And a lot of the core deduction types might be the same, the same short shipments, late fees, et cetera. Every single retailer has their own sets of compliance that's completely different that you need to bridge the expertise for. But at the core a lot of the behavior is similar at the end of the day. But I think using the example of Amazon specifically, they actually are one of the bigger culprits and have more sophisticated systems on the other end. So it's a little harder. Honestly. We've seen brands struggle even more with Amazon. But at the core I think the concept of deduction validation and recovery is pretty similar outside of all of the retail specific nuance.
- [28:09]
A
In terms of the biggest. Why are they the biggest culprits? Where what are like one or two of the line items that they really challenge brands on?
- [28:20]
B
Yeah. So they have a very tight process with receiving inventory and shipping and inventory, et cetera. So there's a lot of supply chain related deductions that come about as a result. So shipping windows, how long they're holding your inventory, et cetera. So usually that and on the compliance
- [28:38]
A
side are there are there also difference is when you work for example with a beverage company versus a durable product company, you know, in, in target, what are the. Some of the differences when it comes to. When it comes to deductions to look out for.
- [28:59]
B
Yeah, so that categories is quite interesting because some of the challenges across every category is so different. So for example with beverage one, I mean the pallets and stuff are a lot heavier. So then there's fees that can kind of merge from there. Every single category has different best buy dates. So for example higher moving perishable goods, if you're out of the window of the best buy date, that's a deduction or that's unsellable inventory. If you have a glass jar product, those may break. So there's more like spoilages and inventory like that. And then I think the overall meta point is every category has its own level of competition. So you have to invest in different types of promotions to stand out in the crowd and those then come up as different formats of deductions as well. So I think the type of product matters a lot because shipping it is a lot easier or harder. And then on shelf competition makes you invest more in promotions first, not how
- [30:07]
A
how did you think about this overall in your own product? Because yeah, I know that you start off with Unfi Kehi. I'd imagine that's mostly you're dealing with CPG companies. Not that you don't have, not that you don't have non CPG companies in, in those, but it's predominantly. And then you moved over and did 10 and launched your target product and then also Amazon product and then your Walmart product. Walk me through. In terms of when it makes sense for you all to expand to a new retailer just like a brand. Right. Expanding your product to a new retailer and also. And some of the considerations you have to take when you also do expand your product.
- [30:49]
B
Yeah. So the way that we've expanded our retailers is in two ways. So one, we just ask our customer base, like what other retailers are you selling in that are big pain points? And the good thing about like Target, Walmart, Amazon, also very CPG heavy. But then each of those retailers opens up net new categories of brands that like in consumer electronics, beauty, apparel, et cetera. And I think the overall thing is the types of trade activities might vary but a lot of the supply chain and compliance fees end up being quite similar and that then creates an overlap in our offering across these customer segments. So today I say that Glimpse is category agnostic, but we're constrained by the retailers that we automate deductions for when you keep opening up new retailers. For example, in beauty we have a handful of beauty companies.
- [31:48]
A
Now this episode is brought to you by Glimpse. Glimpse is an AI powered end to end deductions management service that's focused on recovering revenue from Khe Unfi, Amazon and Target. For consumer brands they centralize deductions with backups. They fully handle disputing on your behalf the brand's behalf and streamline the accounting process. For more information, check out try glimpse.com and let them know that Mike sent
- [32:14]
B
you that sell through Amazon or Target or Walmart. But obviously Sephora and Ulta would be a big unlock for them. So that's now prioritized in our roadmap to handle deductions for those two retailers.
- [32:28]
A
Got it. That makes, that makes a lot of sense. That makes a lot of sense in terms of how you all think about expanding for new retailers and also the opportunities that it opens up. Hold on, I had a, had a question about that and one second. What was it.
- [32:52]
B
For Target.
- [33:04]
A
And so Sephora and Sephora and Altar are, are right now on the way, right?
- [33:10]
B
Yeah. Sephora, Ulta, Costco, Kroger, and then it just, you know, just build as many as you can. Everyone wants us to build everything.
- [33:22]
A
That makes sense. That makes sense. What have been, what are for from your perspective for Glimpse, what are the biggest challenges right now in terms of like product? It could be the product wise, maybe like expanding the product could be like what, what to you are some of like the biggest challenges?
- [33:45]
B
Yeah, I mean I'd say like number one right now is just in prioritization on what makes the most impact because there's a lot of product expansion we're doing right now. So you know, past the deductions recovery, we recently launched cash application to help finance teams close their books faster. In relation to deductions, we actually just rolled out some very exciting features that we'll be publicly rolling out tied to trade analytics, et cetera. So balancing that with expansion of net new retailers and you know, that speed, I would say, you know, it sounds, maybe it sounds a little simple, but I would just say like this huge opportunity here right now and we're just trying to balance resources versus prioritization versus growing and hiring, et cetera. And you know, that comes with, it's a lot of what I'd call, you know, the high growth startup challenges that you kind of see in any fast growing business.
- [34:46]
A
No, that makes, makes a lot of sense in terms of prioritizing because of, because obviously too you want to get into every retailer that you can. So, so you also have, you, you also have that as well. When do you, when do you think a brand should actually really think about or prioritize deduction? Should it be from day one or should there be like a certain threshold that they should be that it actually, that actually becomes a significant part of
- [35:15]
B
your P and L. Yeah, I would say once you grease the wheels in retail a little bit and are starting to see growth, it's usually the right time to introduce a system like Glimpse. So typically once you kind of cross your first failure in revenue, you've unlocked a couple of retailers starting to scale. That becomes that really, really sharp pain point where now the deductions are becoming something quite meaningful. You have no resources or expertise in understanding what these deductions are, are. And now not only are you losing revenue that might actually be rightfully yours, you don't have a system in place that scales with you when you're about to enter this big growth rate. So we typically recommend brands come to us once they've kind of crossed that first million through retail. And our goal is that you should never need to Feel that you need to hire someone to do this because we can just take it off your plate.
- [36:09]
A
Got it? No, that makes. That makes a ton of sense. That makes a ton of sense. Do you. Do you find, though, that. I know, like, category. Category wise, maybe it looks very similar. Do you find that maybe some categories, when it comes to deductions, actually has a lot more in valid deductions their way. Or, or there's a lot of kind of. There's, you know, even on the. For an example, on the inventory side, if they say that. That they delivered 10,000 units, but. But the. But the retailer thinks it's only 9,000 units, are there any kind of. Kind of categories that actually gets kind of hit a lot harder than others or. Not really.
- [36:54]
B
I'd say categories again. Yes. You know, like, beverage gets hit a little bit harder than I would imagine.
- [37:01]
A
Beverage, because, you know, it's. You're. You're. You're traveling with it and, you know, things could go. Could break or. Or something could happen. So I don't know, I just feel like.
- [37:12]
B
Anyway, yeah, so definitely beverage, frozen, et cetera. But I would say probably more realistic is certain retailers and distributors just deduct more than others. And that is something that is very clearly reflected in the P and L as well.
- [37:30]
A
Cool. Got it. Got it. My final question for you is, what's that? I ask everybody on the show, what's one book that's inspired you personally and one book that's inspired you professionally?
- [37:44]
B
So one book that's inspired me professionally is Burn Rate by Andy Dunn. Andy was the founder of Bonobos, and this book was his journey on his mental health journey, which, you know, has had some pretty crazy stories. And I think one of the things about being a founder is the extreme highs and lows that come with the job. And that book felt for, like, the first time in writing that it helped me kind of like really just put towards some of the highs I've seen in the journey, some of the lows, and really has allowed me to focus on just the balance of the journey, because we're growing super fast, but then there's crazy days sometimes, et cetera. So I think that book really inspired me. Journey. And I really applaud Andy for writing that book and sharing his experiences at the extremities of the emotions. So, honestly, that kind of works for my personal answer as well. But yeah, I think that book had a big impact on me, at least in the last couple of years, being a founder.
- [38:49]
A
Cool. No, I appreciate that. Burn Rate by Andy Dunn. We've had a couple people had Andy dawn done on the show a long time ago and really love their conversation. And yeah, I haven't read Burn Rate yet, but I need to. I definitely need to thank.
- [39:09]
B
Yeah, highly recommend this reminder, Akash.
- [39:13]
A
It's been so much fun. Thank you so much for your time.
- [39:15]
B
Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Thank you.
- [39:18]
A
And there you have it. I really hope this episode was really helpful if you're a brand in retail or heading into ret retail in terms of understanding the dynamics of retail. Thank you so much for walking us through it and appreciate all that you're building on Glimpse and how you're helping consumer brands. Thanks for listening. I hope this was helpful again. And thanks for enjoying consumer VC.