Well stocked

The “third space” concept gained prominence with Starbucks’ expansion: a place that is neither home nor work, where people can establish routines outside their existing routines. Unlike home, third spaces facilitate social interaction; unlike work, participation is voluntary.

Coffee shops remain a primary third space, but their role changed significantly following COVID. Meanwhile, fitness centers, mixed-use apartments and condominiums clubhouses and shared spaces, shared workspaces, and other community-oriented environments have become increasingly important. Even church attendance has recently grown among young adults for the first time in decades.

These environments share an important characteristic: people choose to be there. They are familiar, voluntary spaces that matter to the people who use them.

That makes them compelling retail environments—and compelling places to learn what people actually want.

A Different Kind of Retail

Mass retail is designed for scale, but it can be a difficult environment in which to understand individual purchasing behavior. Shoppers may be conscious of only a handful of purchases during a trip, and products influence one another: “I’ll get this, but only one treat.”

At the same time, many of the behaviors adopted during COVID have become permanent. Younger consumers are less enthusiastic about traditional mass retail than older generations, while no-contact purchasing has become increasingly normal.

Vending offers a different model: a small, curated retail environment placed directly into the spaces people already frequent.

And because each machine can be associated with a specific location, audience, and set of products, every transaction can create highly useful data.

Our focus is better-for-you CPG, with the assortment tailored to each location and continuously informed by sales data.

Categories may include:

• Beverages: hydration, nootropics, shakes and smoothies, functional drinks, and better-for-you treats
• Nutrition and protein snacks: bars, chips, meat snacks, and other high-protein options
• Health and beauty care (HBC)
• Supplements
• Potentially, meals

We will also stock innovative products that don’t necessarily carry a better-for-you claim—for example, Liquid Death’s plain mountain water—when the data suggests they belong in a particular assortment.

The location itself is part of the test. A fitness center, apartment building, coworking space, and churches may have very different customers, needs, price sensitivities, and product preferences.

Our Philosophy

Not every product will be new or unique. Established brands and category leaders can provide both revenue and a benchmark against which upstart and emerging products can be measured. If consumers expect bottled water, diet cola, or Red Bull, those products can have their place in the assortment—but they also give us something to test against.

The objective is simple:

Use targeted transaction data to identify the most profitable products for the most profitable audiences.

Over time, we can learn not only what sells, but where, to whom, at what price, and alongside which other products it sells.

Third spaces are routine spaces. Our goal is to make Well Stocked part of those routines.

QR codes and our developing app will allow users to create accounts and earn gamified rewards for:

• Trying new products
• Unlocking new locations
• Reviewing and ranking products
• Answering questions about products they’ve purchased
• Providing suggestions
• Connecting social accounts and sharing experiences

The result is more than loyalty. It turns customers into participants in the discovery process—and potentially into marketers themselves.

Turn Vending Into a Relationship

Unlike a single CPG brand, or a mass retailer whose relationship with a particular shopper may be limited, Well Stocked has the opportunity to develop a direct relationship with the people buying every brand in our machines.

We can ask what they liked, what they didn’t, what they would change, what they would pay, and what they would buy next.

Users who engage more deeply through the app can receive greater rewards, giving us progressively richer behavioral and product data.

The goal is to transform an incidental vending-machine purchase into a routine retail relationship.

The Opportunity For Brands — And For Well Stocked

The better-for-you CPG market is crowded with products promoting benefits that can be difficult to distinguish or validate in a mass-retail environment.

Consider the mocktail. In a crowded field of better-for-you beverages, how much value does “tastes like a screwdriver” and “contains no alcohol” actually create versus “calms your mind” or “tastes like mango”?

And how does that answer change when the consumer is younger, drinks significantly less alcohol than previous generations, and may not have a particular affinity for cocktails in the first place?

Let’s test it.

By placing products in locations with identifiable demographics and interests—and by developing an ongoing relationship with the people who buy them—we can begin to understand the real-world value of product attributes, pricing, positioning, and packaging.

This creates three potential levels of revenue:

1. Better Assortments: Transaction data allows us to continuously improve what we sell, where we sell it, and to whom.
2. Data for Brands: The same data can help CPG companies understand how their products perform with specific audiences, in specific environments, at specific prices, and against specific competitors.
3. Our Own Products: Over time, the data can identify opportunities to develop products ourselves.

Amazon provides a useful precedent. Its Amazon Basics and Amazon Essentials brands emerged from a retail environment with enormous amounts of transaction and customer-review data. That information helped identify products and attributes capable of satisfying large numbers of shoppers.

Well Stocked can pursue a similar principle at a much more focused level: use retail data to discover what people want, validate it in the real world, and ultimately create products to meet that demand.

How It Started

Grayson Hill spent more than two decades on the creative side of the CPG industry, developing creative and products for national and regional manufacturers and retailers.

He subsequently spent more than a decade in sales-focused roles developing and launching new products across chain restaurants, foodservice distribution, and mass, natural, and club retail.

Makenzie Boetcher is a marketing producer for some of the world’s largest entertainment companies, delivering high-impact advertising and social content that drives viewers and programming. Makenzie also is a triathlete and adaptive yoga instructor (assisting people with disabilities).

Well Stocked grew from observations about the challenges faced by emerging CPG products—particularly in categories where products can be difficult to differentiate and where traditional mass retail provides limited insight into why something sells.

Those challenges are becoming more significant as younger consumers develop different shopping habits, product preferences, and relationships with brands.

Well Stocked is built around a simple proposition:

Put the right products in the right places, learn from every transaction, build a direct relationship with the customer, and use what we learn to build better retail and better products.