Why warm introductions stall, and what changes when the first step costs nothing and takes four minutes.
The most useful thing anyone has told us about this business is also the least flattering: you cannot sell a non-priority to a busy company.
We had the evidence and were reading it wrong. Warm CEO introductions, genuine enthusiasm on the call, and then nothing — not a no, just a thing that never got to the top of anyone's list. That is not a sales problem you fix with a better follow-up. Merch sits below hiring, shipping, fundraising and roughly forty other things, permanently, at every company worth selling to.
It rules out almost every standard motion. A discovery call is a priority. A proposal to review is a priority. A sample to approve, a colour to choose, a mockup to sign off — every one of those is you asking a busy person to promote merch above something that is currently more important than merch. They won't, and they will feel slightly bad about it, which makes the next email harder.
Two things.
Make the first step free and instant. Not "free trial" — free. Not "quick call" — no call. The whole first interaction has to fit inside the gap between two meetings, cost nothing, and require no decision that could be got wrong. Upload a mark; four minutes later there is a real store on a real address. Nothing to approve, nothing to pay, nothing to regret.
Then be good enough to become a priority. This is the part that is easy to skip. A free instant store that produces a mediocre garment has just wasted the one moment of attention you were ever going to get. The output has to be something a brand designer would have chosen — which is why the photography is real, the blank is named, and the run is genuinely limited.
Free and instant gets you the attention. Quality is what converts it. Most companies attempting this do the first without the second and end up as a mockup generator, which is a demo, not a supplier.
Honestly: card checkout on a brand-new store is not switched on yet, and we say so at the point of checkout rather than hiding it. That is a fix measured in days. But the principle stands — the moment we ask a founder for a decision before they have seen the thing, we are back to selling a non-priority.