Free Tool
Retail Readiness Scorecard
eight dimensions · retailer-specific thresholds · branded PDF
A retail launch does not fail in month six. It fails at the yes, six months before anyone can see it — the buyer approves the item, the slotting gets paid, and the purchase orders start flowing into an operation that was never ready to fill them.
Getting to yes is a sales problem, and brands that reach a major buyer have usually solved it. What the yes does not test is whether the brand can execute the thing it just won: syndicate clean product data, transact the retailer’s EDI set, hold a fill rate above the penalty threshold, fund the slotting and the deduction reserve, produce at the required cadence, and pass the compliance bar. Those are eight different capabilities, and a launch needs all of them at once. The buyer conversation graded one.
A failed launch is expensive twice — once in the direct costs, the slotting and inventory and fines, and again in the years before that buyer will take the meeting a second time. The point of a readiness diagnostic is to run that due diligence before the conversation, on the brand’s own timeline, so the launch-blocking gaps get fixed while fixing them is still cheap.
Eight dimensions, scored Red, Yellow, or Green
Readiness is not one score. It is eight, because a launch breaks at whichever one is weakest, and the weak one is rarely the one the founder is worried about: product data, syndication, EDI capability, fulfillment, financial readiness, production capacity, compliance, and team and process. Each scores Red below 30%, Yellow from 30 to 69%, Green at 70% or above, and the thresholds move by retailer — Walmart’s fulfillment bar sits higher than Whole Foods’ because its OTIF program is stricter.
Some answers end the conversation. A few dimensions have gate questions: a single answer that forces the dimension to Red no matter how strong everything around it looks. A Whole Foods launch with a prohibited ingredient, or without a GFSI-benchmarked certification, locks Compliance to Red on its own. Gates are the failures that sink a launch fastest and the ones brands most often discover last. Naming them before the buyer conversation is the difference between a fixable timeline and a burned relationship.
Run it before the buyer does
Select a target retailer — Walmart, Costco, or Whole Foods — answer 12 to 18 adaptive questions, and receive a Red / Yellow / Green scorecard across all eight dimensions plus a branded PDF you can hand to your own team as the fix list. It runs offline from a single file: no login, no server, nothing sent anywhere.
What you get
A per-retailer readiness readout across eight dimensions, the launch-blocking gates named explicitly, and a prioritized fix list on your timeline instead of the retailer’s. Running eight dimensions of due diligence before saying yes costs a fraction of one dimension’s failure.
When the score says go
A green scorecard says you can execute the launch. Whether the launch makes money in Year 1 is a separate question, modeled in the Retail Readiness & Launch engagement →
Start in writing.
A few minutes by form — no call. Tell me which retailer you are chasing and which of the eight dimensions you are least sure of. I’ll tell you where a brand your size usually scores Red for that retailer, and which gap to close first so the yes turns into a launch that survives its first quarter. No deck, no obligation.