Case Study
Slot Math: shelf share versus sales share, priced by retailer and region
The category manager already computes this number about you. Slot Math is how you walk in holding it first.
Figures on this page are from the live tool: retail scan revenue, CY2025, Cinderhaven synthetic data.
The number the buyer brings to the reset
Every reset conversation has a version of the same spreadsheet behind it: your share of the shelf against your share of the sales. A brand with 9% of its shelf in a banner that produces 6.7% of its dollars is over-invested there, and the category manager’s syndicated data says so whether or not the brand has ever run the math. The reverse case, more sales than shelf, is an expansion argument with a dollar figure attached. Most small brands walk into the room holding neither number.
What Slot Math does about it
The verdict, defensive first. Six retailer x region cells run over-shelved: about $1.6M of scan revenue sits behind more shelf than it earns, led by Walmart West at $736K (index 1.34: 9.0% of slots on 6.7% of dollars). The tool leads with the buyer’s side of the argument on purpose. Knowing it first is the point.
The index.All 30 retailer x region cells against a 0.7 to 1.3 proportionality band: 19 in band, six over, five under. Two cells sit at 1.299 and 1.301, and the page labels them “at the line” rather than pretending the boundary is sharp. “Slots” counts authorized items per door, an honest proxy for facings, which small brands do not track; the definition says so in the open.
The heatmap. Every cell colored by the signed dollar gap, filterable by channel, naming the first door to defend. And the five under-shelved cells, all Costco, get called what they are: club-normal, a smaller assortment earning outsized volume, not an expansion order. A tool that inflated that into an opportunity would be easier to sell, and wrong.
What the demo cannot see, and says so
This is a within-footprint index: your shelf measured against your own sales, on the doors you already stock. It cannot see a competitor outselling you on the same shelf, or a banner where the category runs twice the size your sales imply. That blindness is stated on the page, because it is the buyer’s real question, and it is exactly what the engagement adds: bring a syndicated category extract (IRI, Circana, or SPINS) and the same machinery computes true category fair share, your share of the category’s slots against your share of the category’s sales, the number a category manager actually adjudicates in the room.
What this looks like on your data
If you sell across three or more regions and two or more channels, your slots and your sales already diverge somewhere, and someone else’s spreadsheet knows where. The deliverable prices every door: over-shelved cells arrive paired with a fix-or-kill item list, under-shelved cells arrive ranked as expansion asks with the dollar case attached.