20 June 2016

Getting POS Right the First Time

How did Tile, Inc., the self-starter sensation, transition from a direct to consumer play to a multi-channel growth company in less than 9 months?

Getting POS Right the First Time:

How Tile Went from No Store Presence to 17,000 Stores in 9 Months

Tile, Inc. is the self-starter sensation that sold 200,000 units of its innovative hardware product and app in 34 days during a June 2013 crowdfunding campaign. Tile began shipping product in June 2014, and by June 2015 it had shipped over two million units. This all happened before a single Tile was sold in brick-and-mortar (B&M) retail.

I joined Tile as VP of Sales and Business Development in August of 2015, and was tasked with enabling our debut into physical stores. We had to get it right the first time, and we did. In this post, I hope to share some insight into the process we used to grow from 0 doors to 17,000 in just nine months.

We set lofty goals and began planning months ahead of the delivery of the first point of sale (POS) display. Five building blocks were essential to creating a successful in-store POS experience for Tile:

Knowing our brand voice
Educating key stakeholders
Calling for pitches from POS manufacturers
Prototyping our displays
Going live, iterating and scaling

1. Know Your Brand Voice

Before entering B&M retail, you must have a very good understanding of your brand voice. When you know what resonates with your customers, you will be able bring it to life at the point of sale.

We were fortunate to have shipped over 2 million Tiles to customers before entering B&M retail. We had created a strong brand identity and we knew our voice. We also deeply understood the problems we were solving for our customers and why they were buying Tiles. We pored over thousands of use cases and stories shared by our customers to inform what we communicated on our POS displays.

2. Educate Key Stakeholders

Going into B&M retail can be one of a start-up’s greatest challenges. It can be a great growth experience for your brand and your revenues, or it can be a very challenging time that hampers the plans you had for your company. If your team has not launched multiple products in retail, you will need to build a knowledge base to ensure informed and rational decisions during the process.

All major retailers have a unique set of constraints you must work within to successfully launch a POS solution. Your team must be educated on how retailers utilize and monetize the different spaces inside their stores—not only because it’s important to be informed, but because it will help you build the alignment and support needed for this very challenging project.

At Tile, we used three input sources to educate our key stakeholders about what to expect about launching a POS solution.

A briefing document containing:
1. A detailed financial review of the costs associated with each in-store opportunity presented to us by major retailers.
2. A high-level return on investment (ROI) document for calculating the sell-thru per POS display by store. This ROI took into account POS production costs, retailer store costs, shipping costs and product costs, along with expected revenue generated per POS display for the period it would be in-store.
3. A cross-section of different OEM POS displays with costing guides to ground the team in what others had done before us.
Store tours
1. We took the key stakeholders on tours of Consumer Electronics and non-Consumer Electronics retail stores to inform them about other solutions in the market and how different manufacturers bring their brand story and products to life in B&M retail.
2. We educated the group about solutions across product categories, the margin and revenue tied to those categories, and the relative investment you would need to make to bring your brand to life in-store.
Store manager and employee interviews on the following:
1. What makes a great display?
2. What brands do the best job of building displays?
3. What displays stand up to the most abuse during busy traffic seasons?
4. What displays are the easiest to set up?
5. What displays are the easiest to replenish?
6. What field marketing firms do the best job of in-store support?

3. Call for Pitches from POS Display Manufacturers

Once you have informed your key stakeholders about the POS process and the investments required to drive results, it’s time to request quotes from POS display manufacturers. Partner selection will have a huge impact on the success of your displays in market. This is not the place to under-invest. Ineffective displays that do not stand up to the wear and tear of B&M retail can lead to a massive loss of invested dollars.

At Tile, we took the following five steps to select a POS display vendor:

Leverage your network to identify three companies that create product displays for the retailers you are targeting.
Deliver a detailed briefing document to all three that captures what you learned from getting to know your brand voice and educating your key stakeholders.
Visit each vendor’s manufacturing facility to inspect the team and quality of work.
Set up reference calls with OEMs that have used these POS display manufacturers to get their feedback on what worked and what didn’t.
Ask the retailers about each of the POS vendors you are considering—have they used any of them or heard about any of them producing great results?

4. Prototype Your Display

Once you have a good understanding of your brand voice, educated key stakeholders and identified your POS vendor, you begin the really hard work of selecting the final display design(s). During the prototyping process, you can expect your small start-up office to start to feel like a POS showroom. It’s worth stepping over prototypes for a short time, however, to create meaningful displays that have the potential to make a huge impact in B&M retail.

We needed over two months of prototyping time to come up with the final holiday 2015 Tile display for Best Buy. We leveraged all of our customer insights, field research and brand voice to inform the decision-making process. We took some other unique steps, too:

We invited everyone in the company to provide feedback on each display we brought into the office.
We ensured our creative agency was heavily involved in the design and development process.
We took the prototypes to a local Best Buy store to get actual employee, manager and consumer feedback. We were also able to get real-time feedback about how the display fit into the space we had secured with Best Buy.
We test-shipped fully-loaded displays to understand how they would hold up and what the unpacking experience would be like for a store associate setting one up.

5. Go Live, Iterate and Scale

When the big day arrives and you start shipping displays to stores and distribution centers, plan for the unexpected. Build extra displays. Set aside money for expedited shipping fees. Allocate a field marketing team to inspect displays and train store associates. Budget for success.

Retail is unpredictable, and you will likely need the cushion you build for yourself. At Tile, we took the following four steps to make our POS landing as soft as possible.

Two weeks after the in-store set date, we deployed a field marketing team and solution-oriented field agents to inspect how many displays had made it onto the sales floor and what areas needed attention ASAP.
Four weeks after the in-store set date, the field marketing team conducted store associate training to create excitement and advocacy—and to establish a second line of display status checkers. This allowed us to make adjustments ahead of the critical selling season.
We utilized the information from this first four-week period to surface insights about the displays and their sell-thru effectiveness. We used those insights to update the POS design and create new prototypes, which we then tested with different retailers.
To facilitate scaling for growth, we developed a set of ten core displays that we utilized across different retail formats to optimize the consumer experience while amplifying our brand. This was a key factor in our ability to grow to 8,000 doors during the fourth quarter of 2015.

The creation of POS solutions at Tile has been extremely gratifying, and I would say it has been a huge contributor to both revenue growth and brand awareness. We grew from 0 doors to 17,000 in nine months, thanks in large part to a discipline based on the 5 major building blocks we reviewed: