What We Learned from Slate Milk’s First Merchandiser
Most founders think the hardest part of retail is getting their product onto the shelf.
Josh Belinsky, co-founder of Slate Milk, would argue that’s only half the battle. On the first episode of The SnoBase Podcast, he shared how an unexpected encounter with a merchandiser completely changed how they thought about retail execution and helped drive a nearly 500% increase in sales across five stores.
The accidental first hire
Before Slate had officially launched, Josh and his co-founder Manny spent hours in stores like Whole Foods, Roche Bros., Shaw’s, and Walmart. They weren’t just checking inventory or stopping by for the occasional meeting. They were living in the stores, watching how products moved, how employees stocked shelves, and how shoppers interacted with the aisle. They wanted to understand retail from the ground up.
One day, they noticed a man in a green shirt moving their cans around on the shelf. Their first thought wasn’t that he was there to help. It was, “Is this guy stealing our product?”
He wasn’t. He worked for Dirty Hands, a merchandising service, and he was doing exactly what great merchandisers do: making sure Slate’s products stayed stocked, visible, and properly placed. Josh and Manny hadn’t raised money yet, and they hadn’t even officially launched. When they offered to pay him, he smiled and said something simple:
“Just watch your numbers over the next two weeks.”
A couple of weeks later, sales across those five stores had increased by nearly 500%.
Not because the product had changed. Not because they ran a promotion. The difference was simply that someone was consistently making sure Slate was on the shelf, filling voids, securing the occasional cooler placement, and protecting the space they had already earned. That merchandiser, Emerson, eventually became one of the first people they hired.
Founders should spend time in stores
What makes Josh’s story so compelling isn’t just that Slate eventually built a merchandising team. It’s that the founders did the work themselves before hiring anyone else. They demoed stores, visited shelves, and merchandised product by hand because they wanted to understand what actually happened after a purchase order was signed.
As Josh put it, “As the founders, we were doing it too.” It wasn’t glamorous, and it certainly wasn’t scalable forever, but it taught them something you can’t learn from spreadsheets or retailer reports. Every retailer operates differently.
Whole Foods, for example, gives individual store leaders a surprising amount of flexibility when it comes to cooler placements. Harris Teeter, on the other hand, follows planograms much more closely, making extra placements harder to secure. That means keeping shelves stocked and pulling product from the back room becomes even more important. Those aren’t lessons you’ll find written into a distributor agreement. You learn them by standing in the aisle and paying attention.
From one merchandiser to thirty
That early lesson scaled with the business. Today, Slate employs roughly 30 full-time area sales managers focused on merchandising and retail execution. It also reflects another strategic decision they made early on. Rather than relying on the traditional DSD (Direct Store Delivery) model that many beverage brands use, Slate chose a different path.
Josh was honest about the tradeoff. Skipping DSD gave the company more flexibility, especially in the early days, but it also meant that merchandising responsibilities stayed with their own team instead of a delivery partner. As he explained, “That does require a little bit more help from your own team members, and why the ground game is so important.”
It’s an important reminder that getting onto the shelf isn’t the finish line. Sell-through is.
The operational challenge nobody talks about
As Slate expanded from a handful of stores to thousands of retail doors, another challenge emerged. Knowing where your team should spend its time became just as important as having people in the field.
Which stores are consistently going out of stock? Which retailers allow local cooler placements? Which displays need attention? Which locations haven’t been visited recently?
Those questions become increasingly difficult to answer as a brand grows. Eventually, notebooks, spreadsheets, text messages, and memory stop being enough. Retail execution becomes an operational challenge just as much as a sales one.
The takeaway
Slate’s early focus on merchandising wasn’t a nice-to-have. It was a growth strategy. A nearly 500% increase in sales across five stores simply from consistent shelf execution is the kind of result that’s easy to overlook until you realize how many brands lose sales because their products aren’t where shoppers expect them to be.
Josh’s story also offers a practical lesson for founders who are just getting started. Spend time in your stores. Even a few hours every week can teach you things that no dashboard ever will. Look for out-of-stocks, shelf placement, cooler opportunities, competitor activity, and whether your product is actually front-facing and easy to find. Those observations can have a much bigger impact than most founders expect.
As brands grow beyond a handful of accounts, staying on top of retailer-specific requirements, merchandising visits, inventory issues, and field activity becomes increasingly difficult. That’s exactly the operational challenge SnoBase was built to solve, giving teams one place to manage retail execution instead of relying on scattered notes, spreadsheets, and memory.
If you want to hear the full conversation with Josh, including his thoughts on category reviews, brokers, scaling into national retail, and the tool he wishes existed in CPG, listen to Episode 1 of The SnoBase Podcast.
