“Where can I find your products in my area…?”

We get this question every single day. I wish I had a better answer.

See it depends upon where you live and what stores are in your area. And who the body care buyer is. And what mood he or she is in. And what phase the moon is in. Okay seriously, here’s the deal. We mostly sell our products to distributors. Distributors are big companies who stock products from a whole bunch of different companies to make purchasing easier for stores. Think about it this way, if you’re a big health food store like Whole Foods Market, imagine how difficult it would be to place an order for all the stuff you needed if you had to contact each company individually to buy their products. You would be calling us for lipstick, Sun & Earth for laundry detergent, Kashi for cereal, etc., etc. So distributors make it easy – a store like Whole Foods can call them up, tell them all the stuff they need, and the distributor personally delivers the products to that store, several times a week if need be.

So where does that leave us? Pretty much not knowing where our products end up!! Now there are some stores who contact us directly for product, and some stores who call us with questions or needing testers – we keep track of them so when you come to us and ask us where to find our products in say Atlanta, we can tell you.

“Well why not just ask the distributors for a list of stores?” you might ask. Because they won’t tell us. Why should they give us their list of customers and risk us selling directly to those stores? It’s really a very frustrating process.

In general, you’ll find our products at health food stores like Whole Foods Markets, New Seasons, etc. Or simply check with your local health food store. If they don’t have the product you’re looking for in stock, they can probably order it for you at no extra cost to you. They’re buying from these distributors anyway, so why not just tack an extra lipstick on to their order? If you want, you can email us for a list of distributors that sell in your area. Some of these stores may not even know about us (hey, we don’t have the advertising dollars that the big boys do, and with all of those bigger companies getting bought by even BIGGER companies, it’s getting that much harder for us to get the word out). So by talking to a store buyer about our water-based nail polish or odorless polish remover, you might be educating them and allowing them to offer better products to their customers, which they may not have otherwise even known about!

Another thing we’re doing to try and make it easier for our customers to find our products locally is that we’re making a list – and checking it twice (sorry, just had to say that…haven’t had my coffee yet). We’re compiling a list of stores who carry our products, and which products they carry. We plan to publish that list on our web site. So if you know of a store in your area who carries our products, TELL US! We’ll put their info on our site to help all of our customers. And really, it helps you too. If we know about these stores, we can make sure they have fresh product testers, proper educational information available for their customers, updated colors and new products. It’s really a good thing for everyone. It makes the store’s job easier and makes it easier for you to find the products. Okay it makes things a little harder for us to keep track of all that, but hey, that’s what we’re here for!

As always, we love hearing from you. Let us know your thoughts. You can use our on-line comments form or just email me directly: melissa@honeybeegardens.com

I’m off to get that coffee…