They Couldn't Get a Distributor Without a Big Store. Or a Big Store Without a Distributor.

Now this is an entrepreneurial story you don’t hear every day!

Three years ago, Russell Menez was diagnosed with Stage 4 Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Treatment began immediately, including aggressive chemotherapy, and Russell and his wife Julia decided they needed to make some changes, including to what they ate. So Julia started making pretty much everything from scratch, including simple snack bars made with dates, oats, coconut, grass-fed butter, honey, and other real ingredients.

(Sounds delicious already, right?)

During one of the hardest periods of their lives, those cozy, homemade bars became a small source of comfort. Fortunately, Russell went into remission. And that might have been the end of the story, except.

Except people kept trying the bars. And loving them. And asking for them.

From Cancer to COZY

Neither Russell nor Julia knew anything about the food business, but both had been entrepreneurs before. Julia was already hosting wellness events, so they began bringing the bars along, letting people taste them, asking for feedback, and figuring out whether anyone would actually buy them.

They would.

So the couple rented space in a commercial kitchen, got the necessary licenses and permits, bootstrapped the whole thing, and started selling their bars to local coffee shops and small retailers. Slowly, COZY Foods was becoming a real business.

But if they wanted to become a much bigger business, they needed to get into bigger stores.

And that's where things got interesting.

The Catch-22

Russell and Julia attended an industry networking event where buyers and distributors had come together. At the time, they were still making the bars by hand, wrapping them in parchment paper, putting them into self-sealing bags from Amazon, and slapping a sticker on them.

“Very homemade,” they told me.

At the event, they met someone from Foundation Foods, a distributor they really wanted to work with. They pitched him COZY and told him their story. He loved the bars and wanted to bring them in.

Great!

Except in order to work together, the distributor needed COZY to already have an anchor retailer.

They knew just the person.

Russell and Julia walked across the room and found a buyer from Mother's Market, a Southern California natural grocery chain. They pitched him too and he too loved the bars.

Great! Except Mother's needed COZY to have a distributor.

Like, say, Foundation Foods?

So what did Russell and Julia do? They brought the two guys together.

Literally, physically. At the event. They walked across the room again, introduced the distributor to the Mother’s Market guy, and had a meeting right then and there in the room.

“Hey,” they essentially said. “Can we make this happen?”

They could.

Foundation Foods became their distributor, Mother's became their first major retailer, and suddenly COZY was in all 12 Mother's stores.

How great is that?

Now They Had to Look the Part

Of course, getting into 12 stores created a new problem. COZY was still hand-making bars and wrapping them in parchment paper. They hired some help and ramped up production, but clearly, that couldn't last.

This is where my friends from Alibaba.com come in.

Julia had used Alibaba.com in a previous business, so when it came time to create professional packaging, she knew where to go. They also began using Accio Work, Alibaba.com’s AI-powered business platform, to help sort through manufacturers, compare prices and minimum orders, organize supplier communications, and get quotes.

Once they found the right manufacturers, they created COZY's wrappers, boxes, shopping bags, and merchandise through Alibaba.com. Today, Accio also helps them plan inventory and future packaging orders so they don't run out as the company grows.

And grow it has. COZY is now in more than 70 retailers.

Yet ask Russell and Julia what they attribute their success to and their answer is community.

They sponsor local runs, mom walks, Pilates events, and other gatherings. They sample their bars, listen to customers, and show up every Saturday at a local farmers market.

Which makes sense, because their biggest breakthrough happened when they showed up at an event, walked across a room, and introduced two people who needed to meet.

The lesson? The smartest entrepreneurs don't choose between high tech and high touch. They use both.

The Takeaway

We hear a lot these days about what AI can do for entrepreneurs, and rightly so. Russell and Julia used it to do things that once would have required far more time, money, people, and expertise. But AI didn't introduce them to their first big retailer. Showing up did.

Using the best of both worlds is what works.

Steal This Strategy

🤖 Tool: Accio Work: Alibaba.com's AI-powered business platform helped COZY compare manufacturers, pricing, and minimum orders, organize its sourcing, and today helps the company plan inventory and future packaging needs.

🥥 Snack: COZY Foods: Russell and Julia Menez turned the food that helped comfort them through Russell's cancer treatment into a growing refrigerated snack brand now sold by more than 70 retailers.

🚀 Event: My One-Person Empire Accelerator is back! Want to build a bigger, better business without building a bigger organization? I am running my four-week One Person Empire Accelerator again. Let me personally help you create better offers, multiple profit centers, crazy reliable customer acquisition, and the systems that give a small business leverage. It starts next week, October 15. Spots are limited.

About Steve

Steve Strauss is the best-selling author of The Small Business Bible and 17 other books, Inc.’s small business columnist, a lawyer (non-practicing), and an entrepreneur. He sold his last venture, TheSelfEmployed.com to Mark Cuban & Zen Business. Need a ghostwriter or a newsletter for your business? Contact Steve!