Logan Ensign: 1:44
Bill, welcome to Shelf Life. Excited to have you here, I'm excited to be here.
Bill Sinacore: 1:48
I appreciate having the opportunity to speak with you today.
Logan Ensign: 1:51
Well, it's fantastic, bill, just diving right in. Could you tell us a little bit more about your background and what your responsibilities are today?
Bill Sinacore: 1:59
Sure, Just as you mentioned, I started my career in CPG with LEGO Toys, which is absolutely a wonderful brick that most of us has played with around the world. I did that for several years in different positions in different cities and towns, Then moved on to LeapFrog, which was a startup company at the time. We made an entry into the preschool learning category, which was a lot of fun and some really really great product and helped a lot of children throughout the world. I did that for many, many years as well. Then I decided to do my own thing and help small to mid-sized customers develop product through pricing and packaging, figuring out the white space on shelves where they could live. How do you get into Walmart and then how do you stay at Walmart? Then a couple of years ago, a colleague of mine gave me a call and said hey, I need some help at Walmart with this brand I have. I ventured into that and that's where we are today. It's been a great run and CPG is just a great industry to get into.
Logan Ensign: 3:03
Looking at your background, it looks like you've got two, probably more, but two very clear areas of expertise toys and games. Working with Walmart on that first piece. What was attractive to you about getting into toys and games? Was this something on your early career trajectory that you knew you wanted to do? And tell us a little bit more about what has kept you in that industry for the last several decades?
Bill Sinacore: 3:28
To be honest with you, logan, I wasn't looking to get into toys. I just graduated and I was looking for a job and the opportunity for Lego came across. I was like Lego you mean the building block they're like. Absolutely as a big customer, I should say my parents were big customers of Lego, but I was able to play with that toy my first 15 years of my life and enjoyed it immensely. I went through the process of interviews and I wanted to be part of this company that I played with. I knew it dearly and I had a lot of passion for it. So that was really how I got into toys Toys. To answer your second question, once you get into toys, you never really leave. It's a very small category if you think about it. I mean, there's a lot of players but the same people move through it through their lifetime. I think it's because number one, if you don't really like to grow up fully as an adult in some areas of your life of like play, it's wonderful because it's new every single year. We're selling entertainment right and entertainment is fun, so it's never the same. Every day is absolutely different and you never know what's going to be around the corner with innovation in product and play, and just the opportunity to give children a smile on their face every Christmas is a wonderful thing.
Logan Ensign: 4:54
What I love getting to know our, our customers and their product lines, and it's got to be such an interesting space to be in. What I've noticed is in the toys and games industry that maybe has been surprising is the innovation that's happening again and again and again. I think it has to be really, really innovative industry. With how much I can, new products come out. You kind of talked about your background helping with with product innovation. Has that been a key part of your functions today, as you've, as you've worked in these various toy companies?
Bill Sinacore: 5:26
Yeah, I think the main idea doesn't really come from me. This come from inventors I've come from, from individuals who have just a deep down passion of creation. How I help and how I really assist is to look at that product, to look at it and say, is there a need for that product? Is a consumer really going to purchase it, and then, at what price? Right, and look at it and say, okay, what is the package? Say, is the package informative so that a customer can look at it within six seconds and understand exactly what it is, and does it fill a need for them? And this is the right price point and is, does it fit the metrics that Walmart looks at and is it gonna so? Is it gonna check all those boxes from the end consumer to the retailer that's gonna purchase it?
Logan Ensign: 6:12
Really, really interesting well shifting gears a bit. I know you're based out In Bentonville and, for folks who aren't super aligned with Walmart, that is Walmart's global headquarters there in Bentonville, arkansas. I had the pleasure of going there, spent on my bucket list for a while and I was there late last year. Fascinating place. Could you speak to a little bit what it's like living in a place that's just so focused on retail and consumer products and what that communities like yeah, I mean it is changed immensely now.
Bill Sinacore: 6:44
I've only physically been in Bentonville for 10 years, so but for 30 years I travel back and forth from from Chicago where I live Most of my life, and 30 years ago it was one place in time and today it is absolutely a totally different place and in a lot of aspects it's grown and it's nurtured and matured and it is now a really it's a global community of individuals from all over the world that are living here, not just from different states but From different parts of the world, have now come to Bentonville and, you know, with the help of the Hunt family and the Walton family and the Tyson family, this Northwest Arkansas, as it's called, has grown immensely. So it's it's pretty neat, coming from a really diverse cultural place like Chicago. When I first got her, even 10 years ago, it was like you know it was, it was pretty normal. I would say it was just a good Midwestern town, and now I see the absolute growth in buildings and culture and different things to do. Restaurants have grown, the people have grown, a lot of families moving in, so it's a really neat place to be.
Logan Ensign: 7:57
Well, and I think, if they've claimed the moniker of the mountain biking capital of the world as well, which is surprising to me- Absolutely yeah.
Bill Sinacore: 8:05
If you're in the biking mountain biking as well as trail bikes you know some of those families have done a wonderful service to this community by purchasing land on a 30 mile track between Fayetteville and Bentonville and you can ride your bike without any cars or anything else For 30 miles from they call it from square to square and you can do that all day. You can ride parts of it. So a wonderful outdoor area in Arkansas.
Logan Ensign: 8:32
Well, and I just have this vision in my mind of dinner parties or back backyard barbecues where people sit around talking about OTIF rates and roll back and promotion. I mean retail is such a big part of probably most people have connections to Walmart and to the retail CPG space.
Bill Sinacore: 8:49
You know absolutely. You get individuals that are other vendors, such as myself, but in different categories, right, you know housewares and outdoor sports and food, so in garments. So you get to talk with those people as neighbors. And then you get individuals who maybe support Walmart and they work for JB Hunt. They talk about the trucking part of the whole thing, so and then you get the individuals who work on the software companies that talk about the tech portion of how they assist Walmart. So you kind of get the whole gambit as well. As then you get to talk with everyday people who are consumers, so you get the full circle of retail in a very, very small area of the country.
Logan Ensign: 9:28
Very, very interesting, very neat, Very neat. Well, bill, since you have such an expertise in kind of working with retailers and specifically with Walmart, would love to just get your perspective on as you work with your buyer, as other brands work with their buyers. What are some of the trends you see on what buyers are looking for, the key metrics that are important to you in running your business, and maybe we can talk about getting into Walmart and building those relationships at Walmart specifically.
Speaker 3: 9:59
Well, first and foremost, you know what Walmart is looking for. Obviously is product that individuals and consumer wants right, as well as helping them better their life on every day, and that's usually. It could be price, it could be options of a product. But how do we make the consumers day a lot better, day in and day out? And of course you know let's give them a great price. But obviously Walmart doesn't do this for fun. You know they need to make their margins and you need to know those. But then you also have to pay attention to your contribution margin. You know as a vendor, right, you know you have to make money, you have to cover your costs and you've got to look at your capabilities. So you know those are the main things that Walmart wants to see and you know they've been really open, at least with me over the last my whole career of bringing products to them to even just to see them and get an opportunity to see them. And you know, take my calls or my emails and say I'll give you 20 minutes or 15 or what do you need? A half hour? So they've afforded me a great opportunity in my life with different products. So that's really what they want to see at.
Logan Ensign: 11:10
Walmart. So what I'm hearing is a great product trumps everything consumers are going to want to buy. That's right. And then obviously there's profitability and pricing consideration there as well. But starting with the end consumer, Right.
Bill Sinacore: 11:23
And then there's capacity. You know, do you have the capacity to fuel a Walmart in their 4000 locations? I mean, not everybody has the manufacturing facilities to produce what they need because they're such a giant within the velocity of your product. And most vendors today not all, but most of them their number one customer is Walmart because of just the buying power and the amount of traffic that they get in stores and the amount of looks that Walmartcom is now getting online and you know, delivery now and pick up at store. So you know Walmart has kind of checked all the boxes regarding where the eyes of the consumer are and where they want to be. So it's a lot of different disciplines that Walmart looks at from a vendor standpoint.
Logan Ensign: 12:07
Make sense, makes sense, and so when you kind of have those components together, how do you find yourself making that case to Walmart? To a Walmart buyer? What are some keys in being able to effectively communicate? It's a great product, the pricing right. We can support you at scale from a supply chain perspective. How do you go through that, that exercise and maybe giving some advice to some listeners who may not have as mature relationship as you do with Walmart?
Bill Sinacore: 12:34
Sure are. There's a couple different ways. If you have the, the budget or the opportunities to test consumers on a I mean a couple thousand consumers, you do test markets with them and you, you know, you know that data, you're giving Walmart the opportunity to say, hey, listen, we've done a great deal of testing with and consumer. You know this, this item or this group of items, you know checks the top two boxes Price and value and innovation and yes, I would purchase it. So you go through a lot of that. Secondly, a lot of vendors will start a product on amazon very cheaply. You're able to go ahead and set up a page, get it rolling, you know, do some social media with that and then start to get Reviews and then multiple reviews and five star reviews and you know those. Those reviews are looked at by the entire world, not just the consumer. You know, when you're looking for a product on amazon, you're really not sure which one you want to buy. There might be ten on the page a lot of us look at. You know star rankings. Right, give me the fives and the four. Well, there's no different than a Walmart merchant or merchant team will start to look at all the different products in their category and say hey, you know, look at this product, start again reviews, game five star ratings and it's something we need to start to look at. So you know we've done that. Where you can Grow a product over eighteen months or so on amazon, it's, you start to garner that and then you bring it to their attention. I mean, they're looking at so many different things every day. The whole world is bringing the product to get on that shelf and you know that shelf space is worth millions of dollars and you gotta prove your point. You know that the consumer wants that product in a Walmart consumer. Be specific that's fascinating.
Logan Ensign: 14:21
So not just the consumer level people looking at reviews on amazon wanna make sure they're buying a high quality product that the kids are gonna play with, but but actually that these big retailers are looking at amazon as a potential testing ground for new products and building that e-commerce presence. Great reviews is it a way to get in potentially?
Bill Sinacore: 14:44
Right. I mean it's just. You know if they're, if they see a product with higher reviews and so forth, they obviously want to care, you know purchase it for their customer. Because they have such such a big customer base and you know they can go from Zero to fifty thousand units and in four or five months easily, because of the amount of traffic they get in those stores, they can. They can pull that market share to them very, very quickly and they know that. So. But they need testing as well. It costs a lot of money just to take a chance on a product and you pull a product out, you put my product in If it doesn't perform. You've not only lost the sales of what you had in your hand there, but you also lost even additional because of what mine did not produce In your world.
Logan Ensign: 15:29
You find yourself even collaborating with e-commerce teams internally at play monster and and this is part of kind of the new product launch strategy. How does that work internally, knowing that this dynamic exists?
Bill Sinacore: 15:42
Absolutely. It's a consortium of individuals within our company that look at our own play monster dot com website. What's selling there, as well as Amazon and others out there, and what is selling there's? There's many products we have and others vendors have on on Amazon. We can put Our full portfolio of products on there. Where is you know? Walmart only has a dedicated amount of space. So does target it's. Anybody that has a physical store only has so many spots. So you know, as a vendor, we'd love them to carry everything right, but that doesn't even make sense either, because some items are just not as profitable for Walmart or Target as they may be for an Amazon. So we're constantly looking at POS and that's where, you know, alloy has really helped us build different reports and Look at different metrics on a daily basis because, you know, your, your software updates every single morning and by 10 o'clock I can have a dashboard of what happened yesterday. It make changes to it if we need to, or change pricing or look at opportunities and look at rates of sale, and so there's just, you know, plethora of metrics using alloy. That has really helped us.
Logan Ensign: 16:53
Well, it's great to hear that's. That's helpful. You'd mentioned you. You know how Bentonville has shifted over the 10 years that you've been there. I'm curious, as you think about Walmart as a retailer, how they've changed over the last decade and what you're noticing about the way they work with their suppliers and how those Strategic objectives have shifted over time.
Bill Sinacore: 17:14
Yeah, I think the biggest thing I've seen is that they've kind of gone to a new kind of buying format where they have multiple buyers within the same category and they're supported by and Administrators within there, as well as replenishment and so forth. So they have teams. The teams have gotten really young. Either I'm getting really old or they're getting really, really young. So they've gone young and that's great. I mean, some of these buyers are a year out of college and you know they're sitting at a six, seven hundred million dollar, you know, as I call it desk. So I've found that they're very open because they are younger and maybe they just haven't been in the market long enough, but they're very open to ideas and new things and, you know, pushing the business forward and and just wanting to hear my experiences with Walmart and what's worked, what hasn't worked and it's it's been a big change in 10 years in those buying desks. So Fascinating.
Logan Ensign: 18:14
So there's more openness to new ideas. Is it more kind of Data-driven or, you know, I've there been other components, as maybe the demographic of the buyer has changed, where you've had to kind of change to meet them where they are.
Bill Sinacore: 18:31
Absolutely. You know they've always been data-driven Walmart. You could always. You know there's always kind of 12 metrics that they've always wanted to see and that as a vendor, you better be up to date on those every week at any point in time the phone call would come, or during the meeting They'd want to see it. Now Everybody has it on their phone, right? You know the buyers can look on their phone to get up in the morning and take a look at sales. You know who's not performing, who is, and today's you know buyer. You better know that before them and you better bring them a solution if there is a problem or a great opportunity and say, hey, this is what I'm seeing this week. You know, let's do x, y and z and I think we can increase sales. You know we can double it in the next two months or triple it or whatever. Or we might have a situation when we're running out of inventory and I just want to make you aware of this. I have a solution for you. So yeah, the analytics part of it now used to be on a weekly basis. Now it's on a daily basis, so that's changed immensely.
Logan Ensign: 19:27
I'm hearing maybe a double-edged sword. They're more potentially persuadable. But also you've got to be on top of your game. It sounds like to be competitive in that environment.
Bill Sinacore: 19:37
Yeah, you got you got to have a case right. You have a case for what you're doing and I always say let's have two or three Solutions to a situation, because you never know where they're coming from. Different buyers have different metrics. You know they always want to sell more. That's the number one metrics they all have. But some of them have different ideas of what else is underlying that they want to look at.
Logan Ensign: 19:59
Really really interesting, bill. Well, one more topic for you. I'd love to unpack a little bit. I know it's top of mind for a lot of industries, but I know it's particularly top of mind for toys and games around Sustainability. I know that this is important to consumers and it's also very important to brands, and so you know how are you thinking about sustainability at play monster. You know how does this play in the relationship with Walmart. Could you speak a little bit to sustainability efforts and and how you all think about that in relationship to working with with Walmart?
Bill Sinacore: 20:32
Sure, yeah, you know, obviously, as you mentioned it's, it's a, it's a big agenda item for Walmart and it's a great one because you know, at the end of the day, we all live on this planet and we wanted to be here for our kids and our grandkids and we wanted to be enjoyable. So the big picture is it's a great picture. So some of the things we we are currently doing at play monster and also researching for the future, is to Limit it as much plastic from our packaging as much as we can. We want that out. We don't want that in consumers hands. Then it goes into the disposal and into our you know, our garbage waste facilities and it just kind of sits there. For what is it? 25 years or 30 years. So we're trying to take plastics out. We're also looking at recycled paper. You know a lot of our products are games, but our games, their cardboard right. So it's a very easy one to do that now. To do that Economically has been a little bit of a challenge, but it's getting. It's getting much better and we will take a little bit obviously less profit if we can come out with the recycled products. And the third part of it is we're looking at. In this next fall, fall 24 we're coming out with two different what we call upcycle products, where it's a toy, but you're using plastics from Water bottles or paper and you're going to be able to make jewelry with those. So not only is there a message there for the consumer that you're helping and you're recycling, but then you're also able to make a bracelet or a necklace with the toy that we're coming out with. So it's it's very unique.
Logan Ensign: 22:07
Wow, that sounds really really neat. When does that come out? That'll hit shelves in June of 24. All right, I have three young kids, so we're gonna circle, all right, circle that time horizon there, I'd be excellent. Well, fantastic, bill. That sounds like really really compelling initiatives there. Bill, really appreciate you making time for this conversation and thanks for joining us on shelf life.