Most distribution companies carry other people's brands. We do that too. But in North America we also built one of our own, and it is now taking a step that says more about where this company is going than any contract would.

The problem with waiting for a channel

When a brand enters a new market, the usual sequence is to sign a distributor, then wait for that distributor to find retailers, then wait for those retailers to decide whether the product moves. Every step is somebody else's priority. A year passes and the brand has shelf space in a handful of stores and no real read on whether the market wants it.

Lusso Scelta exists so that does not have to happen sequentially. It is our own retail and hospitality brand in Canada and the United States, selling Italian coffee, espresso and gourmet products directly to consumers and supplying boutique hotels, restaurants and independent cafes.

What it means for a brand owner

We are not describing distribution from a distance or reciting a process from a deck. We run the pricing. We handle the returns. We answer to the hospitality accounts when a delivery is late. When we tell a manufacturer what their product will realistically do at a given price point in a given channel, it is because we have sold it at that price in that channel ourselves.

Owning a brand also means owning its problems. Stock that does not move. Pricing that has to hold when a competitor discounts. Customers who expect a reply the same day. None of that appears in a distribution proposal, and all of it decides whether a market entry works.

The next step

Lusso Scelta is now developing its own range, produced to a standard above anything it has carried to date, for distribution well beyond North America.

That is a deliberate change in what this company is. For twenty years we took other people's brands into markets that did not know them. We are still doing that, and still looking for the right partners to do it with. But the channel we built to sell somebody else's product is about to carry our own, which means we will be sitting on both sides of the table at once: the manufacturer choosing a distributor, and the distributor being chosen.

We expect that to make us better at both.

Lusso Scelta is at lussoscelta.com.