Sam’s Club wants to become the place where premium local brands go national.
The wholesale clubs are primarily a place to load up on big-brand stuff at bargain prices, but they also pepper a few local surprises throughout the aisles. Now, the Walmart-owned chain is taking those smaller offerings online for everyone to buy.
“We don’t want to be the everything store to everyone. We want to be the curated store that you trust, and that’s what keeps you coming back,” Sam’s Club’s head of e-commerce Greg Pulsifer told Business Insider in an interview on July 30.
Now the Walmart owned warehouse chain is aiming to crack the code on how to make local gems discoverable to members across the US.
Sam’s Club merchant teams are already very skilled at finding high quality local products, but traditionally those items have only been available in a particular region. As the company’s delivery and fulfillment operation speeding up, Pulsifer’s team is stitching together that local discovery with a national reach.
Case in point: Arkansas’ own Onyx Coffee.
Co-founder Andrea Allen told Business Insider that when her coffee bar launched a new brand of beans, Doyenne, that features women-led coffee producers, she wanted a channel that grow volume quickly without compromising quality.
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Most of the coffee Sam’s Club sells is what’s known as commercial-grade, but Onyx and Doyenne only source beans rated as excellent or outstanding by the Specialty Coffee Association, Allen said.
Starting with a test run last year at three Sam’s warehouses in northwest Arkansas, she said Doyenne was able to reach a different cohort of coffee lovers than at her shops in town.
“My vet here locally is buying Doyenne at Sam’s Club, and I know for sure he would never step foot into our cafe, not because he doesn’t like it, but because that’s not his space,” she said.
The demand signal at the club-level was strong enough that Sam’s and Doyenne decided to expand to more than 50 US clubs and open up sales on samsclub.com, with fast local fulfillment and national shipping options.
Things really took off from there, Allen said.
Sam’s Club says Doyenne sales nearly doubled within the first four weeks of online availability, and nearly a quarter of online orders are now shipped to locations where the product is not carried in-warehouse. Shoppers are also refilling on Doyenne at a higher rate than Sam’s Club’s typical whole bean customer, Pulsifer said.
Sam’s Club says it has sold nearly 15 tons of Doyenne beans this year as of the end of July.
The company also said this growth path is similar to one that Oklahoma City-based Kize nutrition bars saw after a Sam’s Club buyer spotted them at a local expo, brought the brand into the club, and scaled to national reach online. Other emerging brands are following as well, the company said.
“Historically, premier brands relied on location and physical environments,” Pulsifer said. “In a digital world, those barriers are gone.”
In the e-commerce era, Pulsifer said the sense of trust Sam’s Club has cultivated over the years gives customers the confidence to try out new premium products online.
“Innovative brands can grow without compromising their identity, and it supports their mission. I think it’s a really it’s a really cool thing,” he said.