With Promomash & Crisp, The Honey Pot seizes opportunities for continued growth

Real-time, granular insights on trade spend and sales performance enable data-driven decision-making for the company’s growing retail channel.

Over the past six years, The Honey Pot Company has experienced exponential growth in retail. Founder Bea Dixon started the company from her kitchen in 2012, but just a few short years later, The Honey Pot’s feminine wellness products went from being sold primarily in Whole Foods to expanding into Target, CVS, Walgreens, and several other major retailers globally. Dixon also gained attention as one of the first Black women to raise over $1 million in venture capital.  

The Challenge: Catching ‘Lightning in a Bottle’   

While the growth has been amazing, there are of course growing pains that have come along with it, particularly when it comes to trade spend. Director of Sales Chelsea De Loughy and Director of Sales Planning Rosalyn Risdon faced the challenge of balancing retailer demands for increased spend, a growing influx of retail customer deductions, and the constant need to make decisions that benefit the company strategically and financially.  

“We have been fortunate to be what we call ‘lightning in a bottle,’” said De Loughy. “…But we did have a need to ensure our rate of growth was sustainable, and that our promotions and the efforts we were putting into play were beneficial to the business.”

De Loughy and Risdon struggled to understand what was working and compare forecasts to actual results. While they did have access to point of sale data from their retailers, it came in the form of a giant excel spreadsheet. From there, they had to add in their own shipment data, then manipulate and analyze everything. Ultimately, they needed a way to better analyze and act on the mountains of data behind their trade performance and spend. 

The Solution: Taking control of trade spend with Promomash + Crisp

The team at The Honey Pot found that Promomash’s Trade Promotion Management Platform and turnkey Deduction Management service offered the solution they were looking for. As a result of Promomash and Crisp’s partnership, they also gained access to Crisp’s retail data platform, piping their retail data directly into Promomash in addition to Crisp’s powerful retailer dashboards. Now, The Honey Pot team dives into both platforms to answer a multitude of questions about their retail business that have long gone unanswered.  

With the Promomash Deduction Management platform, Promomash’s team of experts organize, categorize and track trade spend at a granular level. Since November of 2022, the Promomash team has been able to identify over $122,000 of deductions as invalid and has so far recovered over $56,000 of that amount for The Honey Pot. 

Aside from the value of the recovered deductions, the insights that the data offers is also paying dividends for the team. “It is great to be able to track deductions more closely in real time,” said Risdon. “Before, we were only looking at it on a monthly basis as a pivot table that rolled up into a summary. Now, it’s so much more aesthetically pleasing and less overwhelming to go into the Promomash dashboard and look at deductions in as granular a level as we need.” 

From a promotions perspective, The Honey Pot team now has one place to load all promotions, which allows them to model the financial impact of a range of different promotional strategies – and evaluate their effectiveness. “Once any promotion launches, we are able to go into the Promomash dashboard and look at what the actual lift was from the promotion based on what the retailer charged us back and what we spent,” Risdon said. “Analyzing that return on investment is really helpful to answer questions like, ‘do we feel these promotions are actually driving our business? Is it worth it? Should we try to stay away from these and negotiate a different type of promotion with the retailer?’ These are all things we’re learning as we start to look at our data.” 

“Oftentimes, retailers are really trying to negotiate with you on the spend or how deep you’re going in on a promotion. Being able to have the data in Promomash to showcase and say, ‘hey, this promotion costs us more than it yielded’ arms us with a lot for that negotiation.”

Chelsea De Loughy, Director of Sales

Risdon also points out the time savings from having promotion and sales data in Promomash versus spreadsheets. “I can just open up the platform, click on the retailer and promotion, and everything is already there for me,” she said. “What would probably take an hour of my time pulling together I can now see in Promomash within five to 10 minutes to know exactly how that promotion performed.”

Having the data in Promomash has already added value to some retailer conversations. “Oftentimes, some retailers are really trying to negotiate with you on the spend or how deep you’re going in on a promotion,” said De Loughy. “Being able to have the data in Promomash to showcase and say, ‘hey, this promotion costs us more than it yielded’ arms us with a lot for that negotiation.” 

Using data to drive retail sales

With Crisp, the team also leverages the breadth and depth of retailer intelligence to explore growth opportunities, including product launch execution, optimizing product assortments, and letting data guide their decision-making. 

“With some of our retailers, especially the smaller ones, there’s the question of understanding if all items are launched and still on the shelf,” De Loughy explained. “We can also understand where our top-line performance is in which states, stores, or even which SKUs.” On the marketing side, this information helps The Honey Pot geo-target areas where they either have a strong base or want to create more momentum.

Real results:
$122,000 in deductions identified as invalid by the Promomash team
55 minutes saved for each promotion analyzed
$56,000 invalid deductions recovered in the first 4 months
900 stores where sales increased after acting on insights found in Crisp data

Risdon uses Crisp to access data from Target, and UNFI to understand where her retail accounts are, what their product assortment is, and how sales performance varies at the store level. With this information, she can forecast demand and find opportunities to optimize sales.  

One example of a key business insight uncovered: Risdon noticed in Crisp that major UNFI accounts weren’t carrying The Honey Pot’s top-selling product in their mix, leaving significant sales on the table. She shared this insight with her UNFI buyer to get the best-seller stocked. Within three months, it was introduced into 900 stores, becoming Honey Pot’s second-highest seller in both units and dollars at UNFI.  

Ultimately, Risdon says, finding these distribution gaps creates a win-win partnership: “We’re helping the retailer and distributor, because they don’t always identify those gaps in distribution. If we can work with UNFI to identify those items in specific chains for the retail buyer, it’ll grow our business and it’ll grow their business as well.” 

“We’re helping the retailer and distributor, because they don’t always identify those gaps in distribution. If we can work with UNFI to identify those items in specific chains for the retail buyer, it’ll grow our business and it’ll grow their business as well.” 

Rosalyn Risdon, Director of Sales Planning

A sweet partnership

According to De Loughy, this is just the beginning as The Honey Pot looks ahead to 2024 planning.  “Our promotions could always perform better,” said De Loughy. “How do we better plan for promotions in 2024 or the back half of 2023? The bigger dig-in will be understanding where we are missing, and how we capitalize on that so that we are growing for each of the promotions and showing a real return on investment.” 

With Promomash and Crisp, The Honey Pot team is now properly positioned to see their business even more clearly as time passes.  “Having a platform that’s as agile as Promomash, with Crisp data included, is making it easier for our teams to discern real trends and insights over time versus making a lot of assumptions and never knowing if they were true or not,” said De Loughy. “I’m excited for what’s ahead with Promomash and Crisp and what we will learn from our business.”

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