Case Study
With Crisp and Promomash, The Honey Pot sweetens trade spend and sales.
By using Crisp’s platform and Promomash’s promotion planning features, The Honey Pot is able to accurately forecast demand and reveal sales opportunities.
Situation
Catching “lightning in a bottle”
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, and a few short years later its feminine wellness products went from being sold primarily in Whole Foods to expanding into Target, Walmart, CVS, Walgreens, and several other major retailers globally. Dixon also gained attention as one of the first 40 women of color to raise over $1 million in venture capital.
The company had found lighting in a bottle – but they needed to ensure that growth was sustainable. As a result, designing effective promotions, and understanding the effectiveness of trade spend, was becoming increasingly critical. Chelsea De Loughy, Director of Sales and Rosalyn Risdon, Director of Sales Planning, 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 benefited the company strategically and financially.
With no formalized process or systems in place, Chelsea and Rosalyn struggled to effectively compare promotional forecasts to actual results. They tried analyzing sales and promo data on their own, which left them to aggregate mountains of data into a giant excel spreadsheet that was too cumbersome to manage. That’s when they turned to Promomash and Crisp.
Solution
Using data to build a long-term business
With the Promomash Deduction Management platform, the Honey Pot can now organize, categorize, and track trade spend at a granular level. Since November of 2022, Promomash has already helped them identify over $122,000 of deductions as invalid and recover over $56,000.
Once a promotion launches, Promomash helps Rosalyn and Chelsea look at the actual lift, then determine promo effectiveness based on total spend. Rosalyn explains: “Analyzing that return on investment is really helpful to answer questions like, ‘Do these promotions actually drive 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.”
With Crisp, the Honey Pot team can also explore growth opportunities. Rosalyn uses data ingested by Crisp from Walmart, Target, and UNFI to help her understand where all of her retail accounts are, what their product assortment is, and how sales performance varies at the store level. With this information, she can accurately forecast demand and find opportunities to optimize sales.
One example of a key business insight uncovered: Risdon noticed in Crisp’s sales dashboards 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, and within three months, the product 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, growing their business and benefiting their retail partners as well.
Hive-fiveable results:
• Saved hours per month by automating the aggregation of promotion and sales data in Promomash
• Identified growth opportunities to optimize assortments and expand sales with key retailers
• Evaluated the overall impact of promotions on sales performance to use trade spend more wisely
• Had more effective buyer conversations by discussing the potential lift of promotions and opportunities to drive category growth
Favorite Insight:
Promotional ROI
Aggregates promotional spend with actual sales lift to evaluate the success of a promotion.
“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 assumptions and never knowing if they were true or not.”
Chelsea De Loughy
Director of Sales
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