This interview is with Kade Robertson, CEO, Viral Distributors.
As CEO and founder of Viral Distributors, how would you describe your role in wholesale today, and which parts of your experience in branding, advertising, and social media marketing most shape how you lead the business?
My role in wholesale is part builder, part translator. Viral Distributors is a distribution accelerator and retail solutions partner, so my days are spent connecting brands with the right retail channels and making sure the physical side of that promise holds up once it leaves the warehouse.
We run lean and are bootstrapped, and I still handle operations personally because that’s where the truth in this business lives.
My background in branding and marketing shapes how I lead more than anything else.
A good product doesn’t sell itself just because it’s “good”; it needs a story, the right placement, and someone who understands where the customer actually is.
That’s why we built category-specific retail websites and why I’m still thinking about positioning even when I’m staring at warehouse data.
Social media taught me to watch behavior in real time. Branding taught me consistency. Advertising taught me that you can’t scale what you can’t measure.
What path took you from your early experience in marketing and website building to founding and growing a wholesale distribution business, and what was a defining turning point along the way?
I started out building websites and running marketing for small brands. That is what taught me how demand actually works. I could drive traffic and write copy that converted; there was no problem there.
But I kept watching the same thing happen over and over: great products would sell out and then sit dead for months because the brand couldn’t get them into the right channels afterward. The marketing was never the problem. The distribution was.
The turning point came when a client asked me to help them not just promote a product, but actually get it into stores. I didn’t know the first thing about wholesale at that point, so I learned it the only way that actually works: by calling buyers, visiting warehouses, and making a fair number of mistakes along the way.
That one project eventually turned into a business because I realized the gap was never attention; it was execution. From there, I built Viral Distributors to solve the exact problem I kept running into.
As you have grown a bootstrapped wholesale company, what is one market-growth signal you now watch closely before committing more inventory or marketing budget to a product category?
I watch the reorder rate before anything else—not first orders, but reorders.
Any category can land a one-time placement if you push hard enough, but that tells you nothing real. What actually tells me something is whether the retail buyer comes back for more within sixty days.
It means the product is moving off the shelf on its own and the buyer noticed before I had to point it out. That’s when I commit real inventory and marketing budget behind it. If nobody reorders, I don’t care how good the margins look on paper.
You have described using sales velocity by SKU to guide reorders; what practical rule would you recommend to a wholesale operator trying to balance stock availability against the cost of carrying slow-moving inventory?
Rank every SKU by velocity and margin together, never separately. A fast mover with a thin margin isn’t the same as a fast mover that actually pays the bills, even though they look identical on a basic sales report. We score each SKU and re-sort the whole list every week.
Then set a hard cutoff. For us, anything sitting past eight weeks’ cover goes on a markdown or gets bundled, no exceptions. That may sound aggressive until you actually price out what that inventory is costing you in space and tied-up cash. Slow stock is a bill you’re paying quietly every month, whether you notice it or not.
Protect availability for your top twenty percent, and let everything else earn its shelf space or move on. Stockouts on your best sellers hurt far more than markdowns on your worst ones ever will. One is a lost customer walking out the door; the other is just a correction.
When supplier issues, customs delays, or shifting demand disrupt the supply chain, what process has helped your team respond quickly without making expensive reactive decisions?
We run a daily exception meeting: fifteen minutes, same time, no slides.
The team brings only what actually broke in the last twenty-four hours:
- a customs hold
- a late container
- a buyer who doubled an order overnight
We sort each issue into two buckets:
- Fix today.
- Watch for a week.
Most things land in the second bucket, and that alone eliminated a lot of expensive panic that used to eat our afternoons. The idea here isn’t a perfect response, just a consistent one. A calm process beats a heroic one every time.
Your approach to cost control is to protect what touches the product or customer; how do you apply that principle when deciding which growth initiatives deserve investment and which should be cut?
Basically, it comes down to one question: does this make it easier for a customer to buy again or for a buyer to place a larger order? If yes, it gets a real look. If it only makes us feel more professional or visible, it waits.
I invest in channel relationships and in anything that improves fulfillment speed or accuracy, since those touch the customer directly. I also cut rebrands and internal dashboards that nobody actually uses, and pass on campaigns that can’t be tied back to reorders, no matter how exciting the idea sounds on paper.
Before committing to anything, I test it on a small scale first, in one category or one account. If the signal shows up, I scale it. If it doesn’t, I kill it fast and move the money back to the core.
Protecting the product and the customer isn’t a slogan here; it’s a filter, and most growth ideas fail it. That’s fine. The few that pass are worth the whole budget on their own.
For a wholesale business considering expansion into a new international market, what groundwork would you prioritize before placing the first major order or launching customer acquisition campaigns?
Before you place a major order, you need proof that someone in that market actually wants your product.
I would spend the first few months talking to local buyers and distributors rather than to shipping containers.
Find one partner who already sells into the channels you want; they know the pricing, the seasonality, and the regulations.
That relationship is worth more than a spreadsheet of forecasts.
Your package-insert partnership outperformed digital ads because it reached customers in the right buying moment; how do you identify customer moments or audiences where a marketing message is likely to feel useful rather than intrusive?
The moment matters more than the message. That’s the whole lesson from the insert test. We don’t guess. We look at what someone just bought. If they ordered a dog leash, a pet supplement insert feels like a helpful add-on. If they ordered a phone case, it doesn’t.
Timing is the other fundamental part. A package arriving at the door is a high-trust moment—they’re already opening something from you. An ad that interrupts a scroll feels intrusive. A card that shows up after they’ve already chosen you feels like a bonus. We also segment by buyer history. First-time buyers get one message. Repeat buyers get something different.
Looking ahead, what is one underused opportunity in wholesale—whether in supply-chain data, customer segmentation, partnerships, or social media—that you believe operators can test now to create more sustainable growth?
Treat your return data as a segmentation tool, not an accounting problem.
It tells you which products to fix, which to reposition, and which to stop buying.
Most operators have that data sitting in a spreadsheet that no one reads. Read it, then act on it. That’s sustainable growth hiding in plain sight.