4 Tips to Navigate Your Business from Retail to Wholesale | Guest Blog

If you’ve been dreaming about growing your brand from a handful of stockists to a few hundred, you’re not alone. Many product-based business owners reach a point where they realize that retail (whether online or in-person) can only take them so far. Wholesale opens the door to larger, more predictable revenue, which can take your business from a reactive to a proactive place. 

At Parcel Island, we’ve spent the last decade designing colorful, pun-filled stationery and giftable goods—greeting cards, stickers, apparel, art prints, and more—and the last five years deeply immersed in the wholesale world. Today, our products can be found in over 200 local and national stores such as the Philadelphia Airport, Anthropologie, DiBruno Brothers, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Philadelphia Visitors Center.

Here are the four biggest lessons I’ve learned while taking our wholesale business from 20 stores to more than 200.

1. Know Your Numbers

If you take only one piece of advice from this entire post, let it be this: your pricing and margins matter more in wholesale than anywhere else in your business. Just because you sell an item for $20 doesn’t mean you make $20; and in retail, it’s easy to get distracted by that bigger number while ignoring the extra work behind it, from customer service to digital marketing to in-person events that eat into your time. Wholesale gives you the chance to scale sustainably and get time back to focus on what you truly love, but only if you understand how wholesale margins differ from retail from the very beginning. 

Wholesale requires:

• A margin that allows you to sell at 50% off retail

• Enough profit to cover materials, labor, overhead, and your time

• Space for promotions or stockist incentives

• Room to scale (which eats into margin too)

Many makers underprice their products early on because retail masks the problem. When you sell direct to consumers, you can survive on narrower margins. Wholesale exposes that instantly.

Once you know your cost of goods, you will also be able to see how your pricing compares to industry standards, and find opportunities for reducing the cost of materials in order to increase your ROI. 

2. Community Over Transactions

The biggest takeaway I’ve learned throughout my journey: business is human.

While we live in an age where you can shop millions of products across a portfolio of digital marketplaces all at your fingertips, they can also create a wall between you and the buyer. It's easy to forget that behind every order is a real person running a real store in a real community.

Building relationships with your buyers and these stores is the key to long-term success in the wholesale space. Ways you can look to build relationships:

• Engage with your stockists on social media.

• If you’re local, go visit their stores.

• Buy something from them when you can—show that you care about their business too.

• Send a handwritten note with orders.

• Check in during busy seasons or slow ones.

These small moments create loyalty, and loyalty creates longevity.

3. Wholesale Is a Long Game

In retail, things move fast. Run a sale → get a sale. Post on Instagram → maybe get a few orders. Do a craft show → leave with cash in hand. Wholesale? Completely different game.

You might reach out to a store today and not hear back for years. And I say that with a smile—because I’ve had stores convert after three years of consistent, friendly outreach.

Wholesale growth is about building systems that work over time:

• Quarterly or seasonal outreach

• A regular newsletter

• A strong, easy-to-navigate catalog

• Occasional promotions

• Keeping your online shop updated

Don’t get discouraged when stores don’t respond right away. You’re planting seeds. And when you tie this into the community-building activities (as previously mentioned), once they’re ready to order, they’ll remember you. 

4. Systems Make Scaling Possible

Getting your first 10 stores is exciting. Getting your first 50 is empowering. Getting your first 200… that requires infrastructure. Ensuring you have the right systems in place allows your business to be nimble and ready for growth in order to not cause disruption in your work flow.

Things that become non-negotiable as you grow:

• A production workflow you can repeat

• A reliable shipping process

• Inventory tracking

• A well-designed line sheet or catalog

• Clear ordering terms

• A fulfillment space that doesn’t swallow you whole (been there!)

The smoother your backend is, the smoother your wholesale experience will be—for you and your stockists.

About the Writer

I’m Carley Jackson, the owner and designer behind Parcel Island. I’m a New Jersey native now proudly rooted in Philadelphia for the past 10 years. Parcel Island has been in business for a decade, specializing in colorful and pun-filled greeting cards, stickers, gifts, and stationery. For the last five years, we’ve focused deeply on wholesale—and today, our products can be found in major retailers and beloved local shops nationwide.

If you’re building your own wholesale journey, I’m cheering you on!