Negotiating through Wal-Mart’s labyrinth of approvals for your item to be placed on store shelves can be like winning the lottery for some suppliers. But once you get there, it may not always equal a big payoff.

That’s where 8th and Walton, a six-year-old service provider comes into play. Known as third-party supplier to vendorville, 8th & Walton focuses on helping Walmart suppliers get on the shelves and navigate retailer’s complex supply chain. To date 8th & Walton serves as a gateway for the more than 1,300 Walmart suppliers.

Gathering experts from the vendor community, 8th and Walton then teaches other new suppliers how to be more effective within Wal-Mart’s walls. The 20 people on their staff are seen as experts on communicating and reporting with Walmart. The classes are small and costs up to $600.

It’s no secret that Wal-Mart runs on massive information systems. The major one being Retail Link which is an enormous database of sales, item file and stockholding information accessible by buyers and suppliers.

“There are hundreds of millions of data points a day,” said 8th and Walton’s Executive Vice President of Marketing Jeff Clapper, “from SKUs to stores to shoppers, getting the data to the user is complex.” (SKU is a stock-keeping unit or unique identifier for each product in a store.)

The suppliers are current experts and help others find efficiencies and inefficiencies in that data. The points vary. It could be an out-of-stock circumstance or an across the board opportunity to improve the supplier’s business. The suppliers use their personal experience to create a customizable scenario for the others which Clapper calls the “so what and now what” method.

He cited an example where the company helped a supplier discover in two days how $800,000 wasn’t being spent by Wal-Mart customers.
Jeff Clapper

Cameron Smith, founder of CSA Recruiters, says “With all the services out there for Walmart suppliers, we have to be careful who we recommend.” He said 8th & Walton has consulted with the best in the business in writing their curriculum and it’s the only place he would send a potential supplier for education on the Wal-Mart way.

ENTREPRENEURIAL ATTITUDE
Clapper was raised in Chicago by parents in the magazine business and says he’s always possessed an entrepreneurial attitude.

“My parents worked together and I listened to business-talk at the dinner table every night,” he said. “I was 14 months old and they brought me to the office where 25 of their employees watched me.”

Clapper said he’s comfortable doing “my own thing” and knowing there’s opportunity and risk. He has started and sold several companies including Gimme Golf, an online golf game and Clapper publishing. He’s a partner of Technology 101 and president of Zapiddy, a start-up smartphone app that pays shoppers for answering questions.

Clapper continues to branch out with new business ventures and programs through 8th and Walton. The company recently started two supplier service programs. The first is an onboarding facility for new suppliers. It’s a 90-day program which helps the supplier get off the ground and running.

The second program is called scorecard optimization — a fancy title for sending in experts to find out what you are missing. This can involve small companies or the big national brands that don’t want to take the time or don’t have the personnel to look for business opportunities they are missing, Clapper said.

“People have great intentions and great ideas,” he said, “We help nice, local, down-to-earth people looking to make a living and multi-national companies who want to improve their business.”

Founder Matt Fifer has joined with others to create the Consumer Product Innovation Lab and a workshop called Selling to the Masses meant to help get new products onto retailers’ shelves.

Fifer said the program had “the potential to dramatically increase the success rate of the more than 30,000 consumer products that go to market each year by arming early-stage companies with the tools, resources and connections they will need to go to market.”

Selling to the Masses is a three-day workshop during which entrepreneurs will hear from experts in the field, network with others and apply to work with Fifer and the CPI Lab advisory board. The board consists of Bob Connolly, executive vice president of merchandising at Wal-Mart Stores Inc.; Tom Muccio, president of Global Customer Teams at Proctor & Gamble; Andy Murray, founder of Saatchi & Saatchi X; and Lois Mikita, senior vice president of GMM Apparel & Home at Wal-Mart.

“Every person who attends [the workshop] will be given an application for the lab,” Fifer said. “We will be receiving applications from people at every stage, … nothing but a great idea sketched on a napkin to a working prototype.”

Fifer said he and the board would then invest their own money into the ideas they choose while working with the company to get products to consumers. He said their decision would be based on a number of factors, including product readiness, organizational readiness, safety and other criteria.

The group will make its determination based on “the best of the best,” according to Fifer. “Is it a truly innovative product that people are going to want to buy?”

One of the biggest pluses Fifer said he was bringing to these companies was his location.

“We have the benefit of being headquartered in Bentonville, which is not only home to the world’s largest retailer, but also to more than 1,200 of the most successful consumer brand teams, which also have a presence here,” he said. “There is nowhere in the world with a greater concentration of knowledge and experience when it comes to taking consumer products to market.”

Selling to the Masses is held six times a year in Bentonville. One-day workshops will also be held in Dallas, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and other cities throughout the year.

Photo by Ryan McGeeney - Business partners Matt Fifer, left, and Jeff Clapper are two of the three consultants with 8th and Walton, which helps potential Wal-Mart suppliers around the globe get their products into the retailer's stores.

In a small, spartan office in a strip center just down the street from Wal-Mart Stores Inc. headquarters, a small group of people has some big ideas about getting new products onto retailers’ shelves.

Already known for its classes educating product vendors about doing business with Wal-Mart and other big retailers, 8th & Walton LLC has launched a division called Selling to the Masses to complement its Consumer Product Innovation Lab. The firm seeks to link inventors and entrepreneurs with a deep bench of mentors to increase the entrepreneurs’ chances of success.

An estimated 95 percent of the roughly 30,000 new consumer products introduced each year ultimately fail, according to a Harvard Business School study.

Matt Fifer, co-founder, business partner and executive vice president of 8th & Walton, said the firm is not in the business of creating false hope.“We don’t paint a rosy picture. We give them the truth,” said Fifer, who spent 13 years in various leadership roles at Wal-Mart, including store and club operations, staff development, U.S. marketing and international marketing.“They don’t realize there is help,” he said of vendors new to the region. “People are finding us because there’s not a lot of people out there like us.”

In some cases, 8th & Walton provides some of the start-up funding for new ventures, taking equity positions in the companies. Once clients go through training, Fifer said, the firm has a network of experts it can draw on that includes big names from the world of consumer packaged goods, retailing and academia. Though much of the firm’s focus is Wal-Mart, it also assists clients seeking business with other big retailers such as Target Corp. and specialty retailers such as Cabala’s, the outdoor outfitter.

Jeff Clapper, co-founder and executive vice president for marketing, joined 8th & Walton from Chicago, where he had launched and subsequently sold a handful of companies, including an online golf game and a smart-phone app that pays shoppers for answering questions. For many entrepreneurs hoping to get their products on the shelves at Wal-Mart and other retailers, he said, “they don’t even know where to start.”

“This is about helping them to improve or to build from scratch,” said Clapper, a former Wal-Mart vendor. In addition to classes and partnering clients with mentors, he said, the firm can advise the start-ups on obtaining financing and on approaching other retailers if their products are too specialized for big-box retailers.

Cameron Smith, president of Bentonville corporate recruiting firm Cameron Smith & Associates, said his operation has been involved with 8th & Walton “since, really, the day they opened.” Part of the lure, he said, was the approach of suppliers already working with Wal-Mart and other retailers teaching new suppliers.“We realized the people teaching these classes were some of the brightest minds in Northwest Arkansas as far as managing their Wal-Mart business,” he said. “The credibility was there from day one.”

8th & Walton’s instructors, he said, are users of Wal-Mart’s Retail Link program that tracks and stores point-of-sale data for the company.“A lot of the new companies we bring here, there’s a learning curve. Sending them to 8th & Walton shortened that learning curve,” he said. Tom Muccio, retired former president of global consumer teams for packaged-goods giant Procter & Gamble, said he has been actively involved in development of the product innovation lab and the Selling to the Masses initiative.

Not only do the programs help new and, particularly, small suppliers, he said, they also make business run more smoothly at Wal-Mart.“In terms of new product, the theory is, there’s a lot of potentially good products that never get to market successfully, don’t get in front of buyers or haven’t been through enough evaluation,” he said. “The intent is to be able to provide for small or medium companies the resources to think through, prepare, as if they had a big company behind them.”Muccio is among 8th & Walton’s mentors.

Fifer said a substantial number of the firm’s clients are inventors who recognize that they are not the right person to take a product to market. One client, he said, had developed a body spray and had approached Wal-Mart, CVS and Walgreen with no success. 8th & Walton pointed the client to an e-commerce strategy.

Others, Fifer said, are more realistic and willing to start local, such as marketing a new food product to a handful of stores in a single market to establish the product’s marketability.“A lot of it is not being greedy and paying your dues as you go,” he said.

“We realized that there were lots of promotions where companies buy a retired NASCAR and roll it off the truck, and say look but don’t touch. We thought how boring is that? Why not take a retired car, make it street legal, roll it out, and drive it across the country to promote different companies,” said Jeff Clapper with Street Legal Concepts.

Their car turnaround business has now gone from neutral to full speed in a year’s time.

Their current car was once owned by Dale Earnhart Inc. and once competed in the Daytona 500. Obiviously the team over at Street Legal Concepts had to make some modifications to make it ready to hit local roads.

“We make minor modifications so that it’s street legal. We dropped in a 430 horsepower Corvette engine, put some lights on it, a plate, and a VIN from the State of Arkansas. We even had it inspected by the state to make sure it’s legit, said Clapper.

Right now their car shrink-wrapped with an ad for WalMart Tire and Lube, but they are planning on adding more cars and more corporate clients down the road.

“We are in discussions right now with many national brands right now talking about tours. We can do a one week trade show where the CEO drives around potential clients. We just did a month run in Chicago and it was a huge hit.”

They even let Mitch ”Cannonball Roberts” take it for a spin around town.

Street Legal Concepts has a full-time driver who drives this car back and forth across the country. The car could be classified as a traveling billboard, aimed at bringing race fans and corporations together in a high speed way.