Display Helps Moves Supplement to Retail

San Diego -- In October, Metabolife 356 became available for purchase at mass merchants like Target, Wal-Mart and Kmart for the first time. The herbal diet supplement had debuted in drugstores and food stores in August, but prior to that, consumers could only obtain the product from independent distributors and kiosks that were set up in shopping malls nationwide.Metabolife International Inc., the supplement's maker, had been strictly a multi-level marketing company, according to David Gumner, vice president of marketing. "In five years, we grew from nowhere to about $700 million in sales, all through multi-level marketing. We're now as big as Slim-Fast in the weight loss category," he says. "We reached a point in our growth curve where those 1,100 retail outlets [the kiosks] were limiting our future accessibility to consumers."The company decided to switch to retail distribution and began the transformation into a retail-based consumer packaged goods company. In July, brokers began presenting to retailers with a target on-shelf date of mid-August. "No one has ever attempted what we're doing and in our timeframe," Gumner says. "Because we were completely changing our distribution model, we realized we were going to displace a large portion of our current distribution system. Therefore, we had to move quickly into broad distribution. Given the importance of speed and the fact that we were off-planogram in most if not all of our accounts, we determined that a display was critical."Meridian Display & Merchandising, St. Paul, Minn., designed and produced the gravity-feed floorstand that Gumner says has been enthusiastically embraced at retail. "A display like this can go in-store even before you get on the shelf," he says. "It gives us a billboard effect and allowed us to get in stores with a lot of stock early on."While most stores ordered just one unit, one supermarket chain in Chicago set up eight contiguous displays in a horseshoe shape and sold out in two weeks.Gumner says the fact that a 3% incentive was offered on the 36-piece display may have helped push the unit through. "We sold through the original 20,000 production run in two weeks and reordered another 20,000."In addition to the floorstand, 20,000 counter units were produced, although Gumner says the smaller version was less successful with retailers. A stackable unit measuring 8 inches wide by 14 inches high by 9 inches deep, the counter unit holds 12 bottles of product.

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