[doctorhandshake]

Poorly-kept secret about consumer packaged goods: you can launch your own brand of just about anything tomorrow if you don’t care about sourcing. There’s a US domestic factory making just about anything you can dream of that isn’t electronic, and, if you want something more specific, cheaper, or electronic, there’s Alibaba.

You can white label your own shampoo, sunglasses, supplements, anything, and even if you do the sometimes quite hard work of making sure your product is world-class, it often still doesn’t change the fact that once you have the product in hand, you’re now in the marketing business. This holds true even if you’re tapping a captive customer base with demonstrated search intent as in the case of Amazon. High quality product helps, but in the end it’s a marketing business.

This site doesn’t appear to make things much easier than just googling ‘[x product] contract manufacturer’ and picking up the phone. The product is the easy part.

[mcasey_gl]

Thanks for the feedback! You certainly can google co-packers and call them yourself - however, we make it a whole lot easier for everyone involved - we take care of food safety paperwork, verify manufacturers, allow you to compare copacker offers, provide a systematic way of communicating what you are making, and allow you to make payments online--among several other services.

I would say that no part of launching a new food or beverage product is easy, including contract manufacturing. We have heard too many horror stories of shady co-packers running away with peoples money, or faking their paperwork, or just being disorganized. We will be building more tools and partnering with other businesses to help brands with the other aspects of launching a new food brand - this is only the start.

[doctorhandshake]

Yeah sorry this was not intended as feedback about the product - although if I were to give you a bit of strategy advice it’s this - if you want your customers to succeed, focus on creating truly valuable training and lessons around marketing. You’ve made it easy to get the product, their job is to get customers. Help them do that with quality content marketing about marketing the products you help them produce.

[kwonkicker]

You just described 80% of Amazon.

[doctorhandshake]

I think it extends to all D2C CPG, even ones that appear to have sourcing front of mind, or at least claim to. Branding, design, and marketing can come together to make it very difficult for even a discerning consumer to tell the difference between what is effectively a generic white label and a thoughtfully-sourced product. There was a good discussion about this on HN in re: headphones recently but it applies to just about everything in the world of manufactured consumer goods.