Firm helping entrepreneurs get foot in door

It uses mentors to raise odds goods get in stores

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.
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 Cabela’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.

Business, Pages 63 on 03/25/2012

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