Featured Founder: WeStock

At Founder’s CPA, we are privileged to work with a wide spectrum of highly impressive clients, such as WeStock. Welcome to our Featured Founders, where we are highlighting a diverse set of “Founders” who may not fit the stereotypical “Founder” mold set by Silicon Valley, but they all bring a unique solution to their respective markets.

In this post, we showcase our Featured Founder, WeStock, a company helping CPG brands own their customer retail journey and see less failure on the shelf.

If you are interested in having your company featured, please contact us to get started.

Q) What does your company do?

WeStock makes it easy for shoppers to vote on the products they want to see at their favorite stores by streamlining the product request process for brands.

Q) What is your mission?

To change the future of retail by putting the shopper at the center of everything we do. We want consumers to be able to dictate what their shopping experience looks like and give them the power to control the next phase of retail and CPG growth.

Q) What inspired you to start WeStock? What is your “why”?

It all started with an episode of Shark Tank….The company I had previously worked with was on Shark Tank and immediately after we were slammed with customers asking us where they could find our product and how they could support our brand. We felt helpless, there was no way to measure the demand we were seeing and show it to retail buyers. We turned to the only solution we could find which was a paper request form, no seriously, that’s what most brands still use to this day…

Fast forward a few weeks later and we started to get emails from retail buyers saying that a handful of customers asked for the product in-store. I was shocked to see that just a few customers could move the needle enough for a retail buyer to stock our product.

I knew that this process could be updated and if done correctly that it would not only help brands get into new stores but also empower them to own the customer retail journey and ensure that less brands fail on shelf.

Q) What differentiates your company from your competitors?

We are the only company that uses first-party data and puts the consumer at the center of everything we do. Other data providers use third-party data so they don’t actually own the customer data which makes it less actionable.

Q) What are some challenges your consumers are facing right now and how does your company help?

Our main customers are CPG brands. The biggest struggles they face are getting into new retailers and then succeeding once they get into a new store. We help them identify consumer demand for their product, tell a convincing story using data, and ensure success once the product hits the shelf. All through our data and platform services.

Q) What’s your favorite part about being an entrepreneur?

I like the fact that there is no one to blame except yourself when something goes wrong. Even if it is an employee who makes a mistake, it is on you to set up that person for success and make sure they are given everything they need to do the job correctly. So at the end of the day, the blame all falls on you for when things go bad and the success is all shared by the team when things go right. That might seem unfair and more like a bad thing about being an entrepreneur, but I love the sense of accountability you have to have to make it work and I think it challenges me daily to be better.