Published: 04/28/2026
Last updated: 04/28/2026
There’s a fairytale version of building a product brand that looks like this: you design the product, find a manufacturer, ship it to a retailer, and the retailer sells it to customers. Job done.
The reality, as Aimee Connolly of Sculpted by Aimee knows well, is quite different. You can build a €40M revenue business, place it in Boots, Selfridges and ASOS, open flagship stores in Dublin, Belfast and London – all while finding yourself with limited control over the price on the shelf, no visibility into half your customer base, and a cash position that swings sharply depending on what a retailer decides to pay and when.
That’s not a complaint. It’s just the honest shape of omnichannel retail. And understanding it clearly is one of the most important things a product founder can do before they scale.
Peter Beckman, Treyd's CEO, spoke to Aimee on the Treyd Secrets podcast about what it really means to build a brand across channels you don’t fully own. Here’s what the picture actually looks like.
The retailer sets the price
Sculpted by Aimee has always aimed for a clear pricing position: the accessible end of premium, typically 30–40% more value than a comparable global brand at a lower price point. That’s the strategy. But once the product is on a retailer’s shelf, the strategy meets a hard reality.
“All the store owners have the exclusive right to set whatever price point they want on the shelf.”
In many markets, suppliers aren’t even legally permitted to ask a retailer why they’ve priced a product differently to the recommended retail price. You can communicate your recommended price. What happens next is out of your hands.
That creates a genuine tension. A brand can invest years building a quality positioning – product development, sourcing decisions, marketing – and then see it undermined at the final moment by a pricing call it had no say in. Managing that risk means choosing retail partners carefully, building strong relationships with buyers, and accepting that some degree of price variance is simply the cost of being in wholesale.
Half your customers are invisible
The data problem in omnichannel retail is one of the least discussed and most consequential issues for scaling product brands.
When you sell through your own DTC site, you own everything: the purchase data, the browsing behaviour, the repeat patterns, the first product that brought each customer in. That data is the foundation of every smart inventory, marketing and product decision you make.
When you sell through a retailer, that data belongs to the retailer.
“When you have 50% of your business in retail, you don’t own that data. And that can be a real challenge because you’re essentially missing out on half of your business’s customer patterns. And that’s just the nature of having it split.”
The downstream effect is significant. When Sculpted by Aimee looks at which SKUs drive the best lifetime value, or which first purchase leads to the strongest customer acquisition – the answers only reflect the e-com side of the business.
“It’s all related to e-com because we just don’t have that level of detail from retail.”
This doesn’t make retail the wrong channel. But it does mean that any brand scaling into wholesale is, in effect, making decisions with incomplete information – and needs to account for that honestly in how it plans, forecasts and allocates marketing spend.
Your marketing spend works for everyone – but you only see part of it
The attribution problem in omnichannel is closely related to the data problem, but worth separating out.
When you run a campaign – a social push, an influencer activation, an in-store promo – the lift it creates doesn’t stay neatly inside one channel. Customers discover online and buy in-store. They see a flagship event and order from ASOS later that week. The marketing umbrella feeds everything simultaneously.
“A lot of the time your marketing activities will sit as an umbrella and they will feed retail and they’ll feed digital and they’ll feed flagships, and you don’t really know exactly what’s going to what or in what quantity. And that can be hard when you’re trying to have a very clear return on investment.”
This isn’t unique to Sculpted by Aimee – it’s a structural feature of omnichannel. But it does mean that ROAS and channel-level attribution metrics will always give you a partial picture. A brand that optimizes purely on what it can measure risks underinvesting in the channels where it can’t.
Flagships cost more than the till shows
Physical retail is the most visible example of the brand-vs-control tension. Sculpted by Aimee has flagship stores in some of the most expensive locations in Ireland and the UK. The economics, at first glance, look risky for a bootstrapped brand.
But Aimee’s framework for evaluating flagships goes well beyond what goes through the till.
“Flagships are so much more than what goes through the till. They’re the events, the community destinations, you can do your services, we can have different wellness activities happening at them. They become – you maybe can’t measure it directly – but brand and marketing hubs that show up in these destinations for people on their journey, whether they shop and purchase with you there or they find you at their next stop where they see you in a different retailer.”
In other words, a flagship creates value that flows downstream into every other channel – but that value doesn’t show up cleanly in the flagship’s own P&L. Evaluating it on till revenue alone would be the wrong measure.
That said, she’s clear that this is not a license for loss-making.
“That’s not to be naive – if something was terribly loss-making, I wouldn’t put my head in the sand and go, no, it’s great because it’s doing all these other things.”
Sculpted by Aimee’s flagships are profitable. But the broader point stands: in omnichannel, some of your best investments will be the hardest to attribute – and that requires a different kind of financial discipline than pure DTC.
The cash gap that sits underneath all of it
All of the above – retail partnerships, wholesale terms, long lead times from Korean manufacturers – creates a structural cash flow challenge that sits underneath the brand story.
You pay your supplier upfront, or close to it. The product takes months to arrive. It goes to a retailer on 30, 60, 90, sometimes 120-day payment terms. Meanwhile the business keeps running: staff, marketing, capex, in-store work. The gap between cash out and cash in can be wide, and it widens further as you grow.
“You’ll pay upfront, for example, to get ahead of Q4 – you’ll get the cash in Q4. Q4 and Q1 are generally better in terms of the cash flow cycle and then, you know, it’ll dip and drop. And you just have to be really prepared for that.”
This is the hidden cost of scaling through wholesale that most brand-building narratives skip over. Working capital – the cash needed to bridge the gap between paying suppliers and getting paid by retailers – is not a finance department problem. It’s a strategic constraint that shapes what growth is actually possible.
For bootstrapped businesses like Sculpted by Aimee, that means rigorous cash flow forecasting and a clear-eyed view of which costs can sneak up on you.
“It’s the sneaky expenses – like a capex budget and in-store work – that you maybe take your eye off the ball on because you’re so focused on product and supply chain and freight, and actually it’s those other costs that can really come in and impact the cash flow cycle quite quickly.”
Solutions like selective inventory financing (also known as supplier financing and purchase order financing) exist precisely to help product brands manage this gap – paying suppliers on time without tying up all their working capital, and preserving the flexibility to grow. For brands scaling into new markets or taking on larger wholesale orders, having that kind of working capital support can be the difference between saying yes to an opportunity and having to let it pass.
“You can have the best business in the world, the best will, the best intentions, but if you don’t have the money in the account, it’s not happening.”
What this actually means for product founders
Building a brand is one thing. Controlling how it shows up in the world is another – and the gap between the two is where most of the real operational complexity lives.
The price on the shelf belongs to the retailer. The customer data in Boots belongs to Boots. The marketing halo that your flagship creates is real but largely unmeasurable. The cash to fund all of it has to come from somewhere, and it has to arrive before the revenue does.
None of this makes omnichannel the wrong strategy. Aimee is clear that she has no regrets – and that she’d do it again in every new market. She definitely has the results to show for it. But going in with eyes open about what you control and what you don’t is what separates a brand that scales cleanly from one that grows into problems it didn’t see coming. The devil, as she’d put it, is in the detail.
💜 Found this useful? Share it with a founder navigating their first wholesale partnership.
💜 Want to hear the full conversation? Listen to the Treyd Secrets episode with Aimee Connolly on Spotify.
→ Curious how brands manage the cash gap between paying suppliers and getting paid by retailers? That's exactly what Treyd is built for. Learn more about Treyd's inventory financing.
