Methodology

A territory is a state, a metro area, a product category, or an institutional roster — museum shops, botanical gardens, university stores, hotel retail. It is a boundary we can finish, not a region we sample.

Smaller and specific beats large and vague. A single state swept properly returns more usable rows than a region skimmed. If the boundary you want is too broad to finish, we will say so before starting and propose how to cut it.

We work through a territory store by store rather than querying a database. That is slower, and it is the reason the output differs from a list you can buy.

Each candidate business is checked for whether it is:

• Real — an actual retail operation, not a listing artefact.
• Currently trading — recent, live evidence of operation.
• Independent — buying decisions are made locally.
• Plausibly a fit — the brand's price point and product type could sit on that shelf.

Nothing is bought in and nothing is scraped.

This is the whole product, so it is stated as a rule rather than a description.

A contact is recorded only if we find it published. If we cannot verify it, the row says not confidently verified in plain language.

Every contact carries the URL it was found on, so any row can be checked. Open the link, see the name. No row asks you to take our word for it.

Absence of evidence is recorded as unknown, never as a negative finding. If we did not find a buyer, that means we did not find one — not that the store has none. The distinction matters when you decide who to call.

A, B or C, describing brand match only. It answers one question: does your product belong on that shelf?

• Product type — what the store actually stocks.
• Price altitude — whether your price point sits inside their range.
• Buying pattern — wholesale, consignment, direct, or a mix.
• Adjacency — whether the store's existing range sits next to yours.

The grade is deliberately independent of whether we managed to find a contact. A store can be a perfect fit and still have no named buyer yet. Collapsing the two would hide your best prospects behind our research gaps.

A 0–100 score describing how actionable the row is today — how much of the work of approaching that store is already done. Fit says whether to approach; readiness says how easily you can.

Owner-only and named-buyer are alternatives, not additive — a row scores 15 or 10, not 25 — so the maximum remains 100.

Rejections are as considered as inclusions. A shorter sheet you can trust beats a longer one you have to re-check.

National chains

Buying is centralised, not local.

Dollar and discount stores

Price altitude.

Souvenir-only shops

A $3-magnet shop cannot sell a $28 print. This is the most common false positive.

Closed businesses

Nothing left to sell into.

Online-only sellers

No shelf.

Wholesalers and distributors

Not the end retailer.

Stale or broken sites

No live buyer behind them.

• We will never guess a contact.
• We will never pad a list to hit a number.
• We will never resell your territory to a competitor.