Charlie Kilo·Founder·July 2026
Your 30% rep
I get the same first question when I explain wholesale to people in tech, “…So you have a brand with a catalog, a retailer that knows what it wants, and a rep sitting between them writing order down? Why is there a person in the middle there at all?”
It’s a good question, and pattern matches to nearly every offline market in transition. Taxis, travel booking, freight brokerages. In each of these a human in the loop was moving information between two parties who could talk directly, and once software could move it faster the middle collapsed. Wholesale looks like that from the outside.
Risky business
Zoom out and look at the shape of this market. In my last post I said wholesale is characterized by high value, low volume transactions, and that this is why a human in the loop makes sense. The reason for that is risk. With so few orders, there isn’t enough volume to average out mistakes. Each transaction carries huge downside, and the rep is where that gets absorbed.
Before I started Brio I spent time in back offices during preseason, watching how lines actually get bought.
A $2M shop does not bring on a line because the product sheet was compelling. It brings the line on because of the rep. Because the rep showed up in February when the shop was underwater, because the rep took back the units that did not move, because the rep called with a heads up on the allocation before the brand's email went out. That trust took years to build and will take longer to replace. A rep's word is also the reason a retailer will take on a new brand with no sell-through history, and there is just no dataset that substitutes for it.
Software that tries to remove that relationship is focused on the wrong problem
So retail buying is a who-you-know, pay-to-play, relationship powered market. And this is where it gets interesting: you would expect a rep to spend their week doing stuff to grow sales: sitting with buyers, nurturing accounts, opening doors, because that grows cashflow. Nope! They're at a desk in front of Outlook. Salesforce puts sales reps under 30% of their time selling and 70% on data entry and admin. That is the cross-industry number and wholesale is not an outlier on it.
Where did the week go?
If anything, the retail segment is worse than the cross-industry numbers because of how orders arrives. A PDF. A photo of a handwritten sheet. A forwarded spreadsheet with last season's SKUs still in it. A text message that says "same as last year but add 29ers." Somebody has to turn that into a clean order, and that somebody has been the rep.
Here is a Tuesday in preseason. [The rep in this passage is a composite drawn from the rep agencies and shops we sat with, not one person.] He covers around 60 accounts. He wrote or corrected eleven orders that day, ten of them reorders from shops that were going to buy regardless. He opened zero new doors, and the two prospects he meant to visit moved to Thursday, then to the following week, then into the pile of things that happen after preseason.
None of that was wasted. The orders needed to be correct and he made them correct. But an order that is going to be placed anyway moves cash that already exists. New cash comes from opening accounts or growing one that was ordering three categories into one that orders five. This is the part of the job where the least amount of time gets spent, so it's where Brio is starting.
We're getting reps up and out of the office baby!
35,000 feet high
Did you know airplanes are most efficient at cruising altitude? This is because fuel burn per mile drops and the passenger economics line up. Climbing costs big, and time at the gate costs while producing nothing. Sitting in the hangar is the most expensive on a bottom line. Airlines build their whole operation around getting planes to cruise and keeping them there as long as possible.
Top sales teams think the same way.
A rep at cruising altitude is building relationships and opening doors. Order entry is time at the gate. Email is the hangar. So the question for a brand is what percentage of the rep's week is spent at altitude?
That is the number Brio moves.
We take the rekeying, the catalog cleanup, the SKU reconciliation, the status chasing. In the accounts I have watched, the gap between a shop knowing what it wants and that order being confirmed and correct runs about three weeks of back and forth. The data was there on day one. Brio makes it actionable in under 30 seconds.
Data money
When a rep moves from order entry to selling, accounts grow. Prospects get visited and existing shops get exposed to categories they never carried.
More (and deeper) accounts mean more order data, and more order data means the next season's buy is built on intelligence. A more accurate buy creates less product on the floor in June, which means fewer markdowns, better brand image and better cashflow for everyone. It also encourages the retailer to take a larger position next season instead of hedging. Then the rep has a bigger account, and the cycle starts again but sized one level up.
That loop is a forcing function. The brands whose reps spend the week on relationships pull ahead of the brands whose reps spend it in Outlook, and the gap widens every season the data gets better.
So Brio does not replace reps. It puts them back where growth actually comes from: NOT behind the computer.
Supercharge your reps. Give them Brio
If you want to see what we're building, enter your email and I'll personally show you Brio.
Charlie