Faster, smarter, wholesale

Craig runs the outerwear buy at Summit Outfitters, a three-store bike and ski retailer in Boise, Idaho. In February, he emails his rep at Flylow Gear a winter reorder for "forty units across six SKUs, mostly the jacket that sold out last year." His rep, Joel, is on the road and reads it on his phone. Two days later he rebuilds it in the brand's Excel order sheet and sends it back for approval. Craig notices the size run is wrong on two SKUs. By the time the corrected sheet lands, one colorway is allocated out and Joel has to call about substitutions. The PO clears on March 23. Craig sent the first email on February 16.

Roughly $1.02 trillion of US wholesale trade works just like this.

Today

In 2025 I spent 10 months working alongside buyers to understand why. The problem is behavior, not technology. Wholesale is characterized by high-value, low-volume transactions, the opposite of D2C, and the relationship still sits at the center of everything. When Craig needs to place a spring order he emails or calls Joel. That's rational. Human oversight on a $50,000 reorder makes sense in a way it never will for a $150 jacket. So the rep stays in the loop, and the buyer wants them there. Orders keep moving by hand because nothing connects the buyer, supplier, and rep on one system, with a strong enough reason to use it.

Not a data problem. The general assumption is that underneath all this is a data problem, but I don't think that's true. The data exists and it's structured. It just sits in a dozen places that can't talk to each other, and most of it got there because someone typed it by hand. The problem is access: the right information is almost never in the right place at the moment it's needed.

Portals move work. Tools like NuOrder, SuiteCommerce, Elastic Suite, and RepSpark ("B2B's") give the order a place to be entered. But entry is still entry. The typing moves from the rep to the buyer, and the order still has to be keyed again into the POS on one end and the ERP on the other. So work is mostly getting pushed elsewhere.

Finance disconnected. Payment terms, invoices, and credit get tracked in a separate system, on a separate timeline, by people who never see the order. There's no great reason financing can't attach to the order the way it does in every other modern digital market. That one deserves its own post, so I'll put a pin in it for now.

What's wrong with B2B's?

Most brands over a certain size deploy a B2B portal for their reps and retailers. A portal is a tool you go to: the buyer logs in, builds an order line by line, and submits it. This does one (big) thing: the brand gets a clean order in its own system with a clear set of instructions on how to fulfill it.

Watch what happens to the typing, though. Craig now builds the order in the portal himself, which used to be Joel's job. Then Joel reviews it anyway, which does save him some time, but he still has to fix things, and every fix is an email back to Craig. The backorder notice comes by email, substitutions get settled in text, and the revised ship date lives in whatever Joel wrote down. The supplier gets a clean order, but the records still live in three places, and each has to be updated by hand every time something changes.

That is the limit of a portal. It sits at one step of the relationship and improves that step while shifting work to other steps. The handoff between those other steps is most of the cost of wholesale trade.

What's changing now

Over the past decade, the B2B portal game has been about making it as easy as possible for reps to build orders by hand. But what if they didn't have to?

The chain I keep coming back to goes like this.

1 2 3

DigitalMake the transaction digital and you get a single source of truth.

ProgrammableOnce there is a single source of truth, the transaction becomes programmable.

AutonomousOnce it is programmable, it can become autonomous.

Today a territory grows by reps × orders entered per rep per day. When ordering is autonomous, or even semi-autonomous, it grows by product × relationship × demand. Joel can enter maybe eight orders on a good Tuesday. He can hold 180 relationships.

Everything we're doing at Brio is about making the second number drive.

The operating system

I often describe Brio as the first operating system for wholesale trade. Ordering is where the record starts, but our aspiration is much bigger. Over time Brio learns your business and becomes a company brain that runs the channel for you.

An operating system is the thing everything else depends on. There are three parts:

Screen

{ "order": 4471 }

API

ERPPOS

Integration

Runtime

Doing the work

Wrote the reorder for Summit Outfitters Fixed 3 SKUs before the catalog shipped Answered what’s moving in the Northeast Learned Summit skips tan every spring Flagged 4 doors below plan, drafted top-offs Held the Shell Jacket run — 12 units left Confirmed 8 orders for the Apr 2 ship window Synced 27 POs to the ERP overnight Wrote the reorder for Summit Outfitters Fixed 3 SKUs before the catalog shipped Answered what’s moving in the Northeast Learned Summit skips tan every spring Flagged 4 doors below plan, drafted top-offs Held the Shell Jacket run — 12 units left Confirmed 8 orders for the Apr 2 ship window Synced 27 POs to the ERP overnight

System of record

System of record. One ledger where the state lives. Everything reads from it and writes back to it.
Interface. How anything gets to that record: a person via a screen, a program through an API, a partner system through an integration. Same record, many doors.
Runtime. Something that executes against that record: applies rules, moves state forward, coordinates between parts.

In computer terms: memory, system calls, scheduler. The runtime is the part that separates an operating system from a portal.

Artificial intelligence

Ask your nearest Craig what he needs for March. "Same jacket as last year, one more size run in medium, drop the tan, and I want it before Easter weekend." That's the whole order. It took twenty seconds to say and three weeks to become a PO.

Notice what Craig didn't do. He didn't browse a catalog or click through a checkout. He described what he wanted to a person, the way B2B buyers have since the 1800s. Back then reps carried sample cases and order books from shop to shop. That became mail, then telegram, then fax, then email, texts, and spreadsheets. The ledger has evolved substantially, but the behavior hasn't changed once. That's what I mean when I say wholesale is offline because of behavior, not technology.

Brio works the way B2B trade has worked for 200 years: conversationally. While consumer ecommerce spent the last twenty years training shoppers to click screens, wholesale kept running on messages, typed or spoken. Brio’s conversational AI can take a sentence like Craig's and turn it into a structured order in seconds: the right SKUs, the right sizes, availability checked – with lower error rate than a human. Past orders, catalog and demand can be analyzed in real time.

What changes is that the buyer doesn't have to learn anything. The behavior that kept wholesale on the phone for two centuries is the same behavior that brings it online. Craig keeps talking, but now the system listens. Joel spends his time on account nurture and booking new business.

Meet Brio

Right now every workflow is another tool, screen, or process. B2B's and CRMs compete by adding more of them, and each one takes more time to run.

Brio makes the workflows invisible.

Last_season_PO.pdf

Ask anything

Brio knows every door, every SKU, and every buyer's history. It writes the order, fixes the catalog before anyone notices, and answers in a sentence what used to take a report. A retailer describes an order and it becomes a PO instantly. A supplier launches a catalog in seconds. A company brain forecasts what's coming next. "What's moving in the Northeast." "Top off my best sellers."

No more tools, screens, or workflows. Say what you need and watch Brio work.

If you want to see what we're building, enter your email and I'll personally show you Brio.

Charlie

P.S. If you're interested in why B2B ordering never came online, this whitepaper explains what has changed underneath the market and why that shift is now unavoidable.
The Bottleneck in B2B Trade ↗