An ingredient brand no one understood. A budget that wouldn't cover one campaign.
Intel's Thunderbolt was invisible. An ingredient brand buried inside laptops and docks that most consumers had never heard of. The budget was small. A traditional campaign would have evaporated in weeks.
So we built a platform instead of running a campaign. Each OEM partner paid for a featured day on the store. The cost center became a revenue engine.
Then we did something Amazon had never done. A multi-brand store, managed by a single operator. Amazon didn't have a playbook for it. We wrote it with them.
Every competitor beverage in Canada. Across an international border. Over the holidays. Every other agency said no.
Coca-Cola needed 3D models of every competitor product in the Canadian market. Planogram software. They gave us weeks, not months. That meant buying nearly 600 products from 164 manufacturers across every major retailer in the country. Juices, dairy, water, energy drinks. Bag milk.
Shipping food products across the US-Canada border is where everyone else quit. The FDA requires a separate filing for each product category. One brand of water might need ten separate sheets because of origin differences.
Our broker took one look at the scale and nearly walked. Then they got cyber-hacked and lost access to everything. An ice storm over the holidays shut down the BC shipping route. Two drivers sat at the border for days without the right paperwork.
We kept adjusting. Every time something broke, we found another way through. Within 36 hours I had a rented truck on the road from Toronto to Long Island. Got the first batch to the client while we worked the rest through.
This was the project I think about most. Not because of the outcome. Because of how many pieces had to fit together for it to work at all.
Fifty million dollars. Raised twenty-five, fifty thousand at a time.
Oil wells. Tech companies. The sector changed every time. The constraint didn't. No institutional money. Every dollar had to come from one conversation with one person.
Not fund managers writing allocations. People putting in money they earned. At that level, every dollar has a face attached to it. You don't get to be wrong.
Hundreds of conversations. Hundreds of closes. The only thing that works at that volume is a system you trust enough to put your name behind every time.
What I'm building.
MMK Retail. A retail operating partner for consumer product brands. We get products on shelf and get the reorder.
25 years of this by hand. Over a thousand programs across 20+ major retailers. Costco, Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Home Depot, Amazon, Lowe's. $1B+ in business impact.
Now we're building the system. Direct manufacturing in China and Vietnam, expanding into Europe. We invest alongside the right brands and bring them to market. The complex problem: turn 25 years of operator instinct into something that works without us in the room.