How to Sell to GNC Stores & Become a GNC Vendor

Learn how to become a GNC vendor

Hey, everyone. This is Karen Waksman, founder of Retail MBA and today I want to talk about a retailer that comes up all of the time in my workshops and classes. People are always asking me about GNC. Now, GNC is a mass retailer that sells health products and so forth, supplements. 

Why you should sell to GNC stores

They have over 7,000 stores that they’re responsible for currently. They’re doing phenomenally well, so I completely understand why you would want to sell your product to GNC, if you have a supplement or a health product and so forth. The tricky part to GNC, and that’s what this training is all about just to give you some tips and suggestions about selling to them, is that because they have 7,000 stores, tremendous buying power, everybody wants to sell to GNC, which means everybody’s reaching out to them.

If you have any interest in selling to GNC, come up with a great story

All your competitors are calling them. They’re constantly getting bombarded with people who want to sell to them because they’re the money companies. The issue, though, is that they have very small stores. The format to those stores are fairly small, which means that they tend to have to be really selective in the products that they allow vendors to sell to GNC stores. The problem with that is if you have a new invention or whatever, they’re going to be looking at your numbers, your sales and so forth because they only have a certain amount of space allotted for any physical product. Number one, if you have any interest in selling to GNC, come up with a great story, either you’re selling this product really well somewhere or it, new interesting innovative, the next level of something that’s going on in the health industry.

If you become a GNC vendor it is a tremendous opportunity for your business

Whatever it is, you definitely want to consider that. Now, I sell and I work with a lot of Amazon sellers and a lot of them are doing phenomenally well right now with supplements, and so I get calls all the time from you guys who sell a really common supplement and you will now want to sell to GNC because you’re making millions of dollars online and now you want to sell it there. The problem with that is that online doesn’t necessarily convert to retail, especially in this type of industry. Because if they’re already well the supplement, why would they need your product? If you are successful online and you are successful with an Amazon supplement or whatever, the recommendation is to go to their stores and see what’s missing from their assortment and then approach them with a product that they aren’t currently selling anymore.

What you can sell to GNC Stores

That is more interesting to a buyer than you giving them a product that they’re already selling. It’s really hard to do that in those small format stores. That’s a quick tip and suggestion to become a GNC vendor. Honestly, go there, see there whether or not that there’s one product that you have that would fit in there, that they’re not selling anywhere else. That’s a really nice angle for people to get their products into those stores. Anyways, I hope that helped. If you want to know actually what to say to these buyers to get them to buy how find the buyer’s contact information and so forth, definitely want to learn a little bit more before you approach them, there’s some cool finessing you have to do in order to reach out to buyers and so forth.