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Seed your secondary category in a retail channel where that category is the primary shopper intent, then let velocity reshape your revenue mix.
85%
of total net sales from fragrance
20%
of revenue
24 months
The brand did not exit supplements or other wellness…
The Nue Co., a wellness brand known for supplements and functional ingestibles, now derives 85% of total net sales from fragrance, according to Glossy. Two years ago, fragrance represented roughly 20% of revenue. The shift came from distribution through Ulta Beauty, which seeded fragrance velocity that pulled the brand's entire product mix toward a single category.
The Nue Co. concentrated shelf presence at Ulta on fragrance rather than spreading across wellness categories. Ulta customers bought the scent products at rates high enough to flip the company's revenue distribution in 24 months. The brand did not exit supplements or other wellness lines, but fragrance sales through one retail channel outpaced everything else combined.
The mechanism is category seeding through a retail partner whose customer base over-indexes for the seeded category. Ulta's core traffic skews beauty and personal care, not wellness supplements. By placing fragrance—a beauty-adjacent product—in front of Ulta's existing foot traffic, The Nue Co. captured impulse and discovery purchases from shoppers already primed to buy scent. The retail environment did the category education. The brand supplied the SKU.
This works because the retailer's traffic profile determines velocity more than the brand's legacy positioning. The Nue Co. entered as a wellness company, but Ulta shoppers encountered it as a fragrance brand on a beauty shelf. The customer's intent at point of discovery overrode the brand's original category. The result: fragrance moved faster than anything else in the catalog, and revenue followed velocity.
A small physical-product brand can run the same play without a national retail partnership. Identify one channel where your secondary or tertiary product category is the primary shopper intent. If you sell candles and apparel, seed the candles at a home-goods consignment shop or a boutique hotel gift stand. If you sell supplements and skincare, pitch the skincare to a spa retail shelf or a salon back-bar display. The goal is not broad distribution—it is narrow placement where the location's traffic is already shopping your smaller category.
Pitch a 60-day test with three to five SKUs and a consignment or memo deal to eliminate the retailer's inventory risk. Provide shelf signage and a one-page product card the staff can hand to customers. Track weekly sell-through. If one category moves at twice the rate of your core line, expand placement in that category and let it become your lead revenue driver in that channel. You are not pivoting the brand—you are letting the channel's traffic vote on what they want to buy from you.
The Nue Co. did not abandon wellness. They let Ulta's beauty traffic reshape their revenue mix by seeding the category that matched the room. The brand followed the data, and fragrance became the business.
Pitch a 60-day consignment test with three SKUs in one category to a boutique or specialty shop where that category is their core traffic.
For the operator
Run a pilot with a regional chain in one product category that matches their traffic profile, then expand SKU count in that category based on velocity data.
For the house
Evaluate supplier product lines for secondary categories that match your customer's primary shopping intent, then test those SKUs before broader assortment buys.
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