I recently launched a new business with 2 other Veteran friends. We sell professional accessories (and eventually apparel) for the professional military community and their supporters to wear in professional settings. We identified a need for our products when we realized the current Veteran brands, while great in their own right, didn’t serve Veterans like us who transitioned into professional careers. We wanted to display our pride of service but a graphic t-shirt with military humor was probably not very conducive to a professional work environment.
The inspiration for our company, Assault Forward, is the reverse American flag we wore on our uniforms when we deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.
As of now, we’re strictly e-Commerce and utilizing social media for individual consumers. A part of our strategy is to partner with Veteran friendly organizations who would purchase our accessories for their Veteran employees and constituents. Any ideas on paths forward or tactics to form partnerships? Thank you in advance!
Answers
You want to get to the consumer ultimately so search for retailers selling something similar, and reach out to them. Call them. Real simple.
Start off with a smaller retailer in a few stores so you can work out any bugs.
Then work on your capability to fill larger orders. Do you know how you would do that? Can you reduce you cost per item if you get bigger?
This doesn't mean you can't also reach out to veteran organizations too. See which is better.
A lot of big corporations have veteran affinity groups, but I am not sure those would result in the kind of reoccurring group purchases that you would want to make money. You might connect with the employee resource groups at larger companies as a means to raise awareness for your product though.
So maybe your B2B method is to reinforce the existing B2C simply by building awareness with those veteran affinity groups.
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