Rupesh Kapadia on How to Successfully Enter the U.S. Market

What does it really take to launch a successful product in the United States?

In this episode of 10 Keys to Thrive in Business and Life, Jim Krigbaum sits down with Rupesh Kapadia, Founder of Lumen Brands, to uncover what international brands need to know before entering one of the world's most competitive markets. From FDA compliance and packaging to Amazon strategy, retail distribution, tariffs, and consumer behavior, Rupesh shares why selling in the U.S. is unlike entering any other country.

Together, they discuss the importance of market research, long-term planning, e-commerce, retail readiness, and building strategic partnerships that reduce risk while accelerating growth. Whether you're launching a food product, consumer brand, or expanding internationally, this episode is filled with practical insights to help you avoid costly mistakes and build a scalable strategy.

Rupesh also explains why success isn't about getting your product onto the shelf. It's about getting customers to take it off the shelf.

Because preparation isn't an expense.

It's your greatest competitive advantage.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

If you're not getting the results you want in your business, your team, or your life, it's rarely a lack of effort. It's a gap in how you think, decide, and lead. So welcome to 10 Keys to Thrive, where practical wisdom meets real-world results. Each episode gives you simple, proven tools to improve your decision, strengthen relationships, and drive better outcomes right away. Drawing on decades of global leadership experience, Jim brings practical insights shaped by real-world challenges and results. Here's your host, Jim Krigman.

SPEAKER_02 0:35

Welcome back to Tim Keys of Thrive in Business and Life. Today we have Rupesh Kapati, who's going to join us. He's the founder of Lumen Brands. It's a brand company that helps market product in the United States. Works closely with Amazon and also brick and mortar retailers. He's got a great perspective on how to get a product introduced in the market. Make sure that all your compliances are in place, that your label and the packaging is appropriate, and then they work with the marketing. I'll turn the floor over to Roop to do an introduction.

SPEAKER_03 1:04

Jim, thanks for having me. Hey everybody, I'm Roop. Excited to be here and to share openly about anything. Started this company about six years ago now with the hopes of helping non-U.S. brands enter the U.S. market. Personally, I'd love to increase the diaspora of food available to Americans. And also we'd love to see entrepreneurs from all over the world succeed and facilitate some free trade with the U.S. We find that culture shared through a love of food is a great solve for curing a lot of ignorance in this world.

SPEAKER_02 1:33

There's a lot of ignorance and people not understanding other cultures and really being able to relate to them. And food is a common thread. People say that music is a common thread, but food's a common thread as well. I learned that years ago when we had somebody who was writing books about the biblical history of wine and how to the wine culture and the food culture really spread together and to brought people together. So even though people may be politically apart, sometimes their cultures are closer than they really think they are. So you mentioned the challenge of bringing food into the U.S. market. And I know we're facing unique challenges now with all the tariffs that are in place. How has that impacted your business both in the short term and kind of in a long-term perspective? And how have you adjusted your business to accommodate that?

SPEAKER_03 2:15

Sure. I think for us the tariffs were challenging because they're asymmetric, right? What they do is disproportionately disadvantage many parts of the world. It removes a level playing field. In that way, you know, it can be really damaging. We had tariffs that were 50% or 100% overnight out of the blue. And that materially some of the largest countries that the US does trade with, which really spiked the prices we all experienced if what we believed is that those tariffs were not going to last forever. Also, getting in the U.S. is not like entering any other global economy. It's not like entering the economy of any other country. We often talk to brands and they tell us that they're in 20, 30, 40 other countries. And I congratulate them for their success. And I tell them, well, you know, selling in the US isn't going to be like number 31, 41, or 61. It's actually closer to selling on Mars. So are you ready to sell on Mars? Because that's really what it takes over here. It's wildly different in every way, shape, and form. The only thing that's common is the actual item of food. Otherwise, there's literally zero overlap in mindset, business practices, requirements for success, compliance, insurance, you name it. Because of that, there are very long development cycles in order to get a product and a brand ready for market here. And so we saw the high tariffs as an opportunity to start talking to brands now with the agreement that, hey, let's get a head start. And if and when these tariffs drop, we'll then be ready to move. And so, you know, we're grateful that that actually ended up being true. I'm definitely wrong a whole lot. And uh it was nice to be right about something once in a while.

SPEAKER_02 3:49

Well, it's good. One of the things we always teach is a lot of times the international companies or companies outside the United States have longer perspective on market development. And it seems like here everybody's, what'd you do for me last month, last quarter, last year? Some of the international companies, maybe it's because they're privately owned in a lot of cases or closely held. So they're able to look at the next quarter or beyond the next quarter and sometimes into the next generation. And I think as you say, get into the United States market is not something you're gonna do overnight. You got to lay a foundation and you've got to have a good partner and kind of mention some of the services that you guys provide to a partner. If I'm a producer in a country that's got a product that I feel has an opportunity in the US market, what is it that you do that's gonna help me enter the market versus me trying to do it myself? And I know a lot of the answer to that myself, but I know you can put it in better words because you've dealt with it differently.

SPEAKER_03 4:38

Sure. Better is debatable, but I'll give it a shot here. What it's like is it's a good idea to understand that in the US market, 90% of the trillion dollar economy, that number gets thrown around an awful lot, maybe something like $1.2 trillion now, the food economy. 90% of that belongs to a couple handfuls of companies. And those are companies that a lot of people are very familiar with, right? Walmart, Kroger, Costco, Target have a very similar set of requirements that have nothing to do with the FDA. FDA is maybe step one, and then there's another 100 steps in order to be compliant and sell to these large companies, and that is called the mainstream. And so mainstream retail is where all of the business lies, and that's even before they'll agree to buy the products, right? Which is a whole other challenge in and of itself. What we do is we work as a partner. We're not a consultant, we're not a service provider, we're a long-term partner. That's how we operate. We struggle together and we succeed together with our partners. And I think it's a bit of a different mindset because in other markets distributors say, Oh, we'll buy this much volume every year, but that's because they get to create the market. That's because customers buy products based on how good the packaging looks and how good the product tastes. In the US, nobody's going to buy a product without proper activation, social media support, marketing support, consumer behavior data. And the reason is because these large corporations don't need to, because there's 12 million unique food products on Amazon. 12 million in the US alone. And that's not even all the products. And a grocery store has room for 5,000 products on the shelf. So who has all the leverage here? And it's intentionally designed that way. So what all the large stores and chains say is if you don't have everything we're asking for, fine, go sell to somebody else. So what happens when the top 10 or 15 companies that own 90% of the market all say the same thing? What does a brand do then?

SPEAKER_02 6:49

Well, it's interesting. You mentioned the number of products uh that a retailer has here in Seattle. We have a lot of Kroger stores. You know, Fred Myers, QFC, Albertsons are all owned by Kroger. And that's really the only place I have to shop unless I go to a Whole Foods or Trader Joe's. And they just came out and announced last week that they're going to cut their number of SKUs. They're going to cut the number of products that they have in their store. You know, Fred Myers will have 50 to 60,000 grocery items along with their hard and soft goods. And they're saying we're going to cut that down and focus on what we have to make the efficiency of our distribution better. So we're distributing fewer products, but those are more consistent. One of the things we talk about, ethnic products like a rose water. My family's probably never bought rose water. We probably never will. And I go to the grocery store and my local QFC and Fred Myers will have it, but they'll have it on the bottom shelf and it'll be a slow mover, but it'll be a high profit margin product form. And that's where what we've said is we'll turn over, I can go on to Amazon and have rose water delivered to my door sometimes within the day. Now, if I want a Lebanese pickle, I'm going to order it on Amazon because my local store is not going to have it. So the retailers are cutting back to make themselves more efficiently. As you say, the concentration of retailers is scary that there's so few companies that control so much of the market. And you take that to the next level, even the food manufacturers, all the brands are owned by seven or eight companies here in the US. Some of these companies own hundreds of brands, if not thousands, that they market and they leverage their own distribution. How do you address those challenges? And how do you compete with a major corporation? And, you know, taking that back too, back to the manufacturer overseas, if they're looking at a Kroger or Walmart or Costco, they've got to have the capacity to meet the demand. And how do you work with that? How do you kind of do their assessment and do you help them scale up to be able to meet that market as it grows?

SPEAKER_03 8:36

Well, Jinlows are partners that we choose to work with. And where we start is in seeing if the product, we look for a couple things. One, we look for an exceptional product, right? It matters, it needs to stand out. It's a crowded market, 12 million products. So if the product itself is not high quality and or it doesn't fit the American palette, we'll let the brand know. And they can take it under advisement and choose to change the product or formula or recipe or not, right? That's up to them. Assuming that we have a product that we think is suitable, then what we need to do is talk about the packaging. And so we commonly redesign packaging based on it's not my opinions you want, it's our consumer data. So we look and see what sizes, formats, where the real consumer demand lies. And we design packaging around it. We've actually won some awards for our packaging redesigned, which really helps because we don't launch a product immediately in a grocery store. That's an impossibility. Most small brands and small brand owners are working on a very small budget relative to what the conglomerates work on. So our goal is to help brands enter with maybe a fraction of the usual budget. Historically, if a brand didn't have seven figures, they had no chance of being on the to spend in the US, they had no chance of making it to a large shelf. And what we found is we can leverage e-commerce technology, we can use that to study consumer behavior, we can learn that to soft launch a product to see what if it's successful, if the flavor works, because it's a lot cheaper for us to iterate product cycles on e-commerce on Amazon than it is for us to go in a store, the product doesn't sell. And not only were there huge fees to get the products in the stores, but there are now huge fees to get the product off the shelves. And then there's a five to seven year wait period before the brand gets another chance. So in that way, every single key account buyer in the US for all of these large grocery chains studies Amazon performance of a product. They know how much it sells, they look and read the product reviews, and we provide them with case studies because they all know that Amazon has about an 80% overlap with their own customer. So they know if the product is selling well, they know if it's well liked, and we can show them the geographic data of it selling in the regions that they are, then they know it's not risky. They know it's a reasonable bet because they can already see that we're going through the effort and work of promoting the brand and the product on Amazon, which is a start. In 2026, promoting on Amazon is not enough. It's insufficient. Without having a social media strategy, without having a creator strategy, a brand also does not have a US strategy. And so we're very clear that we're one piece of the puzzle. We're a very important and necessary piece of the puzzle, but we can't be the only piece of the puzzle. That's the very reason we talk about it being a partnership because it's not reasonable for us to take responsibility for a brand's social media. We don't own the brand, right? The brand owns the brand. It's up for us to provide feedback, data, insights, qualified personnel, recommendations for who they might want to work with or for what's going to be important for them to succeed and grow, right? We can provide them with all kinds of metrics and tools. But this is how we work together to establish a brand in the market. And what we found is that we can do it for you know, 60 or 70% cheaper together than it used to historically cost. So is it nothing? No, not at all. But what it does is it actually opens the door and allows it to be a lot more affordable than it used to be because previously small brands were really pricey.

SPEAKER_02 12:17

A couple of things you hit there are perfect for the charm dance principle. One of the A in charm dance is for appropriate and consistent quality. And you know, one of the things we see is that somebody will produce a product in their country and sell it to a couple of markets and say, but it sells well in Spain or it sells well in Europe or it sells well in Africa or wherever it is, doesn't mean it's gonna sell anything here. Georgian wine is a great example. The Georgians are proud of their wine and they sold it into Russia and it was very popular in Russia. It's not gonna sell here. They had to change their product to the appropriate level, to the appropriate quality, had to be consistent. And it sounds like that's one of the things that you guys really help people understand is that what they have in their market doesn't mean anything. Do they really need to take a look at this market, figure out what's appropriate, and can they produce it consistently? And you help them with the product development and design to make sure that they do have the appropriate quality. Is that correct?

SPEAKER_03 13:07

Yeah, confirmed. There is a I'll do my best not to name any names, but there's a hummus company we work with and still do. And their initial product, while successful in 30 other markets at the time, was not liked at all by the American Consumer Palette. And so we launched it on e-com. We spent two or three years redesigning the product formula. We iterated three times. We also provided data for the packaging redesigned that we supported. And now we're going to be in, oh gosh, now I think we're in at least a thousand, maybe two thousand locations, and we'll be in every Whole Foods nationwide next month.

SPEAKER_02 13:47

That's the patience of it. One of the other things that you touched on, which again is a key part of the charm dance, is the R, which is risk. And you really help share the risk with the customers. You communicate, which is a first letter, you're honest with them, and you have kind of an open table, and here's what we need to accomplish to help you accomplish your goals. And sharing the risk is important and gives them a leg up. There's a lot of people out there that are brokers, and a broker will take thousands of dollars a month to bring the product in and then find out that they can't sell it. And you guys, if you bring it in, you're gonna work hard to make it sell because in your case the partnership is long. In the case of the brokers, if they go the six months that they've got the retainer and they aren't able to move it, they move on. And you've wasted thousands of dollars to try and get them to do it.

SPEAKER_03 14:29

So yeah, yeah, Jim. To your point, we operate as a importer and distributor, and so we are the seller to the retail stores. So we actually buy the products from the brands. I think it's sometimes a little known fact. All these delegations, they set up these trade shows and they come and people like the product and then they go back and they're like, we don't have a single order. What happened? And guess what? In the US, no large store buys from a non-US company. And the reason for that is because in the US we fear liability more than anything else. And it's impossible to hold a non-US company liable in the U.S. courts, effectively impossible, really. There can be a judgment, but it can never be collected. So, what that means is the importer distributor carries all the risk and the carries all the risk of lawsuit. And there needs to be a US importer distributor who not only carries that risk so that a store is comfortable buying, but they also carry the insurance on behalf of a brand. Between liability insurance and recall insurance, we spend about $20,000 to $25,000 US a year for a brand just on insurance. That's every year, right? And I think that's something that also a lot of uh brand owners don't realize is uh don't get here.

SPEAKER_02 15:55

We see it a lot of times where we'll take a delegation to the trade show, and first of all, they haven't got the foundation met. They're not meeting FDA standards, let alone the buyer standards. They don't have right certification and sanitation in place. So they've just wasted money coming to the show because they haven't studied the market. They don't know what they need to do to make it work. They come into the show and then they go home and say, gee, like you say, we didn't get any sales. Well, again, most of the people at the show are not gonna get nobody's is gonna give you a purchase order at the show that they haven't already set up. And you have to be able to distribute to them. A lot of times the people at the show go, okay, I need a pallet. Well, if you don't have a pallet, sit in the United States, that sales call, that lead is gone. So you need a company like Lumen Brands to say, okay, we've got the product in inventory here. We can ship it to you. And so you do direct-to-store shipments or do you do to a lot of distributors? What's kind of the breakdown there?

SPEAKER_03 16:42

It depends on the brand, and it depends on the geographic location, and it depends on the sales team. So we sell direct to some stores, and some retailers like Whole Foods don't accept direct deliveries. They only accept deliveries through a distributor or consolidator. That's the rules, their policy. But somebody like Target, we can deliver right to their DC, or they can come and pick it up, or we can ship out because for launch, sometimes Target will want us to distribute one or two cases to each of hundreds of locations.

SPEAKER_02 17:12

And you mentioned the SKUs and the number of SKUs that a retailer has, and they really focus on how frequently they turn that because retailers they don't import, they don't distribute, they have shelf space and they're selling their shelf space and they want to pass the inventory on to somebody else. And it's amazing because people say, I want to talk to Costco, and Costco's not going to handle it directly unless you're doing an Apple or a commodity that they can, you know, market without a brand, or it doesn't matter where it comes from, but they've got it consistently. But if it's a branded product, they're going to rely upon a broker, distributor, and importer not only to take the risk and to cover the insurance, but also to remove it off of their bank sheets and put it into, you know, we just retail, we've got shelf space. I think actually somebody that you know a relationship with Cisco and said, really, Cisco's just a truck. All they are is the delivery. You have to still get out there and sell it. You have to be able to make sure that somebody's carrying your flag. And when you got a distributor like Cisco that has 100,000 SKUs and you're 100,000 and one, your salesman's not going to promote you. They will promote you if it is where they make the most money and they get the most turns and the most reputation and stuff. So that's one of the things we try to teach the exporter is you want your importer, distributor, and retailer to make as much profit as possible. Because that's how they're going to sell more product. They're going to put your product to the best place in the store. Their salespeople are going to promote it. And you're really handling that aspect of doing the promotion. You said you handle everything except for the social media.

SPEAKER_03 18:38

Do you help design it or yeah, those are all excellent points, you know, Jim? I'll talk a little bit more on that first. I think a lot of brands have this idea that the hardest part of the US is getting on the US shelf. And that's probably the second hardest thing. The hardest thing by far, and it's not even close, is getting the product off the shelf and purchased by the customer. And without a, you know, if brands don't have an answer for what they're actively doing and how they plan for that to happen, we also say no thanks because we know it's going to happen. We've seen this happen too many times where people believe in the product and they are unwilling to accept the system. US grocery shelf space is without question the most expensive real estate in the world. It's not even close. Like name any city you want to think of, you know, and it pales in comparison to the price per square inch of US grocery space. It's that expensive, right? And so thinking about it that way, you know, really I think it is a very useful mindset because what am I doing about this incredibly expensive, valuable resource and asset to protect it and keep it? Otherwise, I will be paying for it dearly, right? It's not uncommon to spend $1,000 or whole food standard listing policies, $1,500 per SKU per store. So if one is lucky enough to get three or four SKUs rolled out nationwide without any leverage, that brand is paying a million dollars, right? Just to have it on the shelf without any guarantee of anybody buying it. And they might as well pay another six figures to get it off the shelf when it's time to pull it all down if it didn't sell. All that to say is we are an infrastructure partner and we are a data partner. We are not the marketing partner, we are not the sales partner. So we work with a lot of brokers, we work with a lot of sales teams. We recommend them to brands all the time, but ultimately it's for the brand to build that relationship with them and to show up or be ready to hire a sales team, right? Because that's not what we do, but we stay in our lane. It's because it is a world of work to do the compliance, importation, logistics, coordination, ADI, e-commerce, it's already a tremendous amount of work. And so we like to really stay focused.

SPEAKER_02 20:56

So an importer or a producer has to figure out that they've got to cover that cost with their margins. And so they either have to make it on a big margin or big volume or a combination of the two. And I know you've got a lot of data. If you can talk a little bit about the program that you guys developed that changes your algorithm on Amazon and reviewing their data there and kind of how that proves to be a benefit to the customers, and again, at the same time, and not to complicate the question too much, but also kind of touch upon omnichannel for distribution of groceries and how you've touched on how important it is to people to understand how it's doing on there to use that as a measure. If you can kind of go a little bit deeper into that, that'd be great.

SPEAKER_03 21:34

Sure. Yeah. So uh yeah, co-authored uh Prism, the Data and Insights platform and ad tech platform. I think it's what the kids call AI driven these days, but for us it's generative mathematics. We've had it for about six years now. And what it allows us to do is create uh much more efficient ad spend, specifically in the grocery space. That's what we're designed for as a company, and that's what we focus on. And in addition, we're What it allows us to do is collect a bunch of insights. So it's designed in collaboration with Takemetrics, who is an incredible company. And what allows us to do is also see who's performing, what USPs are performing for a brand, a competitor in that space. It allows us to see which brands customers are naturally choosing or gravitating towards and who is paying more for their customers. Customer acquisition on Amazon is quite expensive. Grocery brands spent something like, I want to say $25 to $30 billion last year advertising on Amazon. So getting that first customer is a wildly expensive proposition. So it's in a brand's best interest to make sure that when they acquire that customer, that customer stays with them. Otherwise, if a brand is in the business of acquiring a new customer every time for a sale, it's very hard to stay in business. And so Prism helps us actually sift through a ton of market behavior and data. And then it also helps us to prepare a case study. So when we do find success with one of our partners, and it is time to transition from e-commerce to retail in years two or three, or start that process, when we can provide a cohesive narrative, show them the data, provide the prospective buyers or store accounts, provide the brokers with the prospective buyers' case studies, then what we can do is really negotiate. We have some leverage. And leverage is what a brand needs in the U.S. in order to pay less money. That is how things work here. Now a lot of compliance falls under the FDA that didn't for the first 80 years of the FDA. Now is it, you know, in the last couple of years, there's an increasing amount of laundry products, cosmetics products, wellness products, health and beauty products that now also fall under FDA jurisdiction. So we have grown a little bit to cover any brands and products that fall under the FDA compliance umbrella. So we were able to successfully negotiate down 75% by 75%, meaning we negotiated to 25% of the original asking price recently for one of the brands that we are launching in, actually have launched in 600 target locations, and we'll be growing that number soon. So it can go a long way towards leveling the playing field. I think that what we found is our best partners are ones who have tried it on their own because they have the unique experience and frustrations where when we try to explain how the US market works the first time around to a successful company that has no experience here, I recognize I sound like I'm crazy. You know, I recognize that I sound like everything I'm saying doesn't make any sense. So really, we're always happy to share knowledge, information, and the expertise. There's no secrets here. If you want to know something, come find me, ask me questions, I'll be happy to answer them. Or probably more accurately, somebody very smart and qualified at this company will answer them. You know, but what that means is finding out and being able to demonstrate success with the US consumer is step one, right? Without that, a brand has no leverage. What they become is one out of 12 million. And so a brand really needs to take that step out from being one out of 12 million to having some sort of measurable, demonstrable success with the US consumer before we can even build out a roadmap and knowing who is buying the products, knowing where they're buying the products.

SPEAKER_02 25:18

And those are the first two factors of the charm dance principle, and obviously in your business communication and honesty to help the customer understand the market. And I've been in the same boat you've had trying to explain to people how the US system works. And even people in the US, you know, the people that we deal with that are oftentimes controlling the purse strings really don't have a clue as to how the distribution system works. I had a client in Egypt not too long ago that called me at Christmas Eve and said, we need you to get to Egypt next week because we need to sell cantaloupe to the United States. And I said, Well, is it allowed in from Egypt? They said, We don't know. And it's not. They wanted me to jump on an airplane between Christmas and New Year's to go do that. And they said, you know, we have over a million pounds of cantaloupe that we need to sell. So they taught people how to produce it. Then they go, oh, wait, we need a market. And then they say, well, you know, let's target the U.S. market because it's an attractive market. It's a big market. They got to be able to buy our cantaloupe. But the protocol wasn't in place. It wasn't going to move here. You know, we've seen situations where we sold to Vol Cafe coffee out of Central America. Vol Cafe is a 300-year-old trading company that trades a large percentage of the world's coffee. And the people we were dealing with at USAID said, well, who's Vol Cafe? We don't want to sell to them. We want to sell to Starbucks. It's like, yeah, Starbucks is one of Vol Cafe's top customers. They said, Yeah, but yeah, if we sell to Starbucks, we would get in the Wall Street Journal. And nobody's ever heard of Vol Cafe, but a lot of times it's not a function of the visibility of selling to the Starbucks or the Costco. That's one of the things that I teach people a lot of times is look at food service. You know, you talk about moving product off the shelf and how to make an appeal to individual consumers. Food service allows them to, they're selling to a chef. They're selling to somebody that's going to look at it from two factors, all quality and price per serving. It doesn't really matter what the brand is as long as they know it's going to have consistent and appropriate quality. Do you get involved in food service at all?

SPEAKER_03 27:08

Yeah. Yeah. Those are excellent points, Jim. We're well involved in food service right now. Cisco's a customer of ours, and as is Del Monte. And so I think we're for one of our brands, we probably move 20 times the volume of food service that we do in retail. You know, I think, yeah, I think we're up to maybe three or four containers a month.

SPEAKER_02 27:26

If I'm sitting and looking at the US market, am I going to spend less money going after food service? And the second part of that question is, how much should I plan on spending to get in the U.S.? Obviously it's going to take years. And it's going to take time. It's going to take understanding the market and sake working with you guys. But before I even come and knock on the door, what should I have sitting in my war chest available? And am I better to focus on food service or retail?

SPEAKER_03 27:49

That's a great question, Jim. And for us, that answer depends on the brand and the product line. Certain brands and product lines are, for example, if I were selling, let's say, gourmet baklava, I'd want to go retail. If I'm selling product, yeah, right. That's a fool's errand. The market cap for food service baklava is not quite high. So yeah. But the US palette for baklava's as a consumer is quite growing. It's a very giftable item, and that matters greatly for us as shoppers because we're often willing to spend money on food as a gift that we love. We're willing to spend more indiscriminately than we are on our own selves. And so it's a valuable part of the calculus. To your point, I'd say probably if a brand does not have set aside somewhere between $200 and $250,000, that's at a minimum over the first two to three years, then I'd suggest saving your money and growing in your other markets. And in our case, that's even with us paying the insurance every year and the compliance every year, you know. That's with us contributing the entirety of the e-commerce operations. Because so really, if you're not working with a company who's willing to absorb some of those costs, then you're also responsible for your own inventory. You're also responsible for your own insurance. You're also responsible for your own e-commerce team and operations, which, you know, a good agency in the U.S. often costs, I think conservatively a couple thousand dollars a month, right? So I said, historically, it's been about a million dollars to get into the US market with a good product, including some development cycles, including some redesigns. We try to get that number down to around.

SPEAKER_02 29:25

So that's not something really an SME, maybe a medium-sized enterprise, but small enterprise. It's better to focus on another market than to look at the United States. And one of the things we see is they want to focus on the U.S. when they haven't sold to their neighboring countries or even develop their market within their country. We're an appeal because they look at us and say it's a huge market, good spending and good capital and everything else, but they don't have the uh bandwidth to really get there. And they need to make sure that they understand the market and understand the process before it and have a war chest sitting there ready to invest in it.

SPEAKER_03 29:54

Yeah, agreed. And so in our case, we often sign our partnership agreements years before a brand is ready to come to this market. Because what we like to do is take our time to advise, influence, talk about seemingly unrelated things. For example, when it's time to grow production, what packaging will the US market want? Well, that influences what brand or producer or a co-op or a community is buying for their production line, right? That influences their equipment purchasing decisions and choices because we need to be able to create packaging. Another thing is given logistics and costs and the viability of our suggesting e-commerce as a very cost-effective way to build a brand, what we don't want are things like grape leaves in glass bottles, right? Sometimes production or sometimes flavor development, it doesn't take weeks or months. It takes years to work out. And so we really want to get a head start. So even if somebody has ambitions and isn't ready now, that's okay because we can get intentional from today. I think we're lucky enough. And our board of directors tells me all the time whether anyone's dumb enough to operate this way, but we really believe in long-term sustainable partnerships. And however long-term it needs to be, it takes what it takes, right? So, but with some advisement intentionality, what we find is when the time comes, the brand is well prepared. They've really gotten a head start, and that can make all the difference. And the more prepared a brand is in the US, the more money they save.

SPEAKER_02 31:25

I know you've got a number of success case studies available on the internet. And separate from this recording, I'll slice them into this recording and show them the website and kind of show them what's there. But for those that don't have the studies and better understand what they're looking at before they contact you to make sure they're on the same page before they give you a holler.

SPEAKER_03 31:44

Sure. Yeah. Our website is lemonbrands.co and can reach out to us there. There's a form and my email address is my first name Rupesh at Lemonbrands.co. Happy to hear from you. Or you can reach out from the website. It'll get to me or get to somebody who knows what they're talking about.

SPEAKER_02 31:59

So I appreciate your time. If there's anything else you'd like to cover, you can use a little pitch time here. I think anybody listening to this is gonna go, okay, I'm interested in the U.S. market. I don't want to do it on my own, so let's give Roop a call and figure out how we can work together because it's not something you can do easy, but it does hit, as we say, it hits on all the charm dance principles. You need to understand the market, and it's a key one there. And Roop's team and the databases and history that they've got, they can help you understand what's moving. One of the things we did years ago before the internet, when we were trying to introduce a product into Japan, we jump on an airplane, fly to Japan, go to the grocery store, and if we could take pictures, we'd take pictures. It's a lot of times they didn't let us, but we take note of how things were packaged, what colors were there, what sizes were there, and really how do we adjust to make sure that we have the appropriate quality. That now you can do with the program that you have, and people can do sitting at home looking at the internet.

SPEAKER_03 32:51

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. The internet's been a wildly useful tool in a variety of ways. And uh I'm gonna do a horrible job of pitching in this moment because I think really I don't think we have a monopoly on success in the U.S. market, and I don't pretend that we do. I think knowledge is empowering, and uh, you know, we're just happy to see people succeed one way or another. And what I think we have is we've got a bunch of experience and some practice and some success now after banging our head against the wall for a while. So come learn from our mistakes, and if it makes sense, then we can explore working together. And if not, we'll be happy to share some knowledge and yeah, hopefully we'll you know be buying your products.

SPEAKER_02 33:27

So I've never been a customer of Roops, but he has been willing in multiple occasions to share information and to to give presentations to the delegations we're working with and kind of help them understand because I can teach people, but Roop's been there, done that, hit his head against the wall as well. And part of the whole concept of this podcast is help people learn from the mistakes that the people like Roop and I have made. They don't have time to make all the mistakes, and it doesn't make sense to duplicate them. Learn from what we've got, from the experience we've had, and Roop's kind of one of our been there done that, understands what's successful and what isn't. And we're still learning. I'm sure he can tell you stories about things he did six months ago that that don't work today. And the things that work today aren't gonna work six months or some cases six days from now. So it's a matter of adjusting. I know your software program does a number of adjustments every day or every week, uh, and that is critical. So, you know, learning from the mistakes, making the adjustments, choosing the right path. And if you run into a roadblock, go another direction. And Roop can help point you in that direction. So I want to thank you for your time and uh appreciate it and always appreciate the friendship and good luck and continued success.

SPEAKER_03 34:31

Yeah, absolutely. Jim, thank you. It's great to see you. Glad to be here. Congratulations on your new book. Looking forward to getting a copy of it. Take care. Bye.

SPEAKER_01 34:42

So that's it for today's episode of Ten Keys to Thrive. Head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show. Be sure to head on over to tenkeys to thrive.com to pick up a free copy of Jim's Gift and join us on the next episode.