Consumer Packaged Goods Editing and Proofreading Services

A brand gets twenty minutes with a category buyer to present four products. The buyer is deciding what leaves the shelf to make room, and their questions are about rate of sale, margin, and whether this brings a shopper into the category who is not already there. The presentation is about the brand's story, its founders and its beautiful packaging.

We edit what consumer goods brands produce for the trade — range review and sell-in presentations, category and shopper rationales, new product forms and their supporting arguments, promotional plans and their forecasts, trade terms and joint business plan documents, distributor and export pitch material, and the follow-up sent after a buyer meeting. Our editors work on documents read by somebody deciding what to delist.

The sell-in document is where a listing is won or lost, and its failure is a brand story presented to somebody making a shelf-space decision. A buyer is not choosing what to admire; they are choosing what to remove. We work through these so the proposal states what it displaces and why the category is better for it, since every listing costs another listing and a brand that has not addressed this has left the hardest question to the buyer; so the rate of sale claim is evidenced from comparable stores rather than asserted, because a buyer discounts unevidenced projections automatically and has seen every version of them; so the margin is given in cash per unit and per facing rather than as a percentage, given that a buyer manages space and a higher percentage on a slower line can be worth less; so the shopper argument names who is buying this and whether they are new to the category or switching, as incrementality is the whole question in a mature category; so the promotional plan states what the brand will fund and what it expects the retailer to fund; so supply capability is addressed with actual capacity, since a listing that goes out of stock in week three costs more than it earned; so the packaging and format are justified in terms of shelf efficiency rather than aesthetics; and so the ask is a specific number of facings in a specific store group. Documents written this way get listed.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including trade terms, margins, forecasts and buyer correspondence. We are editors rather than category or trade advisers, and we offer no view on pricing, ranging or any commercial arrangement. What we can do is answer the question the buyer is actually asking.