Gear.com: Became leading outdoor marketplace with 6,000 new products

Gear.com is the premiere destination for anyone who lives outside. Whether traveling, climbing, biking, or doing water activities, Gear.com has you covered for the outdoor lifestyle. 

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As a brand with over 9,000 SKUs, Gear.com is the go-to destination for outdoor products. But how did they scale to so many SKUs on their store while maintaining a small team?

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The answer is Carro. We recently spoke with Kyle at Gear.com to learn more about Carro has helped them grow on their journey to becoming the go-to destination for outdoor products. 

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“Carro is such a great resource to build your catalog and create awesome partnerships. For us, it’s the one-stop-shop that’s got everything. Being able to interact with brands is super simple.”

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Kyle Green, Business Development, Gear.com

How Carro fueled Gear.com’s expansion into new categories

One of Carro’s defining features is that brands can add products to their Shopify store with one click. When Gear.com started with Carro in 2021, they had roughly 3,000 SKUs on their site. Over the course of a year, Gear.com managed to grow its SKU count to 9,000 through Carro. And their goal is to hit 15,000 SKUs by the end of 2022. 

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Gear.com wants to be the go-to destination for outdoor products. Carro has helped Gear.com with their expansion into new categories. With Carro, Gear.com can easily create new categories on their site and add dozens of products with the click of a button. This has helped Gear.com be one of the first to add new products from new brands to excite their customers.

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Without Carro, Gear.com would have to:

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• Research which brands they want to add to their site
• Find and contact the right person at each brand 
• Buy wholesale products and have them shipped to Gear.com’s warehouses
• Manually set up product listings for each individual product

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The time it would have taken Gear.com to scale up to 9,000 SKUs without Carro would have taken years to complete and would have required them to hire multiple people to get it done.

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But with Carro, the process of finding new suppliers is easy. Thanks to Carro’s directory, it’s easy for Gear.com to find relevant products in the niches they target. They can easily add each product to their product listings will full product descriptions and images already provided. With Carro, they can add dozens or hundreds of products with just a few clicks. No other platform on Shopify can do that for you, but Carro can.

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And thanks to Carro’s virtual inventory system, Gear.com didn’t have to buy any wholesale products. The suppliers handle inventory management and fulfillment so Gear.com can focus more on promoting its products.

How Carro helps Gear.com with brand partnerships 

Gear.com likes to make its brand partners feel valued. When they begin partnering with a brand, they aim to run marketing campaigns to get some initial sales and build up hype for their products to Gear.com’s massive mailing list. These campaigns include blog posts, email marketing, SMS campaigns, and more to generate sales.

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“When we work with brands on marketing efforts, we ask them if they’re willing to work with us. And almost all of them say yes. Even better, they’re open to giving us margin relief which helps boost our sales while maintaining the margins that are super important to us.”

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Kyle Green, Business Development, Gear.com

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Carro makes it easy for Gear.com to get in touch with other brands. And most brands are onboard with co-marketing to help generate sales. Communication with other brands is super simple for Gear.com and allows them to coordinate easily.

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Communicating with brands through Carro is easy because contact information is readily available, so Gear.com knows who they can contact without having to research who the best point of contact is. Even better, Carro’s auto-approval system allows Gear.com to automatically add products from other brands without getting in touch with a brand rep.

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But for brands Gear.com wants to speak with, a Carro account manager can help introduce the brands to each other to kickstart their relationship.

What’s next for Gear.com

With Carro fueling Gear.com’s SKU count and brand partnerships, they will continue adding to their product catalog with the brands available through Carro. As Gear.com grows and builds out their own product catalog, their products will be added to other stores and increase its brand’s visibility.

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