What is the wholesale channel?
The wholesale channel is everything between 'brand' and 'consumer' except your own DTC store: independent specialty retailers, big-box national chains, department stores, distributors, rep agencies, and the digital-native marketplaces that stock inventory.
For most consumer brands, wholesale is still the majority of revenue. It's also the channel where brand marketing dollars compete the hardest — because a customer walking into a specialty retailer sees your product next to five competitors, and the associate's recommendation is usually the tiebreaker.
The three jobs to win in wholesale
Selling well through the wholesale channel comes down to winning three jobs: (1) get on the shelf (buyer/rep relationships, sell-in), (2) stay visible on the shelf (merchandising, display compliance), and (3) get picked off the shelf (associate training, sales incentives, consumer pull).
Trade marketing owns jobs 2 and 3. That's why sell-through enablement platforms have grown so quickly over the last five years — they operationalize those two jobs at scale.