For brands
Grow direct to consumer,
right where they live.
Surplus puts your product inside the buildings where your customers spend their days, in front of a known, high-frequency audience that comes back. Placement, trial, media, and first-party data, in one channel you scale with.
The challenge
Growing a consumer brand has never been harder.
The hard part is no longer making a great product. It is getting it tried, proving it sells, and reading real demand before you spend to scale.
85%
of new consumer products fail within two years
The shelf is not the problem. Trial, velocity, and data you can trust decide whether a launch survives.
$5K to $75K
in slotting fees per SKU
And an authorization is not distribution. Brands routinely pay for a thousand stores and land in barely a hundred.
$71B
moving to retail media and first-party data
Brands are paying for proof of purchase, not just space. An ad you can tie to a sale is worth far more than one you cannot.
Industry benchmarks, directional. Sources: Nielsen, industry slotting data, and retail-media forecasts.
The shift
A store, a media network, and a test market, in one channel.
Surplus places autonomous pods inside the buildings where people already live, learn, heal, and work, so you launch into a captive, high-frequency, known audience instead of hoping to be found on a crowded shelf. Every pod runs on Surplus Core and every shopper is a member, so each sale ties back to a real, repeat person and a specific community. That gives you the one thing traditional retail withholds at launch: trustworthy first-party purchase data, from velocity to repeat rate to basket, building by building.
What you get
Everything a launch needs, in one place.
Real purchase data
Every sale ties to a real, repeat member and a specific building. See velocity, repeat rate, and basket, community by community.
The right communities
Launch into the building types and audiences that fit your product, across homes, campuses, hospitals, and worksites.
The best seat in the pod
Premium, eye-level placement seen by the whole building on every visit, with none of the traditional slotting math.
Media that closes the loop
Reach residents on in-pod screens and in the app, then connect every exposure to the purchase it drove.
Trial that sticks
Put samples and demos in people's hands where they live and work, then watch trial turn into repeat.
Launch moments that land
Members-first drops and limited runs that turn your release into an event people show up for.
The launch plan
A customized launch, in four phases.
We build the plan around your product and your goals, then run it end to end, from choosing the right communities to proving what to scale.
Plan
We choose the building types, verticals, and audiences to launch into, define your target, and set the KPIs that decide scaling: velocity, trial, repeat, basket.
Place
Your product lands in premium, eye-level placement, supported by launch-day sampling and, where it fits, a members-first drop. No slotting math.
Promote
In-pod screens, in-app placements, and membership-targeted offers drive awareness and trial to the exact buildings you chose.
Prove
You get a closed-loop read-out: velocity by pod and vertical, first-time versus repeat buyers, and the lift from sampling and media, so you know what to scale.
Launch where people live.
Placement, trial, media, and first-party data, in one channel. Let's build your launch plan.