Same Price

Guided Products Proud to be Available at Walmart

We are proud / thrilled / pumped / stoked / giddy that you can now find our ReSleeve CD/DVD case on the shelves of over 3,000 Walmart’s nationwide and online at Walmart.com.

Walmart chose Guided and we chose Walmart. If you are expecting some sort of blog post or announcement rationalizing us making our products available through the largest retailer in the world, providing the greatest access possible – you won’t find it.

In the coming months, there will be even more Guided products on even more retail shelves, giving consumers the choice of American Made Values.

American Made

Here at Guided Products, everything we do is American Made. We are patriots.

Open market systems do not discriminate based on ethics or intentions – that is the role of the consumer. We believe in the consumer more than watchdog groups or regulation.

We are intimate with the unique spirit of industry and entrepreneurship in this country. That spirit still continues to have more vigor and passion here (in the USA) than in any other place in the world.

There was a time when you would walk the isles of retail stores and find the leading products were all made in the USA. However, since then many of those American brands took advantage of arbitrage opportunities and moved production overseas. The result being the majority of consumer products are made overseas, often with disregard for that product’s end of life (the American landfill).

Today, each consumer product category is dominated by a few players, often the same set of players from category to category. Because of the dynamics of supporting sales on a retail shelf (rebates, slotting fees, merchandising, margin waterfalls), the same players have held court for decades, with little innovation.

It’s time for an American Made brand to exist that has American Made Values and spans categories. So a consumer knows, regardless of the product they seek, that it was made here, with the product’s entire lifecycle in mind and available on the same shelf, at the same price.

To quote one of our favorite commercials, “it’s halftime in America“.

We like spreadsheets. We like that choices are made because of them. Internally we use spreadsheets to make our own choices. When anyone is buying a product, be it a Fortune 500 company, family or individual, the budgeting spreadsheet matters.

If you haven’t heard of the ‘green premium’, you’ve seen it in practice. It is a practice by manufacturers and their distribution channels who believe only certain, gullible people are interested in responsible products. It assumes those people either don’t understand spreadsheets, or don’t value them compared to other factors. This approach is limiting, short-sighted nonsense, consistent with the treatment of a fad market. Worse, this practice trains consumers that products aligned with their values cost more. It guarantees failure in the mass market.

We believe American consumers will choose products aligned with their values when all other things are equal, including price.

Trying to gouge and alienate consumers is poor strategy, as is using guilt and fear tactics to sell a product. Every Guided Product undergoes exhaustive market research to ensure it is priced at or below similar-functioning traditional products on the same shelf and delivers comparable margins to the distribution channels.

Good for your pocketbook, good for our country. Getty’ up!!

Same Shelf

Just like us, when an American consumer walks into a store looking for ice cream, they go to the ice cream section. Not to the ‘Made in USA’ ice cream section, nor the ‘green’ ice cream section, nor the “I want to save the whales” ice cream section…they go to the ice cream section, you know, where the ice cream is.

There has been a trend in consumer product merchandising that baffles us. As makers of products, we’ve been pitched this trend first hand. You see it in catalogs, physical retail stores and e-commerce sites. It’s when otherwise fantastic product has the death sentence of being merchandised as ‘green’.

To be clear, this means the product is TAKEN AWAY from its core section (where the ice cream is) and moved to another section meant only for those who want the ‘healthy/organic/green/responsible’ lifestyle products for twice as much money.

In many merchandising plans this treatment ensures most consumers, who go only to the core section of products they need, have no opportunity to purchase that responsible product because it’s not on the shelf with the traditional items.

Our distribution partners agree to put Guided Products on the same shelves as their traditional counterparts. We do not want special treatment, we want the same chance everyone else gets.

Same price, same shelf, same function, American Made. It’s on.