Why We Use Toodu — From a Brand

When we first started working with brokers, we thought the hard part was finding the right ones. And it was — finding a broker with the right retailer relationships, who believed in the product, and who had the bandwidth to actually push it, took time and effort. But once we had them, we assumed the rest would work itself out.

It didn't. Not because our brokers weren't good at their jobs — they were. The problem was everything around the job. The communication gaps. The status updates that came when we asked for them, not when we needed them. The promotional recaps that were a week late. The sense that we were one of many brands on a list, and we had no way of knowing where we stood.

Before Toodu, our broker communication lived in a combination of email threads, WhatsApp groups, and quarterly calls. It worked — until it didn't. The moment something slipped through the cracks (a missed promotional window, a retailer meeting that wasn't followed up on), we were weeks behind before we even knew there was a problem.

More than the mistakes, it was the uncertainty that wore on us. We never really knew what was happening. We didn't know if our broker had followed up with the buyer. We didn't know if the promotional materials had been submitted on time. Asking felt like nagging. Not asking meant flying blind.

The first thing we noticed was that we stopped wondering. When we needed to know the status of a retailer account, we could just look. When we had an update for our broker, we sent it through the platform instead of hoping our email didn't get buried.

The second thing was that our broker became more responsive — not because they changed, but because we were communicating in a way that made it easier for them to stay on top of things. Tasks had owners and deadlines. Conversations were organized by account instead of living in a chronological email thread that nobody wanted to scroll through.

Six months in, our broker relationship felt different. Less transactional. More collaborative. That's not something we expected from a software tool — but it's what we got.

Without hesitation. But more than recommending Toodu specifically, we'd recommend any brand think seriously about the operational layer of their broker relationships. The relationship matters. But the infrastructure around it matters just as much — and for a long time, we weren't paying enough attention to it.