If you work in wholesale right now, you don’t need another think piece to tell you it’s “challenging out there.” You live it every day.
You’re watching tariffs, freight costs, and geopolitical decisions change your landed cost mid-season. You’re trying to manage MAP and promotions across retailers, marketplaces, and your own DTC site. You’re fighting to protect margin while still being a good partner to your retailers. And somewhere in the middle of all this, you’re supposed to keep your systems clean, your data accurate, and your B2B platform easy to use.
That’s a lot.
As we wrap up 2025 and look ahead to 2026, I’ve been thinking about what I’m hearing from brands and retailers in the trenches. Recently, I spent time at the Grassroots Outdoor Alliance trade show in Kansas City. It’s a buyer-focused show where retailers place a large portion of their seasonal buys in a short amount of time.
After dozens of conversations, one theme was crystal clear:
Retailers want proactive, transparent, real-time partnership from their brands.
They don’t expect perfection. They do expect respect, communication, and tools that make their jobs easier.
So, in this blog I want to do two things with that in mind:
Here is what I hear when I sit across the table from retailers and brands who are trying to make next season work.
Let’s start with the obvious one: volatility.
Tariffs, shifting trade policies, port congestion, regional disruptions, they all roll downhill into your wholesale business. Suddenly your costs are up, lead times are longer, and the neat demand plan you built last spring doesn’t match reality anymore.
For brands, this isn’t just an operational headache. It’s a relationship risk.
If a retailer places a big prebook, builds their floor set around your brand, and then finds out weeks before the season that you can’t deliver? That’s more than a hiccup; that’s a breach of trust.
They want early, honest communication. If you’re going to be short on a key style or category, they want to know as soon as possible so they can pivot the buy, adjust their assortment, or shift marketing.
The implication is simple:
Wholesale partners expect predictable supply, cost-control where possible, and flexible service – and when that’s not possible, they expect transparency.
That means brands need to build more resilient, tariff-aware supply chains, be willing to accept a higher cost base in some situations, and absolutely must improve their forecasting and communication.
The second challenge is the promotion-heavy market and the resulting channel stress.
Everyone is fighting for the same consumer who has less to spend and more options than ever. That means more discounting, more promotions, and greater pressure on price.
In that environment, some brands treat MAP as a nice-to-have guideline. Others enforce it inconsistently across channels. And that’s where channel conflict shows up:
Retailers feel that. And they remember.
Retailers told me they want respect on MAP and consistency across channels. They’re not asking for miracles. They’re asking not to be undercut by the very brands they’re betting on.
The implication:
Brands must carefully manage channel strategy, stay tightly aligned with wholesale partners on MAP, and ensure the wholesale channel remains a value-driver – not collateral damage.
Next up: systems.
A lot of brands are running a Franken- stack – multiple ERPs, different B2B portals for different brands or regions, custom spreadsheets, plus a few “temporary” tools that somehow became permanent.
From the inside, it may feel like “just how we do things.” From the retailer’s perspective, it’s friction:
Retailers want something simpler:
“Let me log into your B2B and see exactly what I can buy, when I can get it, and what’s happening with my orders in real time.”
When a retailer’s experience inside your B2B is real-time, they are far more likely to self-serve, place more accurate buys, and rely on your platform as the source of truth.
The implication:
Brands that service wholesale channels must invest in digital infrastructure and data flows that support real-time, accurate, streamlined ordering and fulfillment.
If you’re feeling margin pressure, you’re not alone. So is every retailer you sell to.
Costs are up. Consumers are cautious. Discounting is aggressive. And the temptation is to negotiate hard, protect your own profitability, and hope your partners figure out theirs.
But that’s not how you build durable wholesale relationships.
Retailers are telling us:
Simply pushing more products at more aggressive pricing doesn’t work in this environment. It just pushes the problem downstream.
The implication:
Brands must identify cost drivers, find efficiencies, and – most importantly – differentiate on value, not just price, while understanding the retailer’s margin equation.
For larger global brands, there’s another layer: globalization.
Different regions, different assortments, different currencies, different warehouses, different service expectations. In many organizations, the result is:
That’s hard enough for your internal teams. For retailers, it’s even worse: they just want one simple place to work with your brand.
The implication:
Brands need regional fulfillment strategies, localized SKUs and inventory, and a global view of wholesale performance – ideally all supported by a centralized B2B platform.
The good news: every one of these challenges has a matching opportunity.
If 2025 was about surviving, 2026 can be about designing a better wholesale business.
Let’s walk through five specific opportunities.
We can’t control tariffs or global disruptions. But we can control how predictable we are to our retailers.
In 2026, there’s a huge opportunity to become the “predictable brand” in your category, not because you never have issues, but because you’re the best at communicating.
That means:
It also requires a mindset shift: Brands need to think like a retailer after the PO.
Once that order is placed, your retailer now owns the risk on that inventory. They’ve built marketing around it. They’ve allocated open-to-buy. They may have passed on other brands to buy yours.
If you can’t fulfill, they need to know early. If you can fulfill more of something that’s working, they need to know that too.
In 2026, the brands that communicate clearly and early, will win long-term shelf space and loyalty.
Instead of playing whack-a-mole with discounting and channel conflict, 2026 is the moment to build Channel Excellence Programs that align brand and retailer behavior.
This looks like:
Retailers don’t want to be undercut. They want brands who respect the role of specialty and independent retailers, and who don’t treat the wholesale channel as an afterthought to DTC.
A strong MAP and channel program isn’t about control. It’s about partnership and clarity so that everyone who has invested into the season has the opportunity to win.
The outcome?
Better channel cohesion, fewer conflicts, stronger margin protection, and more predictable sell-through for everyone.
Your B2B platform can either be:
Or it can be:
In 2026, the opportunity is to turn your B2B into a more connected and realtime destination for wholesale.
That means:
Here’s where the conversation gets really exciting:
Retailers are increasingly willing to share their POS sell-through data back to brands in real time.
Why? Because when you, as a brand, can see what’s selling:
This two-way data flow – POS data from the retailer into your B2B, and actionable insights back to the retailer will become a real competitive advantage in 2026.
The outcome of this transformation:
Retailers self-serve more, your team fields fewer “where’s my order?” calls, and your B2B becomes a direct contributor to channel growth.
Margin pressure isn’t going away in 2026. But how we respond to it can change.
Instead of reactive price cuts and one-off negotiations, there’s a big opportunity to move toward partnership-driven margin management.
Think about:
This is where storytelling matters too. Some SKUs deserve a premium: they’re more technical, more sustainable, more iconic. Others are volume drivers. Help your retailers understand which is which and give them the support and tools to protect margin accordingly. Additionally, retailers and brands should begin to leverage AI tools to more easily pull performance insights together during the prebook buying process.
When retailers see that you care about their profitability, not just your top line, the relationship changes:
And profit partners tend to get more open-to-buy, more floor space, and more long-term loyalty.
For global brands, 2026 is a prime moment to rethink how you operate across markets.
The old model – separate systems, separate processes, is cracking under its own weight. It’s painful for internal teams, and confusing for buyers.
The opportunity is to become “globally local”:
This matters because your wholesale strategy isn’t just seasonal; it’s global and multi-year. If your leadership can see what’s happening across regions with clarity, they can make better decisions about production, product strategy, and where to lean in or pull back.
After all the tech, all the tariffs, all the dashboards and programs, I want to bring this back to a few simple truths that came up again and again in conversations with retailers this year:
2025 pushed a lot of brands to the edge of their comfort zone in wholesale. Volatile supply chains, promo-heavy markets, system complexity, margin pressure, and global chaos all collided at once.
If you’re a brand leader reading this, my encouragement is simple:
Talk more openly with your retailers. Reduce friction in your B2B. Get serious about real-time data. And keep reminding yourself: at the end of the day, wholesale is a partnership business.
The brands that lean into that truth with better communication, better tools, and genuine respect will be the ones winning the next season, and the one after that.