Great products certainly sell in the beverage market, but as one supplier learned, it often takes the sales savvy of distributors to open things up.

“I tried not to do ASI and Sage for years,” says Gabriel Hargett, owner of Oowee Products (asi/75126), an Asheville, NC-based supplier of leather beer accessories. Beginning in 2009 with the company’s flagship product (the leather pint glass sleeve), Hargett was confident he could navigate the promotional industry on his own. “We patented the pint sleeve and we were selling them wholesale, but only about 100-piece orders,” he says. A fortuitous partnership with the Autism Society of North Carolina allowed Oowee to increase production, and soon, Hargett began reconsidering his reluctance to partner with a distributor.

The leather pint glass sleeve from Oowee Products (asi/75126).

“Distributors would want to work with me and I always told them no,” says Hargett, whose company also offers USA-made leather can sleeves, caps with branded leather patches and branded glassware. “It took me a while to realize I had all these people trying to help me be successful and that I should just let them do it.”

Now his relationship with his distributors has brought Oowee a larger range of clients than he might’ve been able to capture on his own. “We sell to Budweiser and we sell to the tiny brewery in the neighborhood and everything in between,” Hargett says. “Same with distilleries; with them, we’ve done a lot more of the larger distilleries than the smaller, and most of that came through our distributors.”

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