Today the Lansinoh brand dominates the breastfeeding category with $80M in sales across 80 countries – but it wasn’t always that way. When I met the Founder, Resheda Hagan, Lansinoh was a one-product brand. Literally, her first product batches were mixed up in her bathtub. But Resheda had a vision and a passion that she would build a world-class brand sold in Walmart - one day soon.

Our challenge was simply to figure out how to make that happen. Walmart does not make small brands large; they make big brands even bigger, so starting out with the challenge to get a Walmart buyer ‘s interest was difficult to say the least.

Buyers buy from established brands, and Walmart has a policy that they alone cannot be more than 40% of your business, which is almost impossible with the growth and distribution power of Walmart. Walmart buyers are like any other, the more they buy from the big proven brands, the less paperwork they have to fill out and manage. Jumping through the hoops to get a new brand up and on the system is simply extra work that no one has time for.

So our challenge was this, why would a buyer who purchases tens of millions of dollars from competitive firms talk to a little one-product firm like Lansinoh when they can create a similar product in their own factories in China?

The solution that built the Lansinoh brand was out-of-the-box and a non-traditional pitch. We capitalized on a newspaper article of a Floridian woman who was removed from a Walmart store for breastfeeding her newborn in public. So after hitting a wall with the product buyers, we took this article in hand and went directly to the HR department, requesting an emergency meeting to discuss the ramifications of an anti-breastfeeding story that took place inside a Walmart – before the story went viral.

The phone rang back immediately and we got our meeting. We shared the article that HR was familiar with, and lamented the irony of America’s family store not supporting the basic bonding of a mother and her child. We then countered with a proposition to resolve the entire issue. We could together build the world’s first breastfeeding category in Walmart to counteract this story.

We shared our research that showed Lansinoh as the leading recognized brand in the yet to be breastfeeding category, and by the time we left, we were given 6 feet of shelf space and asked to brand 40 non-branded related breastfeeding products that were made in China under the Lansinoh name.

In one meeting, the Lansinoh brand was born and we had a line of 40 products under our brand. Never would this have happened if we had approached the buyers in the traditional manner. Sometimes it pays to draw outside the lines.

Without this non-traditional approach, this category leader would never have existed.