Eileen Blog

Most retail intelligence platforms tell CPG teams how they performed. Far fewer can tell them why. We compare syndicated data, retailer aggregators, field-team execution apps, and on-demand shopper audits across store-level visibility, distribution verification, shelf execution monitoring, pricing, and promo tracking, with a plain-language guide to choosing the right one for your channel mix and budget.

Hire another rep or see your whole footprint? This side-by-side breaks down crowdsourced retail audits and field merchandising teams on cost, coverage, speed, and proof, runs the math on a 2,000-door brand, and shows the hybrid model most CPG teams land on.

Your portal says you're in stock. The shelf says otherwise. This guide breaks down the five layers of retail product placement verification, a five-step playbook for running it at scale, and the one metric every CPG brand should track before the next reset.

Stockout detection gets all the attention, but it's a fraction of what shelf data actually does. After 90+ brands, eight use cases keep surfacing: diagnosing zero-scan stores, verifying launches, recovering authorization gaps, surviving resets, and more. The common thread: replacing assumptions with photographs.

My father ran Charmer Sunbelt houses. I learned distribution at the kitchen table, managed distributors for William Grant & Sons, then founded Grounds & Hounds and discovered that every data product on the market solved the wrong problem. The moment that became Eileen: me in California, my brand in Pennsylvania, and my dad walking into a Giant Eagle to send me a photo of my own shelf. Everyone in this industry does some version of that. We just put it into software.

A great sales rep covers eight stores a day. At a 400-store footprint, that means each location gets seen once every two months, on a day the store knew someone was coming. This post breaks down the three structural advantages a 35,000-shopper network has over any field team: they're already in the store, nobody knows they're auditing, and they have no stake in what the answer turns out to be.

A pallet worth $20,000 vanished between the distributor's warehouse and the store. The distributor billed for it anyway, the retailer faced over the empty slot, and the brand's inventory system, depletion report, and BI dashboard all agreed that everything was fine. A $1,000 shelf audit found what three expensive systems couldn't. If you're building in bev-alc, the three-tier system means your version of this story has even more places to hide.

A tequila founder doing 4,000 cases and a spritz brand doing $20 million kept telling me the same things. After a year of Know Thy Shelf interviews, five lessons showed up in almost every conversation, from why distributor attention matters more than distributor reach to why the chain authorization is the starting line and not the finish. If you're building in bev-alc, at least one of these will land a little too hard.

Eileen just hit a run of milestones worth sharing: an oversubscribed pre-seed round led by Top Shelf Ventures with strategic participation from DisPact Ventures, 105% revenue growth in Q2, and a shopper network that now tops 35,000 people across all 50 states. The momentum follows a wave of new platform capabilities including gamified mobile capture, proprietary computer vision, real-time competitive benchmarking, and authorization gap detection. Brands are already seeing the payoff.