How a life behind, on and in front of shelves led to the creation of Eileen

“Son of a *****!”

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You’d think receiving a call that you’ve just had your products accepted to 180 Jewel Osco locations would be a moment for celebration, but for me it was another iceberg to navigate as a scaling CPG brand. What could possibly be the reason for that reaction? And, why is it such a common thought for CPG entrepreneurs everywhere…?

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Before we dive into that, I’d like to introduce myself and co-founder, Mike Lorenzen. My name is Jordan Karcher and the story you just heard comes from my days as the founder and CEO of Grounds & Hounds Coffee Co. Before talking more about myself and what led to the creation of Eileen, I’d like to introduce my co-founder whom I met about 12 years ago while we were attending b-school at the University of Notre Dame. Mike's an engineer by trade but made the move from building high-rises in Chicago to building data architecture for industry leading brands. He has led analytics, strategy, and growth functions for companies such as DoorDash, Blink Health, and KAYAK.

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My life has been spent in and around grocery store shelves, and my career has been spent finding ways to create and land products on retail store shelves and in shopper’s carts.

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Growing up, my father ran wine & spirits distributors throughout the east coast. Beverage brands were king in my house, copies of Wine Spectator and Whiskey Advocate peppered just about every room, and trips to the store always included checking the distribution, pricing, and promotion of brands in my dad’s portfolio, as well as his competitors. So naturally, after elbow injuries ended my college baseball career, I packed up from Miami and moved west to Sonoma to kick off my career in the wine industry. Fast forward 5 years to South Bend, Indiana where I combined my understanding of beverage marketing and my interest in creating scalable CPG brands to launch Grounds & Hounds Coffee Co.

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After bootstrapping Grounds & Hounds Coffee Co. from my grad school spare bedroom, growing revenue from $800k to $9.5 million in a 3 ? year stretch. During this time, I experienced every up and down of entrepreneurship, but one specific issue bothered me like no other… fighting the uphill battle of scaling, and managing scale, through the grocery space as an emerging brand.

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From poor inventory management and inaccurate pricing to sloppy display and lost facings, it is nearly impossible to deliver the quality of experience and execution we expect as brand creators who pour our soul into creating great products and companies in the disjointed and outdated retail grocery space. Rather than simply accepting the situation as “it’s just the way it is”, we’ve set out to provide a scalable ecosystem that will allow brands to reconnect with, and regain control of, their products wherever they’re sold.

You may be thinking, “is this an isolated issue?”. Simply analyzing the annual domestic lost sales at the retail level in grocery, over $66 Billion in missed sales occur due to out-of-stock issues. This doesn’t even account for lost sales, lost customers, and frequently lost distribution which rolls downhill to crush emerging brands.

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With Eileen, we are revolutionizing the way brands gather, analyze, and act upon real time store level insights while supporting rapid scale across diverse retail distribution.

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-Jordan K., Founder & CEO