Scaling Wholesale the Right Way: How Ripped Jerky is Leveraging Vanik to boost sales by 15% a month

Learn how Vanik has quickly become a key part of Ripped Jerky’s team as their scale their wholesale business to over 3,000 locations.

Ripped Jerky was founded in the summer of 2024 by Duke Delancellotti and Kyle Cooper, who bootstrapped the company from day one. With roots in the action sports community and deep experience in distribution, the team hit the ground running. Duke and Kyle’s strengths are defining and executing a strategy around winning new business and quickly building a network of retailers. 

And that strategy has been no different this time around, as they are currently being sold in over 3,000 retail locations. Duke told us that their goal is to “go everywhere around big box because our competitors are already in big box locations. We are doing really well at golf courses, breweries, independent liquor stores and sports stadiums.” 

What makes Ripped Jerky different is “its all-grass-fed, 100% natural product, with out-of-the-box flavor offerings.” The unique flavors, combined with fun, edgy marketing campaigns on Instagram and TikTok, has resulted in the brand developing a loyal following that spans wholesale, foodservice and direct-to-consumer (DTC). 

The Challenge: Keeping Customers Coming Back

While Ripped Jerky’s sales team has excelled at bringing new accounts onboard, “account retention has been a pain point prior to Vanik,” Duke told us. Since the product has a loyal following, accounts are typically reordering every 3-4 weeks. 

“But once our products hit the shelves, we had just hoped that retailers reordered since we didn’t have a streamlined wholesale process. It’s on the sales reps to manually circle back or in most cases, they were just waiting and hoping that a retailer would email them telling them that they needed to place a reorder, at which point, our rep would manually key in an order into Shopify which takes time away from them hunting new business.” 

Duke further explained that “our strength has been selling into accounts. But once we got the account onboard, keeping up with reorders was a challenge. And since we’re scaling so quickly, we needed something behind the scenes that made sure our customers were checked in on.”

The New Wholesale “Agent,” Vanik

Ripped Jerky turned to Vanik as the “insurance” they needed to keep wholesale retention flowing, while opening up the team's time to continue to hunt accounts.

“Vanik was set-up in less than 45 minutes, and integrates directly into our Shopify store. We started seeing results almost immediately, as orders started generating the first day it was live.”

While some brands think that they need a dedicated Shopify wholesale site or to upgrade to Shopify Plus, Duke doesn’t see the need for that. 

“I don’t see a point in moving to a dedicated wholesale platform or a Shopify Plus site. Vanik lets us keep using our Shopify site while making it ridiculously easy for retailers to place an order and all customer data and orders are kept right within our current Shopify store.”

The Results: Faster Reorders, Higher Revenue

Since implementing Vanik, Ripped Jerky has seen a dramatic shift in how retailers reorder.

“We’re seeing about a 15%  a month increase in revenue in wholesale sales since we started using Vanik”

“Vanik allows us to stay very close to our retailers and keep Ripped Jerky top of mind, which has allowed us to capture reorders that may have otherwise slipped through the cracks. For example, we are now leveraging Vanik to send follow-up reminders to prospective customers that we have sent samples to in an effort to get these retailers to convert - a process that was extremely manual previously.”

Looking Ahead

With Vanik powering Ripped Jerky’s wholesale backbone, the team is able to spend more time focusing on continuing to scale and get larger accounts, like Angel Stadium in Anaheim in California, which they just landed. The team plans to keep implementing Vanik’s new features that help retailers reorder consistently and effortlessly.

For Duke and Kyle, Vanik has become more than just software, it’s the silent partner making sure their explosive growth is sustainable: “Vanik gives us the back-layer of support we need to continue to scale this business as fast as we possibly can.”

If you’re looking to learn more about how Vanik can help you scale your wholesale business, set-up time to chat with the team.