Lemmi, you are bringing up a key question in my mind. We all start grinning from ear to ear when we hear about signing a new distributor and how many accounts they service. The bigger question to me is whether or not they make a valid push to get our product line to those account stores. To me a lot of these larger distributors only look at Kona as another product for them to have in their lineup and its almost like they just wait for the accounts they service to come to them and say "I want that product, do you stock it?". Look at the AB Distributors that we are signed with. We have been with them for months and I would be surprised if our product is in 20% of the stores they service. I would love to see what the AB reorder rates have been like.
To me, conversely the smaller distributors are much more aggressively marketing our product line and trying to get it into stores by doing things like giving the stores a few cases free to get in the door. They are turning out to be the real current backbone of this company. They are the ones that Kona should be bending over backwards to service and support as, at this point in time we are still small and unknown in the grand picture and these smaller distributors are the ones that are working at getting us the brand recognition we need.
Down the road, when we have the brand recognition, some of those large distributors will certainly prove helpful to us with getting the product to the stores but I just don't see them as making the effort that we would like to see right now.
Just my 2 cents worth
