How Yummi Karma Is Using Headset Bridge to Eliminate Blind Spots and Rescue Lapsed Accounts

For cannabis brands with lean sales teams, every hour matters. When you're covering an entire state with a handful of reps, the difference between a proactive reorder and a lapsed account often comes down to one thing: knowing what's happening on the shelf before it's too late.

That's the challenge Jennifer Leal and her team at Yummi Karma — a California-based tincture brand known for its wellness-forward product line — were up against when they decided to bring on Headset Bridge.

A Growing Brand with a Visibility Gap

Yummi Karma has built a loyal following across California with a diverse lineup of tinctures — from sleep aids to aphrodisiacs — each with a year-long shelf life and 30 servings per bottle. The brand has learned over time that when seven or more of their SKUs are stocked side by side in a store, something powerful happens. Jennifer calls it the "billboard effect": "When we have 7-plus SKUs in a store and they see them all lined up next to each other, aesthetically pleasing, it just draws more people to our product. Seven to nine SKUs is our sweet spot — that's when sales really take off."

With 125 to 150 active accounts across the state and a field team of just three to five reps, Yummi Karma's sales operation punches well above its weight. The team segments their outreach into three buckets: cold prospects, current accounts (touched at least once a month), and lapsed accounts — those that haven't reordered in 90 days or more.

That last category was a persistent thorn. At any given time, Yummi Karma had 70 to 90 lapsed accounts on their books — retailers that had gone dark. And the team had almost no way of knowing why.

Flying Blind on Inventory

The core problem was deceptively simple: Yummi Karma had virtually no visibility into what was happening at retail. Jennifer puts it bluntly: "Where we are lacking is knowing their inventory and getting ahead of them being out of stock."

Without access to POS data or real-time sell-through information, the team was left cold-calling, emailing, and hoping for a response. "It's just really hard to get ahold of buyers," Jennifer says. "We can cold call, email, everything — we see that they opened the email and still no response."

The team estimated they were spending 7 to 10 hours per week just tracking down accounts and chasing reorders — time that could be spent on relationship-building, education, and new account acquisition.

Making matters worse, Yummi Karma's Director of Operations, Kevin, identified a pattern that was costing them significant revenue: "Partners wait until they're out of stock on all the SKUs most recently ordered. They may sell out of our two top-selling SKUs — which are about 40 percent of our total revenue — within two weeks. But then they wait four to six weeks for slower units to move through."

The result? Instead of the ideal monthly order cadence that aligns with a 30-serving tincture bottle, retailers were ordering every six to ten weeks on average. Top-selling products sat out of stock for weeks while slow movers lingered, and Yummi Karma had no way of flagging the imbalance.

What Bridge Changes

With Headset Bridge, Yummi Karma can now see directly into their products' performance at participating retail locations — turning what was once a black box into an actionable dashboard.

Jennifer immediately saw how Bridge could transform their lapsed account problem: "If we had Bridge, we would know — oh, you ordered several of one SKU when you sold out of our best sellers, but you're still holding on to three that are slow moving. That's why you haven't reordered. We could get ahead of that."

Instead of waiting for a buyer to pick up the phone, Yummi Karma's reps can now identify exactly which stores are running low on their top performers and proactively suggest a targeted reorder. And for stores with slow-moving inventory, the team can intervene early with one of their proven playbooks: staff trainings (which Jennifer says deliver a 60% lift in sales), in-store demos, or promotional support with sample units.

Bridge also opens the door for smarter SKU expansion. If a retailer's sleep tincture is flying off the shelf, Yummi Karma can now see that in real time and suggest complementary sleep products from their lineup — working toward that magic billboard-effect threshold of seven-plus SKUs per store.

Scaling with Confidence

The timing of Bridge couldn't be better. Yummi Karma recently transitioned its distribution to Nabis, gaining access to a network of over 100 brand ambassadors across the state through the Nabis sales platform. Where Jennifer's team previously had three to five voices in the field, they'll soon have a dramatically larger footprint.

But more reps means more data to manage — and Bridge is the connective tissue that will make that expansion work. Jennifer sees the potential clearly: "If this takes off and we do incredibly well — which I'm fingers crossed we will — it's one more selling pitch to the whole Nabis team. If they could do this with all of their brands — oh my gosh."

On the production side, Kevin and the team are already building more sophisticated forecasting models using two-week, six-week, and twelve-week moving sales averages, combined with historical seasonal lifts. Bridge data promises to sharpen those forecasts further, helping Yummi Karma avoid the kind of surprise that recently caught them off guard — a $24,000 order that "was not on the books at all."

From Chasing to Consulting

For Jennifer, Bridge represents a fundamental shift in how her team operates. Instead of spending the better part of two workdays each week tracking down unresponsive buyers, her reps can show up to every conversation with data in hand — recommending the right reorder at the right time, flagging slow movers before they become stale, and helping retailers optimize their Yummi Karma assortment.

It's the difference between being a vendor who calls to ask for an order and being a partner who calls to solve a problem.

"Education is everything," Jennifer says. And with Bridge, her team finally has the visibility to back that philosophy up with action.

Get Started with Bridge

To learn more about how Headset Bridge can help your brand gain visibility into retail performance and reduce lost sales from stockouts, reach out to our team today.