A Halloween bowl is an unlikely place to look for a management consultancy. Yet there it is in Encore Associates’ product gallery: orange glaze, a spiderweb, a black cat wearing a witch’s hat. Nearby are matching plates. Somebody had to make the collection look like a family. Somebody also had to find the factory, settle the packaging, and arrange for everything to arrive while Halloween was still ahead of it.
- The work: food and consumer goods advice, sales support, product development, and global sourcing.
- The customer: retailers building private labels and manufacturers trying to reach more shelves.
- The idea to borrow: give the whole journey an owner, from assortment decisions to delivery and sales review.
Encore occupies that crowded space between an attractive idea and something a retailer can actually sell. Its proposition becomes easier to understand when you stop picturing a consultant delivering a presentation and start picturing the person responsible for making the presentation come true.
The second career is the product
Gary Smith formed Encore Associates in 2001. His background was Safeway, where his work included category management, the customer loyalty card, and the premium private label program. The company’s founding premise was unusually literal: executives leave companies, but the knowledge and relationships accumulated during their careers remain useful.
That premise became ExecuForce, Encore’s network of experienced industry specialists available for temporary assignments. The customer gets access to someone who has already encountered the machinery of grocery retail. A manufacturer preparing a buyer presentation, for example, can use help from people familiar with the retailer’s own procedures and priorities.
This puts Encore alongside several kinds of alternative: an internal merchandising team, a sales representative, a sourcing agency, or a specialist consultant. Its claimed distinction is the combination of industry experience and hands-on execution. The practical question for a customer is which missing capability needs filling, and whether the assignment has a clear finish line.
“We roll up our sleeves and help you get the work done.”
Encore Associates, describing its consulting approach
Three hundred products, one family resemblance
Consider a project described by Store Brands in 2018. Crystal Butler, who joined Encore in 2016, took responsibility for a major grocery retailer’s seasonal general merchandise business in mid-2017. Her assignment stretched across more than ten categories. She developed designs for over 300 products and assembled domestic and international suppliers.
The merchandise included dining ware, drinkware, plush toys, tablecloths, kitchen towels, and seasonal accessories. Butler made two trips to Asia to work with factory representatives on design and quality expectations. These were ordinary objects with an unusually large coordination problem behind them.
The interesting unit here is the collection. A retailer does not simply need a nice mug. It needs products that make sense together, at suitable prices, with consistent packaging. Encore’s sourcing offer follows that logic: establish a theme, develop products around it, and carry the same visual language through packaging and merchandising.
For a store brand, that coherence has a commercial purpose. It gives the retailer something specific to offer its shoppers. An exclusive seasonal collection can be recognizably its own, rather than an assortment assembled from whichever unrelated items happen to be available.
The calendar belongs in the design meeting
Encore assigns a lead to seasonal projects and establishes critical-path deadlines. Its published process runs through research, development, sourcing, assortment selection, purchase orders, packaging, testing, inspections, customs clearance, delivery, and sales tracking. The calendar is part of the product.
The cost question therefore reaches beyond a factory’s quotation. Encore’s service description includes tariffs, customs brokers’ fees, inland freight, and consolidation. Packaging choices depend on the customer’s budget. For a prospective buyer, a useful comparison is the full delivered program, with responsibilities assigned, rather than an isolated item price.
This is also where the approach has conditions. A retailer needs enough clarity about its shoppers, price points, and deadlines to make decisions. An appealing theme cannot settle those choices. Nor does introducing a supplier remove the need for quality checks. Encore explicitly includes testing and third-party inspections in its process.
Read the numbers with the work attached
Encore’s consulting page reports 22% year-over-year category sales growth for a large private label manufacturer’s retail program. The described work covered assortment, pricing, promotion, and placement across a national retailer’s 14 geographies. The useful lesson is the breadth of the intervention: the result followed a coordinated commercial plan.
Year-over-year category sales growth, following work on assortment, pricing, promotion, and placement.
A separate company-reported case describes an organic supplier growing annual sales from $25 million to $75 million, with Encore contributing go-to-market planning, retailer meetings, and distribution advice. Those numbers describe the supplier’s sales, not Encore’s revenue. They also do not establish how much of the improvement came from any single contributor.
Outside recognition offers another view. Progressive Grocer’s 2022 profile of sourcing principal Lourdes “Mayosh” Barton credited her team with negotiating more than 1,000 new private label products over twelve months. It reported that retail customers received 99.8% of orders on time and complete. For seasonal merchandise, that operational detail deserves attention alongside the design.
Experience has to travel between people
The business also has an investment connection. A 2012 announcement from the separate private equity firm Encore Consumer Capital described an exclusive partnership with Encore Associates, bringing portfolio companies help with growth strategy, brand development, and distribution. The distinction matters: investment funds raised by Consumer Capital are not funding rounds for this consultancy.
Linda Nordgren became Encore Associates’ president and CEO in 2015. Her obituary records her death in June 2025 after a 44-year grocery career. Her tenure belongs to the company’s history, particularly its emphasis on experienced operators and developing people.
What can another business copy? Begin with the handoffs. Put the buyer presentation beside the packaging decision; put the factory conversation beside the delivery deadline. Ask who owns the space between them. Encore’s most instructive idea is that a career’s worth of experience becomes commercially useful when somebody applies it to those specific, unglamorous connections.