How Top Brands Use Brij to Win in Costco

Turn Every Costco Member Into a Known Customer

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Getting into Costco is a milestone. Costco carries a tight, curated assortment, so every item on the floor has earned its pallet. It also sets up a strange problem: Costco probably knows your buyers better than any retailer in America, and you know almost nothing about them.

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Every Costco sale is tied to a member ID. Costco uses that purchase history to power personalized recommendations and a growing retail media business. What comes back to the brand is a purchase order.

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The Reality of Selling in Costco

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Costco is huge, and still growing. The company did $69.15 billion in net sales in Q3 of fiscal 2026, up 11.6% year over year, with digitally enabled comparable sales up 21.5% [1]. Its members are extremely loyal: 82.9 million paid households, 149 million cardholders, and a 92.2% renewal rate in the U.S. and Canada [2].

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For brands, three things make Costco different:

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• Items rotate. Many products run as limited-time or regional buys, and whether you get the next buy depends on how fast this one sells through. You don't get much time to prove velocity.
• Buyers buy in bulk. A Costco shopper walks out with an XL jar or a multi-pack, so the next purchase might be months away. If you can't reach that buyer before then, someone else will.
• The customer data exists, but you can't get it. Costco is building its retail media offering on member purchase behavior, including AI-powered on-site ads trained on real purchase data [3]. That's valuable if you're buying media inside Costco. It doesn't help your Meta account, your Klaviyo list, or your next product launch.

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The Data Blind Spot 

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Most omnichannel brands can't act on about 80% of their buyer data, because those sales happen at retailers and marketplaces. Their ad platforms and CRM learn almost entirely from DTC orders.

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Costco makes this worse in a specific way. A single Costco rollout can move more units in a week than your DTC site moves in a month. None of those buyers show up in Meta, Google, and TikTok as conversions, none land in your welcome flow, and none can seed a lookalike audience. The bigger Costco gets as a share of your business, the less your marketing stack knows about who your customers are.

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How Brands Use Brij to Win in Costco

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Drive Retail Velocity (in Both Directions)

Costco items have a limited window, so the goal is to push sell-through while the product is in the warehouse and capture the buyer at the same time.

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Drive customers into Costco. Brij dynamic links send shoppers from Meta ads, TikTok content, OOH billboards, email, SMS, and influencer drops to "find it at Costco" experiences, such as a digital rebate, a sweepstakes entry, or a warehouse locator. When the item is only in certain regions, you can geotarget those links or change where they point after launch, so you're not paying to drive shoppers to a warehouse that doesn't carry the product.The campaign drives foot traffic; the QR captures the buyer; the next ad finds them faster.

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Capture customers inside Costco. Once they're in the aisle, on-pack QR codes, inserts, or shelf talkers lead to mobile experiences where the shopper trades an email or phone number for something they want: cash back, a sweepstakes entry, warranty registration, loyalty program, recipes, or how-to content.

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For its first-ever Costco launch, Momofuku ran a rebate on Chili Crunch: a $3 rebate or a Buy 2, Get Money Back offer. Shoppers texted a photo of their receipt to get paid back, and Brij captured their phone number and wheskre they bought. Across its Brij program, Momofuku has driven 260,000+ scans, 668,000+ engagements, and $208,000+ in incremental revenue, with a 20% scan-to-registration rate.

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Skullcandy runs this at global scale. In six months, its Brij experiences drove 11,000+ scans a day, a roughly 20% scan-to-registration rate, and 260,000+ previously unidentified customers registered across retail and marketplace channels.

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 "One of our biggest challenges at Skullcandy was not knowing who our retail and marketplace customers were," said Evin Catlett, Global VP, Digital Commerce & Growth. "Brij changed that, transforming our retail footprint into a powerful channel for direct relationships and ecommerce growth globally."

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Keep the Relationship after the Promo Ends

A Costco promo ends, but the jar is still in the buyer's pantry. That's why the most useful thing Momofuku did came after the rebate. When the offer ended, Momofuku switched the same experience to show how to use Chili Crunch. The QR code on the jar kept working, and every scan after the promo still reached the brand.

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This matters more at Costco than at almost any other retailer. A bulk buyer uses your product for weeks or months. If the pack keeps giving them recipes, tips, and reasons to come back, you stay in front of them for that whole stretch and have a real shot at the reorder.

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Send Verified Walmart Purchases Back to Your Ad Platforms

Every verified purchase, whether it comes from a rebate receipt, a product registration, or a sweepstakes entry tied to proof of purchase, can become an offline conversion event sent to Meta, Google, and TikTok through their Conversions APIs.

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With Brij Signal, that creates value in three ways:

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• Attribution (right away): More of your total sales get counted, so reported ROAS goes up immediately.
• Algorithm performance (over time): The same events teach the platforms to optimize on total sales instead of only DTC, so targeting gets sharper as the model learns.
• Audience uplift: Even when a purchase never traces back to an ad, you're giving the platforms confirmed buyers who are new to your audience there. You can retarget them for replenishment and cross-sell, build lookalikes from real buyers instead of site visitors, and exclude existing customers so prospecting spend goes to people who haven't bought yet.

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Skullcandy saw a 32% lift in attributed conversions on Meta, 50% more tracked conversions on Google, and a 40% lift on TikTok after turning on Brij Signal across its retail and marketplace channels. 

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Build One Retention Loop Across Every Channel

Costco is rarely a brand's only retailer. One well-known beauty brand, known for its viral peel-off lip liner, sells across 1,550 Target stores, 1,030 Ulta stores, Costco warehouses, Boots in the UK, and TikTok Shop. The problem was simple: they were selling everywhere but didn't know who their customers were.

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They added QR inserts inside its packaging with a clear offer: unlock a $25 bonus and insider tips. The inserts send shoppers to different experiences depending on where they bought, and every signup goes straight into a Klaviyo welcome flow. The inserts drive 200+ scans a day with a 98% submission rate. An SMS rebate campaign added another 370 scans a day, and now the team leans less on heavy discounting to grow its subscriber list.

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The result is one known-customer database built from every channel, with Costco members sitting next to Target, Ulta, and TikTok Shop buyers.

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The Loop That Ties It Together

The member buys at Costco. They scan the pack to claim a rebate, register a product, enter a sweepstakes, or get recipes. Brij verifies the purchase and sends it to Meta, Google, TikTok, and Klaviyo as a deterministic conversion. The ad platforms optimize on a fuller picture of who buys. Email and SMS bring that buyer back for the next purchase. Every loop gives the platforms more to work with, so the results build over time.

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How to Run This Play in Costco

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1. Plan before the buy lands. Costco packaging is often a custom pack size, so the pack or insert is your best chance to add a QR code without an extra print run. Build it into the Costco pack from the start. Or launch digitally. 
2. Match the offer to the product. Rebates and sweepstakes work for food, beverage, and CPG. Warranty registration fits electronics and durable goods. Tutorials and how-to content fit beauty, cookware, and anything people need help using.
3. Plan what happens after the promo. Decide now what the experience turns into when the rebate ends: recipes, tutorials, a loyalty signup, or a reorder link. The pack should keep working as long as the product is in someone's home.
4. Send every scan everywhere at once. Route verified purchases into Meta, Google, and TikTok and into your CRM at the same time, so the ad side and the retention side both improve together.
5. Bring the data to your Costco buyer. Use scan and redemption data by region to show real sell-through and demand, which helps you make the case for the next buy, more regions, or a return run.

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The Bottom Line

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Costco owns the membership card. You can still own the relationship. The brands that treat a Costco launch as both a distribution win and a chance to capture customers turn one of retail's most loyal audiences into a source of known customers, better ad-platform signal, and repeat revenue.

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If you want to see how this works for a brand selling in Costco, book a demo with Brij.

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Sources

1. Costco Investor Relations (May 28, 2026): Q3 and YTD Operating Results, Fiscal 2026
2. The Motley Fool (May 28, 2026): Costco Q3 2026 Earnings Call Transcript
3. Path to Purchase Institute (March 24, 2026): Costco's Retail Media Network Adds AI On-Site Ads

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