How Top Brands Use Brij to Win in Walmart

Turn Every Walmart Shopper Into a Known Customer

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Landing in Walmart is one of the biggest wins a consumer brand can get. It's also one of the fastest ways to lose track of your own customers.

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Walmart draws 270 million customer visits a week worldwide and runs 4,606 stores across the U.S. alongside 602 Sam's Club locations [4]. Getting on shelf there is a distribution win few brands ever get to celebrate. But Walmart owns every one of those transactions. The brand gets a wholesale purchase order. It doesn't get the shopper.

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That's the trade every brand makes the day it goes into Walmart: reach for relationship. And it's exactly why the brands scaling fastest inside Walmart right now, like Skullcandy, Quip, Caraway, PackIt, and TUSHY, all run Brij on top of it. Not to replace the wholesale relationship, but to make sure it isn't the only relationship they have with their own customers.

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The Reality of Selling in Walmart

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Walmart isn't just the largest retailer in the country. It's increasingly where premium, DTC-born brands go once they've proven themselves online. Caraway launched cookware in over 500 Walmart stores nationwide and on Walmart.com this July, its largest retail expansion to date after earlier moves into Target and The Container Store [1,2]. 

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Caraway isn't an outlier. Walmart has been actively adding premium and specialty brands, from supplements to pet care to baby gear, to its assortment as it leans harder into e-commerce and marketplace scale [5], and Walmart's online business alone did $60.41 billion in revenue last fiscal year [4]. For a brand that spent years building a DTC audience, Walmart is often the single largest volume channel it will ever add. It's also the channel where a brand knows the least about who's actually buying.

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The Data Blind Spot 

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Every brand's ad platforms and CRM are trained almost entirely on the DTC slice of the business, usually ~20% of total sales. The other ~80%, everything sold through Walmart, Target, Amazon, and every other retailer, is invisible to Meta, Google, TikTok, and Klaviyo. None of that shopping behavior shows up as a conversion, a welcome flow, or a retargeting or lookalike audience built off an actual buyer.

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Walmart doesn't make this problem smaller. A brand that goes from a handful of specialty retailers to 500+ Walmart stores overnight can flip its unknown-to-known ratio in a single quarter, right at the moment its ad platforms most need clean signal to keep the launch's momentum going. Getting the shelf space was the hard part. Wasting the resulting purchase data would be the unforced error.

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How Brands Use Brij to Win in Walmart

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Drive Retail Velocity (in Both Directions)

Velocity is a two-way street, and Brij runs both lanes.

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Drive customers into Walmart. Brij dynamic links route shoppers from Meta ads, TikTok content, OOH billboards, email, SMS, and influencer drops directly to a "find it at Walmart" experience: a digital rebate, a sweepstakes entry, or a store locator pointing to the closest Walmart stocking the SKU. Smart Links let a brand geotarget by region or swap the destination after print, so a billboard near a specific Walmart can route shoppers to that store's own locator page. The campaign drives foot traffic; the QR captures the buyer; the next ad finds them faster.

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Capture customers inside Walmart. Once they're in the aisle, brands print Brij QR codes on-pack or on shelf-talkers, linking to a mobile-first experience for a rebate, sweepstakes entry, warranty registration, loyalty signup, or discount code. Each experience trades something of value for the customer's first-party data, turning an anonymous Walmart trip into a known profile.

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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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Caraway's own registration hub, the same one it's now scaling into 500+ new Walmart stores, gives a preview of what that identity capture looks like when it grows into a new channel. Buyers select where they bought before activating their warranty, and the flow now converts at a 52% average rate, up from 33% in its first month, across 133,000+ total registrations. As Caraway's retail footprint jumps to national Walmart shelf space, that same registration flow is the mechanism standing between "wholesale line item" and "known customer."

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Earn More Shelf Space

Getting into Walmart is the beginning of the relationship with the retailer, not the end of it. Buyers renew shelf space based on sell-through, and sell-through is hard to prove when a brand's own dashboards only show DTC orders.

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PackIt has run this play for three years across Walmart, Target, Dick's Sporting Goods, and Office Depot, turning on-pack QR codes into a continuous customer insights engine. The analytics show distinct buyer profiles by SKU, letting the brand validate which products are driving trial in which channel instead of guessing from retailer sell-through reports alone.

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Send Verified Walmart Purchases Back to Your Ad Platforms

Once a Walmart purchase is verified through a Brij experience, it can be forwarded as a conversion event straight into the Conversions APIs for Meta, Google, and TikTok. More of a brand's total sales get counted immediately, and the same events train those platforms to optimize toward the buyers who actually convert, not just the ones who happen to buy DTC.

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Just a couple of months into using Brij Signal, Skullcandy saw a 32% lift in attributed conversions on Meta, an offline Event Match Quality score of 9.87 out of 10, a 50% increase in tracked conversions on Google, and a 40% lift on TikTok. None of that required Walmart to share a single row of its own point-of-sale data.

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Build the Retention Loop Beyond the Register

A known customer is worth more than one shopping trip. TUSHY sells through both Amazon and Walmart and uses Brij to consolidate its QR infrastructure into product setup guides, warranty registration, and a direct Klaviyo integration, driving a 33% scan-to-email rate across 200,000+ total experience engagements.

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Quip takes the same retail identity and turns it into a subscription pipeline: Brij-sourced emails made up 50% of Quip's new Klaviyo subscribers in 2025, and those flows convert 6.4 times the Klaviyo average. A Walmart shopper who bought one toothbrush becomes a customer a brand can actually market to again.

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The Loop That Ties It Together

A Walmart purchase gets acquired at the register, identified through a Brij experience on the package, sent back to Meta, Google, TikTok, and Klaviyo as deterministic conversion signal, optimized against by those platforms' algorithms, and retained through the email or SMS relationship that follows.  

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Prepare for GS1 Sunrise 2027 

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Brij helps brands selling in Walmart prepare for the new GS1 digital link requirements for Sunrise 2027. 

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Every standard-product supplier has to clear a GS1 checkpoint before Walmart will even set the item up. Walmart requires a GS1 Company Prefix, the source of a brand's GTINs and UPCs, before a product can go into the Walmart item file for stores or Walmart.com [6].

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That requirement is about to mean more than a UPC. GS1's Sunrise 2027 initiative is pushing the entire industry from linear barcodes to 2D, QR-based codes that can carry batch numbers, expiration dates, and a live link, not just a product ID, and retailers are already upgrading point-of-sale systems to read them.  

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Brij is partnered with GS1 to help brands compliantly navigate the shift. And, Brij extends the functionality of the barcode Walmart already requires by enabling verified digital experiences, first-party data capture, and post-purchase engagement tied directly to serialized products and omnichannel systems.

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Read more: GS1 Sunrise 2027: The Barcode to QR Shift.

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How to Run This Play in Walmart

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1. Audit your current Walmart packaging and inserts. Most brands already have unused real estate on a box, tag, or insert card that could carry a QR code without a single reprint cycle. You can also activate digitally. 
2. Pick the mechanism that fits the product. Warranty registration for durable goods and electronics, rebates or sweepstakes for CPG and beverage, product setup guides for anything with an onboarding curve like cookware or oral care.
3. Route every scan into first-party data capture, not just a landing page. Email and phone number should be the minimum outcome of every experience, with product education or an upsell offered on top.
4. Feed verified purchases into Meta, Google, and TikTok, and into your CRM of choice, at the same time. You can build the retention loop and the ad-platform loop simultaneously. 
5. Bring sell-through data back to your Walmart buyer. A brand that can show real velocity, not just shipped units, earns the case for more shelf space and a longer runway at the next planogram reset.

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The Bottom Line

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Walmart will always own the transaction. It doesn't have to own the relationship. The brands treating a Walmart launch as a distribution win and a data-capture opportunity at the same time are the ones turning the country's biggest retailer into their fastest-growing source of known customers, ad platform signal, and repeat revenue.

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

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Sources

1. Retail Dive: Caraway debuts cookware in over 500 Walmart stores (2026)
2. PR Newswire: Caraway Expands Retail Presence with Walmart Launch (2026)
3. Mass Market Retailers: Caraway expands retail presence with nationwide Walmart launch (2026)
4. DemandSage: Walmart Statistics (2026)
5. Simply Wall St: Does Walmart's Expanding Brand Mix Signal a Deeper Shift? (2026)
6. Walmart Supplier Requirements

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