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How Top Brands Are Using Brij to Win in Target
- Getting onto Target shelves is the easy part. Staying there, and proving you deserve more facings, more endcaps, and a bigger order, is where most brands stall.
- Target gives brands a massive distribution footprint, but no visibility into who is buying or how to bring them back. Every transaction at the register is anonymous.
- Brands are using Brij's AI-powered omnichannel marketing platform to turn anonymous Target shoppers into known customers, then activate that identity on both sides of the LTV:CAC equation.
- The play is repeatable: on-pack QR, rebates or sweepstakes at shelf, plus dynamic links from social, email, and OOH that drive customers into Target to lift in-store velocity.
- Brij extends brand communication off-package with video, founder stories, education, and recipes, all updateable without a new print run.
Landing in Target is one of the biggest moments in a brand's life. Bobbie rolled out across all 1,900 Target stores nationwide earlier this year with its 100% organic whole milk formula. Plant People hit the #1 spot in the mushroom supplement category across 820 Targets after its October rollout. These are career-defining wins.
But here's what no one tells you in the press release: the moment your product hits a Target shelf, you lose the customer.
A customer buys your product, but now you don't get their email. You don't get their phone number. You don't know if they're a first-time buyer or a brand-loyalist who used to subscribe on your DTC site. You don't know whether the digital ad you ran in their zip code is what drove them in. And when Target's buying team asks for a sell-through review in 90 days, you have a single data point to work with — the POS number Target shares back.
For most brands selling in Target, this is the trillion-dollar disconnect. Customer acquisition costs are up 222% over the past eight years, and yet the largest retail channel most omnichannel brands have is also the darkest one.
This is exactly the problem Brij was built to solve.
The Reality of Selling in Target
Target rewards brands that move product fast and behave well. Both are harder than they look.
On the velocity side, you're competing with private labels (Up&Up, Good & Gather, Auden) that have a built-in cost advantage, plus established CPG giants who have decades of trade-spend muscle. Target's planogram team watches sell-through by the week. If your SKU is sitting, your facings shrink. If your facings shrink, your next PO does too.
On the compliance side, Target's Perfect Order Program, launched in May 2025, added strict fines for ASN accuracy, barcode quality, and on-time-in-full delivery. Miss a window, mislabel a pallet, ship an unreadable barcode, and you're paying Target instead of the other way around.
Then there's the harder, less-visible problem: the people walking out of Target with your product in their cart are invisible to your marketing team. This breaks the math on both sides of your business.
On the acquisition side, roughly 80% of an omnichannel brand's customers shop in-store, but Meta, Google, and TikTok only see the ~20% who buy on your DTC site. Your paid algorithms are being optimized against a quarter of your real demand, which keeps CAC high and ROAS soft.
On the retention side, those Target buyers never enter your CRM. Your Klaviyo and Attentive flows are firing for a sliver of your actual customer base. The personalized win-back, the upsell, the "switch to subscription" offer: none of it can run on a shopper you can't identify. Your LTV math stops at the threshold of the Target sliding doors.
The brands using Brij in Target are closing both loops at once: pushing verified retail purchases signals into ad platforms to drive CAC down, and pushing the same identities into CRMs and lifecycle tools to drive LTV up.
How Brij Closes the Gap in Target
Brij is the retail identity infrastructure brands use to turn anonymous Target shoppers into known customers, drive in-store velocity, and feed verified retail purchase signals into ad platforms and CRMs. Here's what that looks like in practice.
Drive Retail Velocity (in both directions)
Velocity is a two-way street, and Brij runs both lanes.
Drive customers into Target. Brij dynamic links route shoppers from Meta ads, TikTok content, OOH billboards, email, SMS, and influencer drops directly to a "find it at Target" experience: a digital rebate, a sweepstakes entry, or a store locator with the closest Target stocking the SKU. Smart Links let you geotarget by region or swap the destination after print, so a billboard placed near a Target store can route shoppers to that specific store's location. The campaign drives foot traffic; the QR captures the buyer; the next ad finds them faster.
Capture customers inside Target. Once they're in the aisle, brands print Brij QR codes on-pack or on shelf-talkers, linking to a mobile-first experience about a rebate, sweepstakes entry, warranty registration, loyalty program signup, discount code, etc. Each of these experiences provides something in exchange for the customers' first-party data, making them known.
Chamberlain Coffee used the on-shelf and digital promotion to drive 750+ in-store transactions and 9,000+ sweepstakes entries through its nationwide retail campaign. These lifts show up in Target's POS report the same week.
Turn the Anonymous Target Shopper into a Known Customer
Every Brij experience captures first-party data (email, phone, zip, purchase details) and pushes it directly into the brand's Klaviyo, Attentive, or Shopify CRM. Brij customers convert offline scans into known customer profiles at rates roughly 10x higher than typical post-purchase flows, and the average profile is worth up to $150 in downstream DTC revenue.
Feed Verified Retail Purchases Back to Your Ad Platforms
Every registration becomes an offline conversion event that flows back into the ad platforms running your acquisition: Meta's Conversions API, Google Ads conversion uploads, and TikTok's events bridge. Brij's API then pipes the data into Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns, Performance Max, and the equivalent algorithms on other platforms, so each one can optimize against your actual omnichannel demand instead of the DTC sliver. The result is lower CAC, higher event match quality, and better attribution for the retail sales your ads are actually driving. On Meta alone, Brij customers are seeing on average a >28% lift in ROAS from forwarded offline purchase events.
Tell a Bigger Story Than the Package Can Hold
The package is the trailer. The Brij experience is the movie. Once a shopper scans, you have their full attention and unlimited real estate, and you can use it for whatever the brand needs that month.
Common plays Brij customers run from this surface:
- Product education and how-to videos. For complex or unfamiliar categories (supplements, beauty regimens, baby formula, electronics setup), this is the difference between a one-time trial and a repeat buyer. Plant People uses Brij to walk shoppers through which mushroom blend solves what, which is exactly the kind of context that doesn't fit on a tincture bottle.
- Brand storytelling and founder content. Bobbie's whole pitch is "mom-founded, organic, European-style infant formula." That story doesn't fit on a formula can. It does fit in a 60-second founder video on the other side of the QR code.
- Ingredient sourcing and sustainability narratives. The shopper who scans your code is the most receptive audience you'll ever have for the long version of why you source the way you do.
- Recipes, use cases, and "extend the product" content. Momofuku uses Brij to share recipes for its retail noodle and chili-crunch SKUs, turning a single purchase into a multi-week relationship with the brand.
- Reviews, surveys, and feedback loops. Capture qualitative input from real Target buyers without waiting for them to write a public review.
Target's own packaging guidance underscores why this matters: communication is "especially important for trial of new products." The digital layer is what makes trial stick.
Build the Subscription Flywheel
A Target shopper isn't a one-time event. With a known profile, the brand can run a personalized reorder flow, a "switch to subscription and save" offer, or a category-cross-sell. This is how brands like Bobbie convert one-time Target buyers into recurring subscribers — and where the long-term LTV math gets interesting.
Real-World Examples: Bobbie and Plant People
Bobbie launched into Target in 2021 with its original formula and has spent the last five years building out four organic-led SKUs on the block at every U.S. Target.
That kind of expansion doesn't happen without sell-through proof. Bobbie uses Brij to convert Target and other retail buyers into direct-relationship subscribers. Every retail buyer becomes a candidate for the subscription program, dramatically lifting LTV beyond the one-time Target ring.
Plant People ran a similar play, but starting from the sampling side. As Plant People expanded into 820 Targets nationwide and onto TikTok Shop, the team deployed Brij across on-pack QR, retail sampling, and direct mail. The results: 70,000+ total engagements, a 20% rebate conversion rate from sampling, and $54 in average DTC revenue per email captured.
Both stories prove the same point: Target is the awareness engine. Brij is what turns that awareness into an addressable, monetizable relationship.
How to Run This Play in Target
If you're prepping a Target launch, or you're already on shelf and bleeding identity at the register, here's the executional path most successful Brij customers follow:
- Add a Brij QR code to your packaging or inserts. Whether it's where you upload your receipt for a rebate, sign up for a loyalty program, register your warranty, or download product-specific content. The goal is for one scan to capture a known customer profile.
- Mirror the experience on shelf-talkers and endcap displays. Target shopper marketing teams will often co-fund the printed asset if there's a measurable promo behind it, such as a rebate or sweepstakes.
- Wire the events into your ad platforms. Map your offline purchase events back to Meta, Google, and TikTok ad platforms for better attribution, segmentation, and ROAS. Then layer in Klaviyo or Attentive for retention flows once you have a base of profiles.
- Treat the first 90 days as your sell-through proof window. Bring the verified Target buyer count, the email opt-in rate, and the Meta lift into your QBR with Target. Buyers love brands that can prove velocity with their own data.
- Iterate the experience by SKU, region, or campaign window. Brij lets you change QR code destinations after print, so a new promotion or a new flavor launch doesn't require a new packaging run.
The Bigger Picture
Target is the most coveted shelf in the country for a reason. The brands that win on those shelves aren't just the ones with the best product or the best packaging. They're the ones who can prove to Target, and to themselves, that every shopper who picks up the unit is a customer they can keep and grow.
That's the work Brij does. And it's why so many of the brands you see leading their categories at Target run on the same infrastructure underneath.
If you're launching into Target this year, or you've been on shelf for a while and you're tired of running your marketing against a quarter of your actual demand, book a demo with Brij. We'll show you the exact playbook other Target brands are using right now.
Sources
- Target Accelerators: Packaging for Mass Retail, Retail Packaging Tips to Set Your Product Apart
- RetailerHub: Target Packaging Guidelines (May 2025)
- Bobbie Launches 100% Organic Whole Milk Infant Formula at Target Nationwide (Businesswire, April 2026)
