Bearhug came out of a working distribution business, built by jan/san industry operators covering foodservice, safety, industrial, and packaging alongside it. Five industries, every day, for years.
We bought the software you have been sold. Enterprise systems that needed an implementation partner before they needed a login. CRMs built for people who sell subscriptions, not cases. Inventory tools that arrived as an empty database and a friendly note about data migration being a customer responsibility.
Every one of them assumed the hardest part of our business was the part their software did. It never was. The hardest part was that nothing knew what a case of can liners is, or that the part number a customer just read off a competitor’s invoice has an equivalent three aisles over.
So we built the thing that knew
We built a catalog and kept it maintained — 24,000 items across 50 manufacturer catalogs, with 6,500 competitor products matched to equivalents. We built quoting on top of it, because a quote is only as good as the catalog underneath. We built a field app, because the work happens in a truck and a warehouse, not at a desk. We put an assistant in it, trained on how these industries actually talk.
Then we ran our own company on it. Not a pilot. Not a sandbox. The catalog our reps quote from, the accounts they visit, the numbers our business closes on.
What that means for you
It means the boring things are already handled, because we could not afford for them not to be. The catalog is loaded. The cross-references exist. The mobile app works where there is one bar of signal, because ours had to.
It also means we are not guessing about your week. We know what a line review is. We know what happens when a manufacturer changes a price list mid-quarter. We know why your team still keeps a spreadsheet, and we know that telling them to stop is not a strategy.
Bearhug is not a rethink of distribution. It is the software a distribution business built for itself, made available to the people doing the same job. If that sounds less ambitious than what you usually hear from software companies, good. Ambition is cheap. Software that works on the first Monday is not.
— Ryan Sellars, founder
