Sectors
Retail and dental — the shelves we already supply
GDH distributes into two channels: retail and dental. The same warehouses and the same lorries serve both, but each channel has its own commercial team — a chain category buyer and a practice principal do not respond to the same conversation.
GDH runs a single warehouse estate and a single route plan. Stock for a shampoo range and stock for a composite filling material sit in the same buildings and travel on the same vehicles, which is what makes it viable for us to carry smaller ranges at all. Commercially the two channels are kept apart. Retail has account managers who sit in front of chain category buyers and work to their range review calendar. Dental has representatives who call on practices, clinics and laboratories. Neither team is asked to sell outside what it knows.
Grocery and convenience
The large grocery chains, and the convenience and forecourt networks behind them. We hold listings across ambient food, drinks, household and pet lines, and we deliver either into a chain's own depots or store by store, depending on how that retailer wants to be served. For a brand on its own this is the hardest door in the market: range reviews run on a fixed calendar, and a buyer wants to see that somebody can keep the shelf full between them. We are in those stores every week already.
Sectors
Personal care, cosmetics, supplements and over-the-counter lines, sold into drugstore chains, beauty retailers and independent pharmacies. The pharmacy side is a long tail — hundreds of individual counters rather than a handful of depots — so it is served from the same vans that cover our dental round. Health and beauty also carries more rules than grocery: claims, labelling, batch traceability, recall. Our team reads a product dossier before the first order is placed, not after a buyer has sent it back.
Private label and own-brand programmes
Chains that want a product made to their own specification, and manufacturers that would rather make it than build a brand. We sit in the middle. We know which categories a retailer is short in, what price architecture the shelf needs, and which factories can hold that specification at volume. The name on the pack stays the retailer's. Responsibility for stock, delivery and shelf condition is ours. For a manufacturer it is the quickest route to committed volume without spending anything on marketing.
Dental: practices, clinics, laboratories and depots
Materials, consumables, small instruments and equipment. Four kinds of customer, each ordering differently: single-surgery practices buying little and often, group clinics working from agreed lists, laboratories that need specific alloys and ceramics by batch, and dental depots that resell. This channel runs on trust in the person who walks through the door, so our representatives carry product knowledge rather than a price sheet. Items with shelf-life or temperature conditions are held in the same warehouses, in dedicated monitored areas.
In practice.
Shared network
One warehouse estate, one route plan. Retail and dental stock move together — which is exactly what makes it worth our while to carry a small range.
Separate commercial teams
Selling to a chain category buyer and selling to a practice principal are different jobs. Each channel has its own account managers and its own call list.
Nothing billed either way
Whichever sector your product sells into, your brand never sees an invoice from us. We buy the stock and earn from distribution margin.
FAQ
Questions brands ask us.
No. Most of the brands we carry sit in a single channel, and nothing about how we work changes because of it. A dental consumables maker deals with the dental team and never hears from retail. What a single range still gets is the whole warehouse and delivery network behind it, because the cost of running that network is already spread across everything in it.
Occasionally. Oral care is the obvious bridge: a line that starts in practices can earn a place on a drugstore shelf once there is evidence it sells. We do not force it. Retail wants different pack sizes, different margins and packaging built for a scanner, and a product that works in a surgery is not automatically ready for that. If the move looks worth making, we will say so and tell you what has to change.
One commercial lead in the channel your product belongs in, from the first meeting onwards. They set the forecast you produce to, take the range through buyer meetings or practice visits, and remain your contact once it is selling. The warehouse and transport side sits behind them. You are welcome to come and see it, but you should not have to manage two relationships to sell one product.
Next door.
Send us your range.
We will tell you honestly where it fits and how fast we can start.