How Charm Makes Brand Discovery and Analysis Smarter and More Efficient

Finding high-potential brands to add to your retail portfolio, your prospecting pipeline, or your list of prospective investment opportunities is harder than ever. Brand discovery feels overwhelming with new players popping up across every channel. It's easy to miss the ones that actually matter to your business. 

Whether you're a merchandiser, salesperson, or investor, you need a faster way to cut through the noise and find brands worth your attention. From precise filtering to deep performance insights, Charm gives you the tools to find, analyze, and act on brand opportunities, smarter and more efficiently.

How Do Businesses Discover Brands?

For businesses, brand discovery isn’t about chance. It’s about strategy. Merchandisers, salespeople, investors, and sourcing teams need to identify brands that fit their goals and target markets.

Traditionally, businesses look to online marketplaces, trend reports, trade shows, and industry news. They might check what’s trending on social media or review the marketplace bestsellers. Some rely on referrals, while others track product placements or rising ad activity. But even with all these channels, brand discovery can still be messy and time-consuming.

The challenge is sorting through all that information (some of which is inaccurate) to find brands that align with your criteria—product category, growth signals, price point, tech stack, and more. That’s where Charm comes in. It turns scattered sources and guesswork into a focused, data-backed process for discovering and evaluating brands that are actually a fit for your business.

Charm Brand Discovery & Analysis in 3 Steps

Finding brands is just the first step. Knowing which ones are worth your time takes real analysis. Charm combines precision filters and deep brand insights to streamline the discovery and selection of brands for any business goal.

Step 1: Customize your brand search with precise filtering

The first step to brand discovery and analysis is refining your brand search using targeted filters. You can set the country, focusing on a specific geographic market. Then narrow your search to any Charm categories. Performance metrics like Charm Growth score™ and Charm Success score™ evaluate brand growth and success according to other brands within their product category. You can also filter by store platform, ad count, social media metrics, and more.

Whether you’re looking to find well-known brands or discover more up-and-coming brands in the space, a few filters will help you achieve your goal. Revenue filters can also help you focus on emerging to mid-sized brands earning a specified sales volume annually. You could use this strategic filtering to exclude larger, saturated players to highlight rising or niche contenders. Overall, this approach could help you identify promising brands in a certain category with room for growth, innovation, or collaboration.

Step 2: Access lists of potential brands that meet your key criteria

No more digging. Charm pulls the most relevant brands based on the filters you set. As mentioned, this list is generated based on filters such as location, industry, performance scores, revenue range, and more. Each brand is also tracked by Charm’s proprietary scores, including the  Charm Growth score™, and Charm Success score™.

At this stage, the goal is to get a list of brands that fit your key criteria or ideal customer profile (ICP). You can find emerging brands that are growing fast but may not be very well known by looking for brands with a high Charm Growth Score™, but a moderate Charm Success Score™. You can also filter for brands that integrate with your software, brands that qualify for the funding you provide, or brands within your retail store’s key product category. Within a few clicks, you’ll have identified the brands that your company is interested in and you can save that list for later or export it right away. From here, you can shortlist brands for deeper analysis or strategic insights.

Step 3: Analyze brand performance across key metrics

This involves reviewing a brand's core data, including Charm Growth Score™ and Charm Success Score™, as well as traffic patterns and product positioning. You begin by analyzing the brand overview, which provides a summary of scores, key growth channels, product type, and estimated revenue. 

The web traffic chart offers visibility into brand momentum over time, helping you assess consistency and spikes in engagement. The store and product tab breaks down key ecommerce details, such as platform (e.g., Shopify), pricing tiers, and product volume—vital for understanding accessibility and business model.

Additionally, the similar brands section highlights competitors with close alignment in strategy or audience, allowing for benchmarking and whitespace analysis. This step helps assess where a brand stands in its market segment, how it's growing, and what consumer or operational strategies may contribute to its success.

Overall, this stage turns data into direction, offering clear indicators of what’s working and where opportunities lie for positioning, differentiation, or collaboration.

Why Choose Charm for Brand Discovery and Analysis?

Charm isn’t just about data—it’s about finding the right brands faster, and knowing exactly why they matter to your business. Here are more reasons to have Charm on your side.

Build your brand pipeline—fast

Find brands that align with your goals, whether you're sourcing for retail, looking for acquisition/investment targets, or building your pipeline. Charm has the most comprehensive and accurate dataset on millions of DTC brands. Using various key metrics such as Charm Growth Score™, Success Score™, ad activity, tech stack, marketplaces, and more, Charm allows you to quickly find the brands you’re looking for (and even integrates into your CRM) so you can conduct efficient and effective research.

Make informed merchandising & brand portfolio decisions

Identifying the right brands for your assortment can help you make smarter merchandising and portfolio decisions. Charm lets you find emerging brands in product categories that match your store or marketplace goals. Not to mention, Charm’s TikTok Shop data shows you which brands are driving sales right now. With Charm's data, you can confidently curate a lineup that speaks to consumer demand and market momentum.

Source & diligence investment targets

Need solid leads for investment or acquisition? Charm discovered Allbirds and Caraway before they were household names. Charm gives you data across global DTC brands and can help you find the next best brand to add to your investment portfolio. Charm is the most comprehensive and accurate ecommerce database that tracks all DTC brands globally and allows you to analyze critical performance metrics including social media awareness, advertising exposure, technology stacks, & reseller adoption.

Smarter Brand Discovery Starts with Better Data

Discovering the right brands shouldn't be complicated. You just need the right data to help you find and analyze brands that you're looking for so you can act with confidence.

Charm gives you the in-depth ecommerce insights you’ve been looking for. It filters out the noise, helps you surface the best opportunities, and delivers data you can trust. Whether you're sourcing, investing, prospecting, or curating, Charm keeps your brand decisions smart and efficient.

Get further insights into brands in any ecommerce category when you book a demo with Charm.io today.

Have questions about Charm? Attend our upcoming Charm 101 webinar to hear from our Customer Success Managers about how to build the perfect pipeline and find ecommerce insights with Charm.