SOLON, Ohio — Efficient Collaborative Retail Marketing (ECRM) has acquired RangeMe, a San Francisco-based provider of an online platform that streamlines new product discovery between consumer packaged goods (CPG) suppliers and retailers.

Greg Farrar, ECRM

ECRM said Tuesday that San Francisco-based RangeMe will add scalability and bolster the technology foundation that it has developed over the past two decades in helping retail buyers discover new products and sharpen category planning.

“Technology has always been a key part of our service offerings. The acquisition of RangeMe will accelerate and strengthen our ability to help buyers and sellers work through the category planning process as the most complete solution in the retail industry,” ECRM chief executive officer Greg Farrar said. “It will allow us to get granular and more deeply into the workflows of our retail customers and our manufacturer customers,” he explained.

RangeMe helps retailers and suppliers do business by giving buyers an efficient way to discover innovative products and manage the inbound product submission process. The company’s platform provides suppliers with increased control over the marketing of their products as well as greater access to retail buyers.

“By incorporating RangeMe’s digital product discovery tools and solutions into ECRM’s processes and services, we can be the true extension of the buyer’s sourcing and category planning efforts,” Farrar noted. “It will greatly extend and enrich our value-added proposition.”

RangeMe will become a business unit of ECRM and continue to be led by Nicky Jackson, RangeMe’s founder and CEO, according to Farrar.

“Together with RangeMe, ECRM will be better-positioned to provide even more strategic value to our clients by offering incredibly effective product discovery and category planning solutions,” Farrar said. “We look forward to welcoming the RangeMe team and working together to help shape the evolving retail industry. We will weave RangeMe into everything we do. It will become the currency and the language of our business, and hopefully of the industry as well”” he added.

Nicky Jackson, RangeMe

In the past year, RangeMe has experienced explosive growth, expanding to almost 65,000 suppliers and more than 210,000 active products across all categories.

“We have over 1,000 new suppliers signing up every week. We integrate into the retailer’s workflow, and we help the retailer manage all the inbound submissions,” Jackson said. “We are helping the retailers use the technology to help manage the overwhelming nature of what’s coming in the market and to help them find the right products that they are looking for.”

ECRM facilitates category-specific buying and selling between CPG retailers and manufacturers via its EPPS events and proprietary software that streamlines interactions between trading partners. The company serves manufacturers and retailers within a range of product categories, including health and beauty care, general merchandise, food and beverages, pharmaceuticals and electronics, among others.

Together, ECRM and RangeMe are positioned to provide an “end-to-end category sourcing solution in retail today and for the future,” Jackson said.

“With this acquisition, ECRM and RangeMe are bringing advantageous streamlined technology to a wider breadth of customers, and influencing the evolution of the CPG industry,” she added. “We started the RangeMe journey to bring efficiency and speed to the way retailers discover products and to provide smaller suppliers big opportunities to revolutionize the CPG industry. As part of ECRM, we are fully realizing this vision.”