A brand on nine channels isn't twice a brand on five.

We publish a number called Ladder Reach — how many retail channels a brand appears on in a given week. It is the most quoted figure we produce, and we want to be the ones who explain its limit before someone else misuses it.

Every channel counts as one. They are not one.

Ranking on YesStyle means placing inside a top-195 sample. Ranking on Hwahae Global means placing inside a top-20 sample. Both add exactly +1 to a brand's channel count.

That is a 10× difference in gate width, hidden inside a single integer. A brand on nine shallow shelves and a brand on five deep ones can look like a 9-versus-5 story when the second brand has cleared the harder test.

Why we keep the number anyway

Because breadth is real. A brand present on one channel has one demand source; a brand on nine has survived nine different buying decisions. That is genuine information — it just is not a measure of size, and it should never be read as one.

So we do two things. We publish #rank / sample for every placement rather than rank alone, and we treat top-20 placements as the one clean cross-channel comparison — a top-20 slot is a top-20 slot whether the shelf holds 24 rows or 195.

How to cite us without getting it wrong

If you quote a channel count from us, quote the depth with it. "Present in nine of our 15 tracked channels (samples ranging top 20 to top 195)" is longer and true. "In nine channels" alone invites the reader to hear "nine times the distribution," which our data does not support.

What we'll watch next

As channels come online our depths will keep diverging, which makes the raw count progressively less comparable over time. From W30 we start reporting movement in top-20 placements specifically — the version of the metric that survives this problem.