Enquirer Consulting Group

Reachable Buyer Map

Prepared for Randy Herbertson · The Visual Brand · August 2026
In this market, a studio that does motion and global packaging is selling into two seats that rarely share a budget. This map covers where both sit across the US, who signs inside each segment, and roughly how many companies are there. It describes the market rather than your business, and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
Food and beverage producers
The largest countable group and the one where design work recurs rather than arrives once. Label and pack artwork moves with line extensions, retailer resets, claim changes and regulation, so the same brand comes back on a cycle instead of once a decade.
Who signs: VP or director of marketing, brand manager, director of packaging, innovation or R and D lead, and the founder at the smaller end.
6,500 to 7,000
US employers registered in food and beverage production, of which roughly 3,700 to 4,100 carry 20 or more people on the plan
Beverage alcohol: brewing, distilling and wine
A category where the pack is the entire shelf argument and where new SKUs launch constantly. Small teams, fast decisions, and an owner who is usually in the room, which shortens the path from first conversation to a brief.
Who signs: owner or founder at the craft end, VP of marketing, brand director, and the national sales lead who owns the distributor story.
1,900 to 2,300
US employers across breweries, distilleries and wineries; a long tail of very small producers sits below the reporting threshold
Household, cleaning and personal care production
Smaller by count and heavier by project. These packs carry regulated claim language, multi-language panels and a global rollout, which is precisely the work a studio with a packaging discipline is built for and a general creative shop is not.
Who signs: brand director, packaging engineering lead, category marketing manager, and regulatory affairs where claims are on the pack.
700 to 900
US employers registered in soap, cleaning preparation and toilet preparation production
Beauty and cosmetics brand owners
The segment where the register understates the market badly. Brands that own the label but outsource production do not file as manufacturers, so they surface under wholesale and ecommerce codes instead. The true brand owner layer is materially larger than the producer count beside this line, and it is the layer that buys design.
Who signs: founder or CEO at emerging brands, VP of brand or creative, head of ecommerce for motion and content, packaging manager at the established houses.
Roughly 350 to 450 registered as producers
the countable manufacturing layer only; the brand owner layer above it is not separately enumerated anywhere public
Pharmaceutical, OTC and consumer health
The one segment where artwork is not discretionary. Labeling and carton changes are controlled documents driven by submissions, safety updates and market changes, which means the work has dates attached and a budget that does not get cut in a slow quarter.
Who signs: director of packaging and artwork, regulatory affairs lead, brand or product manager, and the commercial training lead for motion work.
1,600 to 1,900
US employers registered in pharmaceutical and medicine production; contract packagers and label converters sit alongside this group
Medical devices and diagnostics
Longer cycles and more approvals, and a category that buys motion more than it buys packaging, because the product has to be explained before it can be sold. Instructional and procedural video sits with a different budget from the brand work.
Who signs: marketing director, product manager, packaging engineer, and the medical education or clinical marketing lead.
2,900 to 3,300
US employers registered in medical equipment, supplies and diagnostic production

Where the openings are

1
Your two disciplines are bought by two different people. Motion and content sit with brand, digital and ecommerce. Packaging sits with packaging engineering, regulatory and the category team. A channel aimed only at marketing leadership reaches half of what the studio can actually do, and the packaging seat is the half nobody is competing for.
2
Regulated categories buy artwork whether or not they feel like it. A claim change, a formulation change, a market addition or a safety update forces a pack revision with a date attached. Those events are visible from outside if somebody is watching several thousand named companies for them, and they are the cleanest reason to arrive at exactly the right week.
3
Brand owners hide from lists. Beauty, supplement and better-for-you brands that outsource production never file as manufacturers. Anyone buying an off-the-shelf list of producers in those categories reaches contract factories and misses the brands entirely. Working that layer takes identification rather than purchase, which is why it stays open.
4
In this category the binding constraint is usually distribution rather than credibility. A portfolio answers the question of whether the work is good. What no portfolio does is put a studio in front of several thousand named brand and packaging leaders who have never heard of it, on a schedule, and track what comes back. That is the part that gets built, and it gets handed over when it works.
Built from public registries, counts banded deliberately. The pool covers US employers that file a benefit plan, so owner-only and very small companies are not published in it, and segment codes are self-reported by the companies themselves. Brand owners who outsource production do not appear as producers at all, which is stated in the segment above rather than quietly corrected in the number.
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