Six places a brand your size leaks margin. Most leak from two.
Which two are costing you the most, your own numbers say before you have paid for anything.
Most brands run on Shopify, an ad account, a 3PL portal and an accounting package, and none of them can say what one order made once returns and ad spend are in. This sits across all four: one profit number per order, and somebody who reads it every week and tells you what to do. It is built as an admin around how your brand actually works, your processes and your workflows and your names for things, not a template with your logo on it. It comes in six parts that share the same numbers.
We cannot say which products, markets or customers actually make money.
The foundation
Built once, kept true every month
In the first week, before any of it is finished, you get a rough cut of what your twenty largest products actually earned after returns and advertising, so you have something to argue with.
Then every order carries what it is expected to make from the day it is placed: returns modelled per product and per market, the landed cost of the units that stay sold, and the advertising that won that order rather than a channel average. The example on the front page is one of them.
Every number your brand runs on is written down once, for your people and for the AI they ask, so one question stops getting three answers. All of it in your own name from the first day, inside an admin built around how your brand works, with an assistant your team can ask in plain language.
Stock is tying up cash, and nobody can say what to clear and what to hold.
Stock and tied-up capital
Every week
Every week, in writing: what to clear, what to hold, and what each choice is costing you, product by product and market by market. Not a category average but the actual number for the actual stock, with the expected return rate and the real landed cost already in it.
We buy on last season and a feeling.
The buy
Every buy
The buy is the biggest decision the business makes and it is usually made with the fewest numbers. What to buy, how much of it, at what cost, to sell at what price, with expected profit on every line before the order goes to the supplier.
The ad budget follows revenue, and we suspect it is buying returns.
Advertising allocation
Every month
The platforms optimise extremely well toward whatever target they are given, and they have been given revenue. Fed expected gross profit instead, they move the money toward what actually earns. How much budget there should be, and which products and channels it should follow, decided every month with that number in front of you.
We find out where the month landed six weeks after it ended.
Where the month lands
Every week
You know where the month lands while there is still time to change it, and finance and commercial stop arguing over which number is right.
They buy once, send it back, and do not come again, and we do not know why.
What to change in the next run
Per study
Why they buy, why they send it back and why they do not come again, by product and by market, written for whoever decides what gets made next.
You do not pick from this list. After I have read your numbers I tell you where you are losing money, which part fixes it, and which parts to leave alone. Most brands need the foundation and one more.
What this is costing you has a number, and you get it before you pay for anything.
Inside a single category the return rate runs from roughly 8 per cent to roughly 34 per cent depending on who is buying and where. Whatever one rate your system uses is wrong for most of your catalogue, in both directions at once. The advertising platforms are bidding on that wrong number, the buy is placed on it, and the stock is held against it. How much that is costing you is measurable, and the first look at your numbers measures it.
Until your own number exists, this is the range. Find your turnover.
| Your turnover | Low | Middle | High |
|---|---|---|---|
| 100m kr | 1,4m kr | 2,5m kr | 4,2m kr |
| 200m kr | 2,8m kr | 5,0m kr | 8,4m kr |
| 350m kr | 4,9m kr | 8,8m kr | 14,7m kr |
Ranges, built from published evidence rather than a case study.
The fee is about half a per cent of what you sell. Everything in that table is between 1,4 and 4,2 per cent of the same number.
So which of your bestsellers is it?
Write to me and I will tell you where I would look first in your numbers, and whether it is worth your money. Nothing to prepare, and no call until you want one.
If it is worth going further, I read your numbers rather than talk about them. Then I ask for a yes or a no. A maybe is the only answer that costs us both something.