Category strategy
REAL Growth Partnership delivers margin you actually keep. We work across pricing, assortment and design to value, personalise promotions and markdowns so the right offer reaches the right customer, and pull topline and bottom-line levers together in margin recovery programmes for retail and consumer businesses.
What gets in the way
Price is the fastest lever a business has and the one it is most reluctant to touch. Small errors compound quietly, because a discount that was never needed looks exactly like a sale that was.
One discount for everybody
A blanket promotion reaches the customers who needed an incentive and the customers who were going to buy anyway. The second group is paid for out of margin, and nothing in the reporting tells the two apart.
No read on willingness to pay
Prices are carried forward, matched to a competitor or built up from cost. What a customer will actually pay, and how far the sale depends on a discount, is not measured occasion by occasion.
Cost cut in the wrong places
Specification gets reduced where it is easiest rather than where the customer will not notice, so the saving arrives with a quiet loss of relevance. Features people were paying for get trimmed alongside the ones they never valued.
Margin leaking where no one looks
Sales, cost and promotional data sit in different reports, so the line by line picture of where margin goes is never assembled. Each function can defend its own numbers while the total stays unexplained.
Assortment, pricing and the margin you actually keep.
REAL Growth Partnership delivers margin you actually keep.
Pricing, assortment & design to value
Range and assortment for relevance and margin.Promotional & markdown personalisation
The right offer to the right customer, protecting margin.Margin recovery & commercial economics
Topline and bottom-line levers, pulled together.
Category strategy features
Markdown, pricing & promo effectiveness diagnostics
Sourcing, assortment & margin-expansion toolkits
Product innovation and design-to-value
Trade terms optimisation
Customer-centric trade planning
Assortment and brand architecture
Markdown, pricing and promotional effectiveness
Frequently asked questions
Design to value is the discipline of engineering products and ranges around what customers actually value and will pay for, removing cost that customers do not notice and investing where they do. REAL applies it alongside pricing and assortment work to grow margin without damaging relevance.
By replacing blanket discounts with targeted offers. The customers who need an incentive get one; the customers who would have paid full price are not given money away. The result is the same or better sales at materially better margin.
Some volume sits on promotions that were only ever discounting sales you would have made anyway. We model the volume at risk on every change before it goes live, keep the mechanics that genuinely drive incremental sales, and remove the ones the evidence says you can afford to lose.
We do both. We build the price architecture and the promotional plan, then work with your commercial and buying teams to put it live and adjust as the early numbers come in. You are not left with a spreadsheet to implement on your own.
No. Most retailers already hold enough sales, cost and promotional history to show where margin is leaking. Where a gap matters, we use short willingness-to-pay testing rather than a year-long build.
Promotional and markdown changes land as soon as the new calendar runs, so the effect is visible within the quarter. Price architecture and design to value follow the range and buying cycle, so they take longer to flow through. We track both by line and by channel.
A heritage outdoor, ski and performance footwear and apparel brand
Strong brand love, but boxed in. Leadership had no shared, fact-based view of where future demand sits, so investment, price and promotion rested on assumption rather than evidence, and spend risked chasing head-on competition instead of the spaces the brand could genuinely win.
11
Demand spaces with price and promotion pressure-tested
12k
Consumers surveyed across five European markets
30+
Functional and emotional needs decoded per occasion
