Market Entry Study — Nordic Speciality Retail

The client had grown steadily in one market and assumed the model would travel. It mostly did not. The study combined a bottom-up cost model with twenty-two interviews across distributors, landlords, and former operators.

Approach

Rather than starting from market size, the work started from the unit economics of a single store and asked what would have to be true in each city for that store to clear its cost of capital within four years.

• Bottom-up model of rent, staffing, and logistics per city
• Interviews with operators who had entered and exited
• Scenario testing against three demand cases

The recommendation was to enter one market properly rather than three tentatively — a smaller answer than the one commissioned, and the correct one.