Should a new retailer enter the online hedging plant market, and at what price? A viability model built from a competitor's public filings.
The problem
A UK client was weighing up whether to sell hedging plants online. The market had a few known established players and no public numbers: no reliable read on what customers spend, how often they return, or what it costs to acquire them.
The approach
I reconstructed the unit economics of an established competitor that had since closed, reverse-engineering the numbers from what they'd left in public: a filed statement of affairs (built into a structured CSV to work out AOV and the share of repeat customers), pricing across their range, and search-volume data.
On top of that sat a viability model: cost of goods, marketing spend, delivery, and payback period, run across a range of price points and volume scenarios rather than a single optimistic case.
The result
Clean CSVs and web dashboards that put the answer in front of the client: whether to enter, at what price point, and what the payback period looks like under conservative assumptions - plus the conditions under which it would change. The client chose to enter the market.