What we think about retail growth, and why it matters for your business

We publish because we believe mid-market retailers deserve better thinking, not more dashboards. Every piece here is written by people who've been inside the problem. Not observers writing from the outside.

UK7 April 20264 min read

Growth has stalled across UK mid-market retail. The tools aren't the problem.

The UK beauty market contracted 1.5% in 2025 while online beauty grew 7%. Pet care margins are compressing despite a growing market. Fashion return rates are eating more margin than most brands realise. Across mid-market UK retail, the pattern is the same: the data exists but the decisions haven't changed. This isn't a tools problem; it's a gap between analytics output and commercial action. And it's costing mid-market retailers more than most of them know.

US1 April 20265 min read

Your SaaS stack is a tax on your margin, and you're paying it voluntarily.

Take a typical $15M DTC beauty brand. Add up the annual cost of the analytics stack: platform licences, integration maintenance, time-to-insight lag, the meetings about what the data means, the decisions that get delayed because nobody trusts the numbers. The total isn't a rounding error. It's a material drag on margin. And the returns? Another dashboard. Another login. Another set of reports that two people open and nobody acts on. This is the SaaS tax, and mid-market DTC brands are paying it voluntarily.

Both25 March 20265 min read

What "retail growth engineering" means, and why this category needs to exist.

When a mid-market retailer's growth stalls, the options on the table haven't changed in a decade: hire a consultancy, buy a platform, or commission a dev team. Each one solves a piece of the problem while ignoring the rest. The consultancy leaves a deck. The platform leaves a login. The dev shop leaves code aimed at last quarter's problem. None of them combine the thinking, building, and staying that actually moves numbers. That's the gap. And it's why we believe "retail growth engineering" needs to exist as its own category.