Retail market research is growing in importance, and a faster time to market is the ultimate retail differentiator.

As e-commerce sales drop, the stocks of e-commerce players like Etsy, Shopify, and Wayfair have been walloped. For the first time in a decade, digitally native brands need to look at their numbers to see if their business model requires a transformation to endure this new economy.

The retail environment is likely to remain challenging for some time, but the situation also presents an opportunity for those who move decisively and quickly to develop a response.

Perfumarie helps companies by
identifying key touch-points,
unifying the brand's goals & core values,
removing friction points &
barriers to engagement
via shoppers' insight research &
targeted marketing campaigns.

• How do we strength the value and reach of a brand?
• What can we do to make your brand, products or experience(s) more accessible, meaningful, and memorable? 
• How can we redesign the user experience, the human experience, to be more impactful and improve its retail performance?

"In-store sales were a bright spot, jumping by 10% as consumers continued their march back to brick-and-mortar locations," shared McKinsey & Company.

NOW is an opportunity to reposition for future growth:

• "Companies can catalyze these challenges into opportunities—if they make bold, deliberate decisions."
• "Companies that achieve breakthrough performance during economic downturns tend to outperform their peers over the following decade. We saw this following the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009; the most resilient retailers could drive 11 percent annual growth in total return to shareholders, more than five times higher than their peers through 2018."

Perfumarie develops purpose-built roadmap infused with thoughtful and strategic design.

Founders are often too close to their brand, but as your management advisor, we can see your growth & blind spots.

From a holistic, birds-eye view, Perfumarie explores your brand's possibilities and help synchronize your touch points for an evolved positioning that can thrive in the metaverse and win IRL (in real life, offline):

• We are intuitive and thoughtful, with utmost sensitivity to the human experience. 
• As a collective of specialists, we are your objective experts to help you seed, incubate, and nurture your brand or product(s). 
• Test hypotheses without confirmation biases: We demystify myths by inviting internal, industry, and external feedback for improvement or validation toward success.
• As a container for supporting Founders, we empower brands, serving as a net and task force whenever required.
• Agency-As-Service: Perfumarie assists with actionable strategic advisory, marketing, placement, PR, and even fundraising (or investment) only as required.
• On-demand coaching: We observe and coach the leadership team with ongoing open & honest dialogues.

How We Help

• Test & Research:

• Is it time to revisit your category strategies to reflect consumer purchase behavior and margin profile shifts?
• Knowing which product categories face the most inflationary pressures and are likely to encounter meaningful changes in the consumer behavior can help retailers make informed category-strategy decisions.
• Should we rethink your SOPs (store operations) to optimize productivity?
• To counter the effects of labor cost inflation, retailers can re-evaluate their in-store processes and look for opportunities to reset the store operating model by deploying technology and analytics, resetting labor allocation and scheduling, and taking an end-to-end view of costs.
• What SHOULD we digitize or automate vs. preserving and slowing down the experience in IRL?
• Retailers may also invest in frontline employee experience and retention to reduce costly turnover by leveraging recruitment and talent analytics and rethinking capability building.

• Develop your own branded products:
  In today's environment, consumers are becoming less brand-loyal, value-conscious, sustainability-minded (which is good!), and turning to private-brand goods to cope with inflation.
  
  Retailers are thinking differently about their mix of private and national brands as a response. Companies seeking to improve private-brand penetration should develop brands strategically with high awareness of what consumer wants now, often with some form of advocacy in mind.
  
  Let us help you enhance your margins while improving brand power across your portfolio!

• Reorient your supply and distribution networks.
  Perfumarie's extensive network of suppliers and technical expertise can help you become more sustainable, responsible, and optimize your cost of goods.
  
  Having greater visibility of end-to-end inventory, fulfillment costs, and customer experience metrics can enable you to balance costs and services more effectively.

• Revisit your pricing and promotions strategies. 
  Retailers that take a surgical approach are more likely to emerge with profitability and consumer relationships intact. But how do you know what is really working without a controlled study and feedback from your target consumers?
  
  Retailers are re-evaluating their price and promotion mix during this time, yet pulling back on promotions can help manage cost increases without raising prices.
  
  Perfumarie helps brands and retailers take deep dives into understanding the right mix.

• Team Optimization: 
  
• Is your team empowered with a cross-functional structure to coordinate inflation response?
  
  
• Do you have clear goals set for your team to increase the speed of decision-making?
  
  
• Do you have fact-based mechanisms to track execution, diagnose wins and losses, and apply lessons learned?

You are invited to set up an exploratory call to begin your journey to success with us.