Pricing strategy consulting
Pricing and margin strategy
Pricing is a systems decision, not a number. For founder-led brands, margin is determined less by the price on the shelf than by the architecture underneath it: how packs and sizes ladder across channels, where promotional floors sit, how trade investment is allocated, and which SKUs are actually earning their place in the portfolio.
Pricing is a systems decision, not a number.
Price-pack architecture
Price-pack architecture is the structure of sizes, formats, and price points across a portfolio and the channels it sells through. Done deliberately, it lets a brand serve prestige, mass, and marketplace channels without the price points colliding, and it gives each channel a role rather than letting them cannibalise each other. Done by accident, it produces the familiar problem of a marketplace listing setting the effective price for every other channel.
Promotional and trade discipline
Promotion is where margin is most often lost quietly. The work is to set guardrails (floors, maximum depth, frequency limits by channel) and to build an evaluation mechanism so trade investment is judged on incremental contribution rather than on volume lift or account relationships.
SKU-level profitability and rationalisation
Portfolios accumulate. SKUs that made sense at one stage persist through the next, absorbing inventory, complexity, and attention. Rationalisation decisions require contribution margin by SKU including landed cost, channel-specific fees, and trade, a view many growing brands do not yet have. Building that view is usually the first step, and it frequently changes the conclusion.
Taking price without losing the customer
Price increases are survivable when the architecture supports them, when the ladder, the pack structure, and the value story move together, and when the sequencing across channels is deliberate. They damage brands when the increase is a single number applied uniformly and announced late.
Is this you?
Signals this is the work
- Marketplace pricing is undercutting retail partners and creating channel conflict
- Promotional depth has become the default response to a soft month
- Landed cost has moved but pricing has not
- The portfolio has grown but the bottom third of SKUs has never been evaluated
- A price increase is needed and there is no framework for sequencing it
What the engagement produces
- Price-pack architecture across channels and formats
- Contribution-margin model at SKU and channel level
- Promotional guardrails, floors, and evaluation criteria
- Trade spend allocation framework
- A sequenced price increase plan where one is warranted
Engagements are structured around outcomes and accountability, not activity or hours, and are intentionally limited in number to preserve depth.
Common questions
What is price pack architecture?
Price pack architecture is the deliberate structure of pack sizes, formats, and price points across a portfolio and its channels. It defines how products ladder against each other so that each pack and channel has a distinct role rather than competing on price with the rest of the range.
How does trade spend affect margin?
Trade spend sits between gross and net revenue and is often the largest uncontrolled line in a consumer brand's P&L. Without an evaluation framework it accrues by negotiation rather than by economics, which is why brands can grow revenue and lose contribution margin at the same time.
When should a brand rationalise SKUs?
When contribution margin by SKU is known and the tail of the portfolio is consuming inventory, working capital, and operational attention disproportionate to what it returns. The prerequisite is the margin visibility. Rationalising without it tends to remove the wrong SKUs.
Where does margin improvement usually come from?
In consumer brands, rarely from cost reduction alone. The larger recoveries are structural: price realisation that has drifted from list, promotional depth that has become habitual, trade investment that accrues without evaluation, and a portfolio tail that dilutes the average. Profitability work here means finding which of those is actually costing the most before touching any of them.
If margin is moving in the wrong direction while revenue grows, a short conversation can locate where the architecture is leaking.