The operating playbook.
Running a portfolio of stores is a discipline, not a hunch. This is the playbook the studio runs to: how a line is chosen, how a store is judged once live, and how the decision to keep it or close it is made. Plainly, and on the numbers.
Choosing a line
A store earns the right to be built
Not every idea becomes a store. A line has to clear a simple bar before the studio spends a day on it.
Real demand
There has to be a real audience already searching and buying, not a market the studio would have to invent.
Clean fulfilment
A supply and delivery path that works to the target market at an honest landed cost.
Room to be different
Something the store can do better or clearer than what is already there.
A way to run lean
A path to running it with little manual touch once it is live.
Judging a store
The same questions for every front
Once a store is live, it is read on the same plain measures, so a weak store cannot hide behind a good story.
Does it sell
Real orders from real customers, at a margin that holds after the true cost of getting them.
Does it run lean
How much manual work it takes to keep open. The less the better, the more it scales.
Does it have room
Whether there is a clear next step that makes it bigger or steadier, or whether it has plateaued.
Keep or cut
Churn is the studio working, not failing
A portfolio is meant to change. Stores that clear the bar get more attention and budget. Stores that do not are retired cleanly, and that is a feature, not a setback.
Keeping a store that does not work costs more than the store: it costs the attention that a better line could have had. So the studio prunes without drama and reinvests where the numbers point.
Because each store is its own brand and domain, retiring one touches nothing else. The portfolio gets stronger by losing its weakest members, on schedule.
- Winners get more attention and budget.
- Plateaued stores are held, watched or wound down.
- Losers are retired cleanly, with no brand damage elsewhere.
- Freed attention is reinvested in the next real line.
See the live and in-build stores on the portfolio page.