Cost optimization
Deliver without leaks
Margin shouldn't be a once-a-month number.
Most brands work out contribution margin in a spreadsheet, weeks after the fact, and nobody fully trusts it. We build the live version on your own stack, then use it to rank every cut by what it's actually worth. That includes the AI line, which has to earn its keep like everything else.
- How it runs today
- A monthly spreadsheet nobody quite trusts
- What breaks
- Nobody owns margin end to end
- What you get
- Margin, live, by product, channel, and cohort
The shift
Margin went live. So did the AI bill.
The old way
Cost cutting used to be a season. Finance negotiated the goods, ops pushed the carriers, growth policed the discounts, and everyone owned a piece of margin while nobody owned the whole thing.
The AI-era shift
Now margin can be a number you watch, per product, per channel, per cohort, live. And there's a new line on the ledger that deserves the same treatment: the AI spend itself. Plenty of AI pilots never pay back what they cost, so we hold ours to one rule. The AI pays for itself after its own bill, or it goes.
The AI pays for itself after its own bill, or it goes.
What we actually do
The work, made concrete.
The live margin model
We start by building contribution margin as a living number on your own stack, by product, channel, and cohort, so every decision that follows has a scoreboard.
Cost-to-serve audit
Then we go through what it costs to get an order out the door: boxes that bill you for the air inside them, packaging heavier than it needs to be, carrier and 3PL rates nobody has tested in years.
Markdown discipline
Discounts get rules tied to sell-through, so markdowns clear inventory that's genuinely stuck instead of giving margin away on things that would have sold anyway.
The software and AI audit
We go tool by tool through the stack, cut the seats nobody logs into, and put a return next to every AI line, so you know what's earning and what's just billing.
Back-office automation
And the quiet grind, support tickets, reconciliation, freight audits, returns triage, gets automated where the math earns it. That's where a lot of the hours are hiding.
Proof
The math that decides it.
Margin managed monthly leaks daily.
Walk into most brands at real revenue and contribution margin lives in a month-end spreadsheet nobody quite trusts, markdowns run on instinct, and the software bill carries seats nobody has opened in a year. A live margin model on your own stack, rules behind the markdowns, and an honest cull of that stack is where the recovered basis points come from. We baseline yours before we claim any.
The first step
We build the first read of your contribution margin by product, channel, and cohort, from your own numbers. You leave with a ranked list of what to cut first, and an honest answer on what the AI spend is actually giving back.
What we move
What we watch on margin.
Benchmarks and targets, not guarantees. We baseline yours first.
How we work
How the engagement runs.
- 01
Diagnose
We baseline your numbers and map the operation end to end, so the work targets a real leak, not a hunch.
- 02
Prioritize
We rank the opportunities by dollars of impact and effort, and agree on what to do first.
- 03
Build
We build the real thing in production (for you, or alongside your team) against a measured baseline.
- 04
Prove
We hold the work against a holdout or benchmark, so the lift is proven, not asserted.
- 05
Hand over
Documentation, dashboards, and an accountable owner on your team, so the work keeps running without us.
Where this connects
Find the first cut.
We'll build the margin read from your own numbers and hand you the ranked list of what to cut first. From there you'll know what each fix is worth, and in what order to make them.