How we work with clients
Most questions fall into three areas: what the engagement involves, how we stay involved over time, and what it costs.
Compliance is usually why you call us. It is not where we stop.
Most conversations start in the same place: a brand unsure if its VAT structure is right, unclear what EPR requires, or facing packaging and labelling rules for a market it has never sold into. Sometimes it is a bad start - stock in the wrong place, a filing done incorrectly. Sometimes it is simply not knowing where to begin. Either way, that is usually the first thing we fix, and usually why you are talking to us at all.
Getting compliant is the start of something bigger, not the whole job. Once it is sorted, the same sequence applies to every brand we work with, whatever stage they are starting from.
Compliant
VAT, EPR, packaging and labelling sorted, or corrected if it already went wrong.
Visible
Found and understood, on your own site and on marketplace, before a single conversation happens.
Buyable
Live where people can actually purchase, fast, while the other channels are still being built.
In demand
Social, advertising, and an email list you own - proof that people actually want it.
Retail-ready
A buyer's due diligence is already done. You are not walking in cold.
Foundation → visibility & demand → retail
A retail buyer deciding whether to list a brand does not just look at the product. They search for the brand, check the website, read the reviews, and form a view of the whole brand before a single conversation happens. A brand with no visible presence does not get past that stage, however good the product or clean the paperwork.
That is why, once compliance is moving, we push marketplace and DTC development early. Amazon makes a brand visible and buyable at once, to consumers and to the retail buyers doing their homework. A direct consumer website does a different job: it is the brand's home asset, presented entirely on its own terms, and it is where an email list gets built. Talk to customers directly, in the right way, and you start creating demand you own, rather than renting it from someone else's platform.
Get compliant, visible, and buyable right, and demand follows, built through social, advertising, and that growing email list. Then retail stops being a cold pitch. You are not walking in with just a product. You are walking in with a brand a buyer can already find, already judge, and already see moving.
It works because of where we have come from. Between us, we have spent more of our careers getting brands onto physical retail shelves than building them online, and we know exactly how hard that door is to get through. What is different now is that we also understand the direct-to-consumer and marketplace side properly - the thing that makes retail achievable in the first place.
Amazon US
For UK and EU brands entering or growing in the American market, and for US clients managing marketplace activity across multiple territories at once.
Amazon Australia
Active client work in the Australian market, supporting brands either launching there or expanding from Australia into the UK and EU.
Our primary focus is UK and EU marketplaces, including Amazon's European stores and broader EU retail marketplaces, with the VAT registration, EPR obligations, and packaging compliance each market needs. Wherever you are starting from, the same sequence applies: get compliant, get visible, get buyable, build demand - and the door into retail opens with it.
Marketplace experience beyond Amazon
Amazon is our core strength, and where most of our current client work sits. But our team's experience goes wider, with hands-on operating experience across:
If your business needs marketplace management, channel strategy, or brand control beyond Amazon, it's worth raising in our first conversation.
What actually happens, and when.
Every engagement starts with an assessment: what you have, what you are trying to achieve, and what stands between the two, starting with whether you are actually compliant. From that, we build a sequenced plan through the five stages - compliant, visible, buyable, in demand, retail-ready - at a pace that suits your business.
Most partners treat compliance and growth as sequential, and that can mean six months or more before any commercial activity begins. We do not work that way. From week one, we run both tracks in parallel: while compliance is being resolved, we are already building the marketplace strategy, listings, and DTC presence, so the moment you are compliant, you are already visible and close to buyable.
Early Phase
Compliant + Visible
Regulatory setup, logistics, account configuration, and the first listings and DTC presence going live, built together.
Build Phase
Buyable → In Demand
Advertising goes live, listings are optimised on early performance data, the catalogue expands, and account health is actively managed.
Ongoing Phase
Demand → Retail-Ready
Continuous optimisation, expansion into new marketplaces or channels, and, once the numbers are there, the retail conversations this was always building towards.
The brands that do best with us are in it for the long term. Building a proper marketplace presence, or recovering from a failed expansion, is not a quick project. We are not looking for short engagements. We are looking for partners.
What working with us feels like once you are up and running.
Scale With operates as an extension of your team. You stay involved in strategic decisions and approvals. We take responsibility for execution, issue resolution, reporting, and partner coordination.
Clients tell us it feels like having a member of their own team, not an agency they have hired. We get close enough to understand the objectives, help define the strategy, and then do the execution ourselves.
In practice, it works like having senior, experienced people inside the business, without carrying the cost of employing them.
In practice, that also means a regular rhythm
A snapshot of revenue, units sold, advertising spend and efficiency, and account health.
A strategic review call with both founders on what is working, what needs to change, and next period's priorities.
A full business review against the original objectives, commercial performance, and any structural decisions.
We handle compliance issues, competitor moves, and account health as they come up, so you do not have to be.
Every business has different priorities and different metrics that matter. The rhythm above works well for most clients, but we shape it with you from the start so it is genuinely useful, not just something we send and you file.
How we charge.
Our primary commercial model is a percentage of gross revenue generated through the channels we manage, with a minimum monthly commitment.
That structure is deliberate. It means our incentive is the same as yours - to grow the revenue. We do not benefit from billing more hours. We benefit from the account performing. When you do well, we do well.
The minimum commitment exists because there is a level of work required to run an account properly regardless of the revenue it is currently generating, particularly in the early months of an engagement when the foundations are being built. The percentage of revenue reflects our long-term stake in the outcome.
For discrete project work - a CRM scoping exercise, a compliance audit, a market entry assessment - we use a fixed project fee.
We are straightforward about cost from the first conversation. If the numbers are not going to work for your business at this stage, we would rather know that early and come back when the timing is right.
Ready to see how an engagement would work for you?
The fastest way to find out is a direct conversation about your business and where you are starting from.
Questions we get asked early in most conversations.
We work best with established brands that have a proven product, real traction in their home market, and the commitment to invest properly in the next stage of growth. We are not the right fit for very early-stage businesses still finding product-market fit. Revenue alone does not decide it - a brand generating $3-5M in the US looking to enter the UK is a different case to a UK brand at the same revenue scaling domestically, and both can be the right fit.
Amazon is the primary channel for most of what we do, because for physical product brands it is typically the largest and most immediate marketplace opportunity in the UK and EU. But it is not the only one. Depending on the engagement, we may also work on the DTC website, other EU retail marketplaces, or a wholesale strategy.
It depends on where you are starting from. For a new market entry, the first eight to twelve weeks go on foundations. Meaningful commercial momentum builds over a three-to-six-month period as the advertising matures, the catalogue grows, and the account's performance history builds.
Both founders are directly involved in every client engagement throughout the relationship. That is a deliberate constraint on how many clients we take on at any one time. John leads on commercial strategy, marketplace operations, and go-to-market execution. James leads on operations, finance, supply chain, and commercial infrastructure.
Done properly, it does not have to. Taking control of your brand on Amazon and building an authoritative presence can actually strengthen trade relationships by presenting a more consistent, professional brand to the buyers and distributors who look you up before ordering through their wholesale accounts.
We deal with it. Account health issues, compliance notifications, competitor activity affecting your listings, logistics problems - these are a normal part of managing a marketplace account. You will be told what happened, why, and what we did about it.
Not ready for a conversation yet?
Our free UK Market Entry Guide covers VAT, compliance, logistics, and marketplace setup in detail, so you can work through it in your own time before you talk to anyone.
Get Our Free UK Market Entry GuideStill have a question?
If you have a question that is not covered here, the fastest way to answer it is a conversation. We are straightforward about what we do, what we do not do, and whether your situation is one we can genuinely help with.
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