A category built from nothing: 300 SKUs, 40 vendors, 28% more margin.
Sector
Women's evening dresses, DTC and marketplace
Scale
New category
Countries
Turkey, China, UAE
Period
18 months
Where it started.
There was no supplier base, no sales history, no costing architecture and no process. The brief was to create a category and make it profitable, with a cross-functional team of seven across buying, sourcing and product development.
The work, in order.
- Built the costing and MRP architecture from scratch so every style had a landed cost before it was committed.
- Sourced and qualified more than 40 vendors across Turkey, China and the UAE.
- Ran a test-and-scale buying model: 50 units to test, scaling past 200 only on evidence.
- Launched more than 300 SKUs across eighteen months on that rule.
- Pivoted vendors and shortened lead times where cost or reliability failed.
- Used customer data to set buying cycles, and capsule launches to build traffic.
SKUs in 18 months
Gross margin
Vendors built from scratch
Deadstock
Web traffic
Why this matters to you.
This is the closest case to a founder's situation: no data, no supplier base, real money at risk. The test-and-scale rule is the single most transferable part: small first buys, evidence, then depth behind what works.
This engagement was carried out as an employee of the business described, not as Prox client work. Prox is a new practice, and client case studies will be added as engagements complete.