Grow the sales that grow profit, in stores and online.
AI-enabled operating models for better business performance
Formalus works with multi-site and multi-channel retailers across Europe & MENA, from store estates with ecommerce to online-led retailers with stores, click and collect or marketplaces. We help leadership improve trading contribution, promotion performance and profitable customer growth: redesigning the commercial decisions behind them, building the investment case and showing where AI and machine learning can add measurable value.
Best fit: 20–500 stores or trading locations, with central responsibility for trading. A guide, not a cut-off. Including consumer electronics, home and office, fashion and apparel, health and beauty, and other specialist chains.
Headline measure: incremental contribution per promotion.
Commercial AI transformation for mobile, retail and membership organisations across Europe & MENA.
Michael Williamson has run retail commercial decisions across stores and online, with the numbers on the line.
More sales do not always mean more profit.
Commercial AI transformation starts with the money. A promotion can lift sales and still lose it.
Margin is harder to win back than ever. In the UK alone, the British Retail Consortium estimates that retailers’ employment costs rose by £6.5bn over two years (BRC, 2026), while consumers stay cautious and promotional activity stays heavy. Every pound of margin given away on a promotion that did not need it now matters more.
Where a successful-looking promotion leaks margin.
A better demand forecast or promotion-response model does not fix this on its own. Profit improves only when pricing, promotion, stock and customer decisions change, and the benefit exceeds the cost.
One customer. Several channels. One commercial result.
A customer may research on a phone, buy in a store, collect an online order or return it somewhere else. When each channel is judged on its own numbers, one team can hit its target while the business as a whole earns less.
- Stores
- Websites
- Mobile apps
- Click and collect
- Marketplaces
- Loyalty and direct digital
- Fulfilment and returns
- Click-and-collect orders are credited to ecommerce while stores carry the cost
- Stores are judged on sales that include costly collections and returns
- Loyalty rewards customers who would have bought anyway
- Each team defines contribution differently
- Common commercial definitions across channels
- Clear decision rights and cross-channel approval rules
- Contribution measures by customer, product and channel
- One owner for each enterprise outcome
- A defensible case for any analytics or AI investment
Relevant experience: at Staples Europe, Michael centralised 19 country teams into a single hub, with marketing, analytics and promotions run across around 800 stores and 19 websites together.
Why Formalus, and not another platform, pilot or consultancy?
Each can play an important part. Formalus does the step before them: deciding which commercial changes are worth making, how the work should change, and whether the investment is justified.
Your trading, ecommerce and analytics teams
Know your ranges, customers and data best. Changing decisions that cut across trading, ecommerce, finance and stores is hard to lead from inside one of them.
A pricing, promotion, loyalty or AI platform
Runs decisions at scale, and a pilot shows what a model can do. Neither decides which rules are worth running, or whether the return justifies the spend.
A large consultancy or systems integrator
Brings capacity for programmes across the whole business. Scope and price usually reflect that scale, and integrators naturally start from the system.
Formalus brings retail P&L experience across stores and online, machine learning applied to promotions and pricing, and an independent investment case measured against a baseline: the technology you need, when you need it.
Price, promotion and customer decisions are shared across trading, ecommerce, stores and finance. The redesigned workflow gives each a clear owner, trusted data and controlled access, with governance designed in from the start.
He has led retail commercial decisions at scale.
As Vice President of Marketing & Analytics for Europe, Michael Williamson was accountable for how a multi-country, multi-channel retailer won and kept customers, and what it spent doing so.
He centralised 19 country teams into a single hub, specified and built the European CRM platform that served 30,000 customer segments from it, and led the data scientists who assessed retail and online promotions and built the dynamic pricing models for the websites. A team of 165 people and a €110M budget sat behind it.
Staples Europe had seen seven years of year-on-year decline as Amazon reshaped the stationery market. Eighteen months after these changes, it returned to year-on-year growth across Europe for the first time in seven years.
What carries into Formalus is practical: analysis pays only when trading decisions change with it, and someone is accountable for whether they paid.
€400M+online sales
Staples Europe ecommerce.
+45%digital, year on year
Staples Europe online growth.
7 yearsof decline reversed
First year-on-year growth across Europe in seven years.
“Michael has one of the strongest strategic minds that I have come across in business. He demonstrated a great ability to analyse and understand customer needs and experience particularly in a complex multichannel environment.
Michael is also a great listener to not only customers but his teams and colleagues which made him a trusted colleague.”
The same sales uplift can produce very different financial results.
A simplified example. The figures are illustrative; your own data decides the real answer.
Two promotions, each adding £100k of sales.
| Promotion A | Promotion B | |
|---|---|---|
| Margin on the extra sales | £40k | £40k |
| Discount on sales that would have happened anyway | −£25k | −£10k |
| Contribution lost on displaced sales* | −£15k | −£5k |
| Returns and stock effects | −£5k | −£3k |
| Contribution added | −£5k | +£22k |
Same sales uplift, opposite effect on profit.
*Contribution forgone on products whose sales moved to the promoted line, stated as contribution, not revenue.
What a full business case would add.
The table is deliberately simple. For a multi-channel retailer, a full case would also test effects it does not show:
- Delivery and click-and-collect costs on the extra online orders.
- Online return rates, where they differ from stores.
- Whether the promotion changes a customer’s later spending in either channel, not just this basket.
Additional effects only; nothing above is counted twice. A framework, not a result.
To size it for your business: take the gap between the best and worst promotion, and multiply it by the number of promotions you run a year.
What a Value Map produces.
Two exhibits from the Value Map, shown with illustrative examples, not client results. The heatmap shows where the money is; the data-gap register shows what the business cannot yet see. Every unanswerable question becomes a requirement.
| Value question | Answerable today? | Why not | Becomes a requirement |
|---|---|---|---|
| What share of baskets stack promotions? | No | The till does not log every promotion applied | Capture every promotion applied per basket, in store and online |
| Which of last year’s promotions added contribution? | Partly | Sales uplift is reported, not contribution | Post-campaign contribution report as standard |
| How much margin moves between stores and online? | Partly | Channels report separately | One contribution definition across channels |
Make promotions pay. Grow customers who are worth growing.
Two executive-sponsored programmes, both delivered through the same Formalus Value Architecture, across stores and online. Your teams keep planning promotions, setting prices and running channels day to day.
Retail Margin & Promotion Performance
Headline measure: incremental contribution per promotion.
Promotions can raise reported sales while lowering incremental contribution, and the effect differs by store, website, category and customer group. The aim is not fewer promotions. It is better decisions about when, where and how to use them.
Decisions that may need redesign
- Which promotions are approved, and on what evidence
- Promotion depth, timing and channel, store by store and online
- How pricing and promotion decisions are shared between trading, ecommerce and finance
- How results are measured once the campaign ends
What Formalus helps establish
- The true incremental contribution of current promotions
- Redesigned approval rules, roles and controls, with pricing governance built into the work
- The investment case, baseline and measures
A typical first paid engagement is a Phase 1 Value Focus day, £2,500, credited in full against a Value Map. Typical Value Map scope: one category, one promotion mechanic or a recent set of promotions, reconstructed to show what really happened to contribution.
Optional Value Blueprint workstreams, added only when the Value Map shows the value: Returns & Promotion Leakage; Store Productivity.
Possible measures
Incremental promotional contribution · gross margin and contribution · discount economics · redemption and loyalty cost · cannibalisation · returns and fulfilment costs · price and promotion effectiveness · contribution by store, channel and category
Relevant experience: Staples Europe promotion and price decisioning.
Retail Customer Growth & Profitability
Customer growth is not the same as profitable growth. A customer won through paid search, a loyal store customer and a customer who uses both can carry very different costs and contribution. Best suited where customers are identifiable through loyalty, app or account data.
Decisions that may need redesign
- Where acquisition and loyalty budget goes, by channel and segment
- Which fulfilment and returns options are offered, and to whom
- How growth targets are set against contribution
Possible measures
Customer acquisition cost · acquisition conversion · customer lifetime contribution · repeat purchase · cost to serve · fulfilment and returns economics · contribution by cohort and channel
Typical Value Map scope: the customer journey across stores and online.
Relevant experience: Staples Europe multichannel customer management.
One method. You decide whether to take each next step.
Both retail programmes run through the Formalus Value Architecture. The first step is a Free AI Opportunity Assessment; the typical first paid step is a Phase 1 Value Focus day, £2,500, credited against a Value Map.
- Free Value Signal Free AI Opportunity Assessment Is there enough commercial value to investigate? Free Get Your Free Assessment Sponsor agrees a Value Focus day
- Phase 1 Value Focus Executive Sizing Day How much is at stake, and is a Value Map worth it? £2,500 · one day, credited See Value Focus Sponsor signs the Value Map charter
- Phase 2 Value Map Discovery & Audit Where is value being won and lost? From £15,000 See Value Map Leadership prioritises the workstreams
- Phase 3 Value Blueprint Requirements, Specification & Redesign What must change, and is the investment justified? From £25,000 See Value Blueprint Board approval; baseline locked
- Phase 4 Value Assurance Support through the build Is the build preserving the value case, and are people working the new way? From £5,000 a month See Value Assurance Alongside: your technology partner builds Go-live; assurance complete
- Phase 5 Value Ledger Value Realisation & Optimisation Is the investment delivering attributable value? From £5,000 a month See Value Ledger The next justified Value Map
Your leadership owns the result. We design the change. Your technology partner builds it.
Retail executive leadership
- Owns the commercial targets
- Approves the investment
- Owns the realised outcome
Formalus
- Assesses the opportunity
- Designs the commercial decision changes
- Develops the business case and measures
- Provides Value Assurance and the Value Ledger, as commissioned
Trading, ecommerce, finance and operations
- Provide data and validate assumptions
- Help redesign decisions and processes
- Run the changes day to day
Your technology partner
- Detailed technical design
- Integration and configuration
- Implementation
Every number is labelled: illustrative (an example, like the table above), modelled (from your data and stated assumptions) or measured (against a baseline agreed before the change). Formalus is independent of software, licence and implementation sales, and discloses any referral or delivery-related interest before you decide.
Promotions are lifting sales but not margin.
Nobody can say which campaigns actually made money.
Store and ecommerce teams chase different numbers.
Acquisition costs are rising faster than contribution.
A pricing, promotion, loyalty, CRM or AI investment is on the table.
The board wants a case before a major commercial systems programme.
Improve retail contribution before investing in more technology.
Start with a Free AI Opportunity Assessment with Michael Williamson: a free 60-minute executive discussion, followed by a concise written assessment. We explore whether there is a material commercial opportunity across your stores and online channels.
Usually with the CEO or CFO and the Trading, Commercial or Chief Customer Officer. An initial conversation, not a business case: you leave with an initial view and an honest recommendation, including whether to proceed at all.
Get Your Free Assessment