Operations
Availability, gap discipline, replenishment cadence, in-day chase, hygiene routines, partner deployment.
Every store audited as your customer sees it, then fixed.
A diagnostic and fix programme for retail estates. Customer-equivalent visits, four diagnostic lenses, every observation paired with a fix and a named owner.
Daring to see what the customer really sees. Not for the faint-hearted.
Maat is the ancient Egyptian goddess of truth, justice, and order. In hieroglyphs she is depicted with an ostrich feather — the feather against which every heart was weighed. We named the programme after her because that is what it does: it weighs what is actually happening in your stores against what should be happening, and tells you the truth.
Why this, why now
In-house teams, however good, develop blind spots. The store walk becomes routine. The issues become wallpaper. Something that would have been a fire alarm on day one is, by month nine, just there, tolerated. The customer, who has none of that history, feels every gap.
Most of what surfaces isn't strategic. It's the paper cuts: the small daily frustrations for customers and colleagues alike, trivial individually, cumulatively damaging. Maat surfaces them, owns them, fixes them.
The four lenses
Run in parallel on every visit, so nothing falls between teams.
Range & merchandising
Planogram compliance, shelf-edge accuracy, overfill versus underfill, adjacencies, signage hierarchy.
Marketing
Value clarity, promotional mechanics, point-of-sale execution, mission-led navigation, local relevance.
Trading & space
Space allocation versus rate of sale, secondary displays, mission-led ranging, where space could be reallocated.
Where the upside comes from
Four levers, not one number. Each independently moves the dial. Together they compound.
Lever 01
Trading & sales execution
Bakery fuller for longer, sandwich units stocked through lunch, in-day chase on lines selling out from 5pm.
Lever 02
Range & space productivity
Mission-led ranging, removing slow lines that crowd out winners. Ten bays of crisps where two of ambient should sit.
Lever 03
Value perception
Simpler promotional mechanics, consistent value cues, deal stickers that don't block the price they're advertising.
Lever 04
Messaging & navigation clarity
Signage hierarchy, point-of-sale earning its space, category cues a customer can actually read.
What we typically find
Three from recent work. None spotted by in-house teams: invisible through familiarity. Each photographed, located, paired with a fix, assigned an owner.
Range & space
Ten bays of crisps where two of ambient should sit
A Channel Islands forecourt store had ten bays allocated to crisps but condensed its entire ambient and household range into two. Crisps were full and faced; ambient was cluttered and cross-merchandised on a trolley. Customer-mission match: poor. Space-to-sales productivity: poorer.
Operations & merchandising
The price hierarchy customers actually read
A laundry bay running value own-label, mid-tier brand, premium and a price-matched line, all on one fixture. The ladder is theoretically there. But where each rung sits, and whether the price-edge story reads consistently, decides if the customer can read it. One price wrong, and the entire price investment is dead on arrival.
Marketing & value
Local cider excluded from the deal mechanic next to it
A "Buy any 4 for £7" mechanic ran across the beers fixture, with locally produced cider sitting on the same shelf but outside the deal. No signage to explain why. The customer reads inconsistency; the local product loses share to the deal-eligible alternatives.
A problem in a single site is one too many, but most extrapolate across a hundred stores or more. The visit is the sample; the nationwide deployment is the prize.
The model has run before, at scale
Years of walking shop floors, in multi-billion-pound estates and single-fascia operators alike.
2021
Channel Islands Co-Op
Maat prototype. Every fascia visited, 3,000+ images, 1,000+ pages of recommendations.
2023 onwards
Project Imperium, M&S
600+ stores brought into a controlled operational rhythm and sustained for two years.
Earlier
Waitrose
Methodology origin. Old signage, range gaps, trading inconsistencies surfaced.
The investment
A rounding-error investment against material upside. Diagnostic work, not a commodity service.
Quote on enquiry
Scope scales with estate size and category coverage. A smaller scope does not scale linearly downward.
- 25 individual store visits, prioritised by geography
- One report per store, plus split reports by area
- Server-platform access, every observation paired with fix and owner
- Best-practice callouts from competitor visits
- A day in the office presenting findings to each business area, with Q&A
- Programme commences within one week of agreement
"Against a multi-billion-pound business, this sits at the rounding-error end of consultancy spend. The cost of not knowing is the bigger number."
Talk to Steve
30-minute call to walk through the detail. No commitment.
Scope scales with estate and category coverage.