All pricing & margin, latest first.
Pricing the croissant: a margin walkthrough you can copy in 12 minutes
From bag-of-flour cost to till receipt — exactly how to land on a price that pays for itself, the oven, and the morning shift. Worked example with real numbers from a Berlin bakery on nouz.
Ibrahim Ölmez
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07 May
How to price a haircut: the four-input formula salons under-use
Chair time × stylist rate + product COGS + overhead slice, then a margin target. Most salons price on instinct and miss two of the four inputs. Worked example with real numbers — and a copy-paste pricing ladder for a four-chair boutique salon.
Ibrahim Ölmez
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29 Apr
The Shopify true-margin calculator: what's left after fees, refunds and shipping
Shopify reports show gross sales. EBIT lives three deductions further down. Here's the line-by-line walk from order total to true per-order margin, with a worked example and the seven leak points most stores under-count.
Ibrahim Ölmez
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19 Apr
The retail markup formula owner-operators actually use (not 3x cost)
The "keystone" 2x markup is a relic from department stores in the 1950s. Real owner-operator retail in 2026 runs on a four-layer markup formula that accounts for category turnover, shrink, markdown allowance and target margin. Worked example with a knitwear shop.
Ibrahim Ölmez
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07 Apr
How shipping costs quietly eat your e-commerce margin (and the threshold maths)
On a €40 average order, every €1 of unrecovered shipping is 2,5 percentage points of EBIT margin. The "free shipping over €50" promise is sometimes the most expensive marketing decision a small store makes. Here's how to model the threshold properly.
Ibrahim Ölmez
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24 Mar
The 90-day menu-engineering quadrant: stars, dogs, plowhorses, puzzles
Plot every menu item on two axes — popularity and contribution margin — and you get four quadrants that tell you exactly what to promote, kill, reprice or rebuild. Here's the 90-day routine, the quadrant maths, and how to read the chart in 30 seconds.
Ibrahim Ölmez
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13 Mar
Service-line pricing for boutique salons: cuts, colour, blow-dries and the bundle
A boutique salon usually offers 12-20 distinct services across three stylist tiers. Pricing each one consistently — and pricing the bundle so it pulls — is the difference between a healthy 22% margin and a quiet 8% one. Here's the full service-line ladder.
Ibrahim Ölmez
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28 Feb
Subscription pricing economics: when bag 3 is the only one that pays
A coffee subscription, a wine club, a soap-of-the-month — every recurring product runs on the same unit economics. The first bag usually loses money on acquisition. The second covers the cost to serve. Only the third onwards is profit. Here's the maths.
Ibrahim Ölmez
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14 Feb
The true cost of a 15% discount code (it's not 15%)
A 15% discount code on a product with 40% gross margin doesn't cost you 15% — it costs you 37,5% of your contribution margin. Plus the cannibalisation. Plus the brand re-anchor. Here's the maths every owner-operator should run before pressing send on the next "Save 15%" email.
Ibrahim Ölmez
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30 Jan
Bundle pricing without bleeding margin: the gift-set maths
A gift bundle reads as a discount to the customer, but priced from the cost stack it can be margin-accretive — fewer transactions, lower packaging cost per unit, shared shipping. Here's the maths that turns a "save 15%" headline into a +6-point margin lift.
Ibrahim Ölmez
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18 Dec