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The template only earns its keep if you actually put two cases next to each other.

This is the reason every teardown answers the same questions in the same order. Put a luxury house beside a console platform and the differences stop being vibes — one is refusing sales to protect a price, the other is selling below cost to collect a toll, and both are defending a moat.

Case ACase B

Retail · TSX: ATZ

Aritzia

A Vancouver retailer that invented a price tier between the mall and the maison, fills its boutiques entirely with brands it owns, and has spent the last decade opening large, expensive stores in American cities while its peers were closing theirs.

Technology · NASDAQ: AMZN

Amazon

Runs a near-breakeven retail operation at enormous scale, and earns essentially all of its profit from renting out the two things that operation forced it to build — computing capacity and shelf placement.

The thesis in one line

Aritzia's trick is that the shop looks like a curated boutique and earns like a factory. Every label on the rack is the same company wearing a different name.

The store is not the business. The store is the customer acquisition cost for the businesses.

Verdict

Watch it

Own it

Moat

Narrow

Brand · Counter-positioning · Process power

Wide

Scale economics · Network effects · Process power · Switching costs

Porter's five forces

Competitive rivalry

Threat of new entrants

Threat of substitutes

Buyer power

Supplier power

Competitive rivalry

Threat of new entrants

Threat of substitutes

Buyer power

Supplier power

Headline figures

Net revenue: C$2.74B
Gross profit margin: 41.5%
US share of revenue: > 50%
Brands on the rack not owned by Aritzia: 0

Net sales: $638B
AWS share of operating income: ~58%
Retail operating margin: ~5.4%
Third-party share of units: ~60%

Unit economics

One TNA Super Puff jacket, sold at full price in a US boutique — estimated from group margins

There is no wholesaler and no licensor in this table, which is why a mid-priced jacket can carry a designer's gross margin. What eats it is the boutique — the rent, the marble, the staff — and that is deliberate. Aritzia spends on the room what other brands spend on advertising, and the room is harder to copy.

One $50 third-party item sold through Amazon

Amazon captures roughly 38% of the sale price and carries none of the inventory risk. The seller took the risk, paid for the warehouse, and then paid again to be found in a search of Amazon's own catalogue.

What would change her mind

If new US boutiques opened in FY2026 and FY2027 reach the productivity of the first sixty within two years, the second act is proven and the growth multiple is earned; I would own it through the next stumble. If instead US comparable-store growth turns negative while the company is still opening at pace, the tier does not travel as far as the plan assumes, and the shares should be valued as a mature Canadian retailer with an American side business.

If AWS revenue growth falls below 15% for two consecutive quarters while segment operating margin also declines, the cloud business is being commoditised rather than merely contested, and the capex is being spent defending share rather than buying growth. That combination — decelerating growth and compressing margin at the same time — breaks the thesis outright. A single weak quarter on either measure alone does not.

2 mechanisms in common

vertical integration own the customer