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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: GRGD

Groupe Dynamite

A Montreal mall retailer that runs two women's fashion banners off one design studio and one supply chain: Garage for the teenager, Dynamite for the woman with a job, and, since its 2024 listing, one of the most profitable mall retailers anywhere.

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

Groupe Dynamite does not try to be one brand for everyone. It is two brands for two customers, with one factory floor of decisions underneath them, and the margin lives in the floor.

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

Verdict

Watch it

Own it

Moat

Narrow

Process power · Scale economics

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

Revenue: C$1.31B
Gross margin: 63.8%
Inventory turnover: 9.85x
Bank debt: Nil

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

Unit economics

C$100 of sales, fiscal 2025 (reported group figures, scaled; not a single item)

Nearly thirty cents of every dollar becomes operating profit, which is extraordinary for a mall apparel chain — most mall chains earn well under half of that. The gap is not a cheaper factory; it is a smaller markdown bill, because the company buys late, buys small and sells through before it has to discount.

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 comparable sales hold above 8% through fiscal 2026 and 2027 while the gross margin stays above 62%, and the UK stores trade like the North American ones, the process is a durable advantage rather than a hot streak, and I would own it on any further fall. If instead comparable sales turn negative and the margin slips back toward the high 50s, the boom was the cycle, and the multiple would have further to fall.

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

own the customer vertical integration