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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

Toys · Private — Gatacre family

Jellycat

A private London soft-toy company that retires its designs every year, refuses to sell everywhere it could, and has turned a plush bunny into something adults collect, queue for and resell.

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

A toy company is supposed to chase every shelf. Jellycat's whole strategy is deciding which shelves are not allowed to have it.

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

Verdict

Own it

Moat

Narrow

Brand · Distribution · 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

Turnover: ≈ £333M
Pre-tax margin: ≈ 42%
Designs reissued after retirement: 0
Advertising campaigns of note: None

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

Unit economics

One medium Bashful Bunny, sold through a stockist (illustrative — the company does not publish unit figures)

The bunny costs less to make than a sandwich, and the company keeps roughly forty pence of every pound it invoices — a figure I have reverse-engineered from the filed accounts, not from the company. Every pound above the £3.50 of fabric and stuffing is paid for by the promise that this exact bunny will one day be unavailable.

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 the 2025 accounts show turnover flat or down and the pre-tax margin back below thirty percent, the demand was the platform's and not the mechanism's, and I would move to watch it. If instead turnover keeps growing while the retirement list gets longer, the mechanism is doing the work and the verdict stands.

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.

No mechanisms in common

These two share no tagged mechanism, which usually means the comparison is about contrast rather than pattern — a useful thing to know before you start writing.