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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 · Osit (private; co-founders control, Nuo holds 30%)

Subdued

A Rome-based, founder-controlled teen fashion chain that designs for girls aged 12 to 20, sells almost entirely through its own stores, gets a new style from sketch to shelf in about a week, and has grown from €41 million of sales in 2013 to €196.5 million in 2025.

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

Brandy Melville made fitting in the scarce thing. Subdued made the shop the scarce thing, and then opened more shops than anyone expected.

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 · Brand · Distribution

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: €196.5M
EBITDA margin: 31.4%
Design to store: 7 days
Sales abroad: ≈ 70%

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

Unit economics

One €26 crew-neck T-shirt sold in a Subdued store (illustrative — the company does not publish gross margin)

Only the last line is anchored in a reported figure, and I have reverse-engineered the rest. The point survives the estimating: a company that sells nearly everything at full price in its own room keeps roughly two-thirds of the net price after the garment, and the speed of the supply chain is what lets it avoid the markdowns that eat that margin elsewhere.

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 2026 results show the US stores trading at or above the European average per store, with the group margin holding above 25%, the brand travels and I would move to own it. If US expansion stalls at a handful of stores, or Italian sales start to fall, it is a strong European regional chain priced like one.

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