Project Maat
A diagnostic and fix programme for retail estates. Customer-equivalent visits, four diagnostic lenses, every observation paired with a fix and a named owner.
Imperium delivered control.
Maat delivers the truth.
The name
Maat is the ancient Egyptian principle of truth, balance and right order. The Pharaoh's task was to maintain Maat across the kingdom. Project Maat does the same job across a retail estate.
In-house teams, however good, develop blind spots. The store walk becomes routine. The issues become wallpaper. Something that would have been a fire alarm on day one is, by month nine, just there, tolerated. The customer, who has none of that history, feels every gap.
Most of what surfaces isn't strategic. It's the paper cuts: the small daily frustrations for customers and colleagues alike, trivial individually, cumulatively damaging. Maat surfaces them, owns them, fixes them.
Run in parallel on every visit, so nothing falls between teams.
Availability, gap discipline, replenishment cadence, in-day chase, hygiene routines, partner deployment.
Planogram compliance, shelf-edge accuracy, overfill versus underfill, adjacencies, signage hierarchy.
Value clarity, promotional mechanics, point-of-sale execution, mission-led navigation, local relevance.
Space allocation versus rate of sale, secondary displays, mission-led ranging, where space could be reallocated.
Four levers, not one number. Each independently moves the dial. Together they compound.
Lever 01
Bakery fuller for longer, sandwich units stocked through lunch, in-day chase on lines selling out from 5pm.
Lever 02
Mission-led ranging, removing slow lines that crowd out winners. Ten bays of crisps where two of ambient should sit.
Lever 03
Simpler promotional mechanics, consistent value cues, deal stickers that don't block the price they're advertising.
Lever 04
Signage hierarchy, point-of-sale earning its space, category cues a customer can actually read.
Three from recent work. None spotted by in-house teams: invisible through familiarity. Each photographed, located, paired with a fix, assigned an owner.
Range & space
A Channel Islands forecourt store had ten bays allocated to crisps but condensed its entire ambient and household range into two. Crisps were full and faced; ambient was cluttered and cross-merchandised on a trolley. Customer-mission match: poor. Space-to-sales productivity: poorer.
Operations & merchandising
A laundry bay running value own-label, mid-tier brand, premium and a price-matched line, all on one fixture. The ladder is theoretically there. But where each rung sits, and whether the price-edge story reads consistently, decides if the customer can read it. One price wrong, and the entire price investment is dead on arrival.
Marketing & value
A "Buy any 4 for £7" mechanic ran across the beers fixture, with locally produced cider sitting on the same shelf but outside the deal. No signage to explain why. The customer reads inconsistency; the local product loses share to the deal-eligible alternatives.
A problem in a single site is one too many, but most extrapolate across a hundred stores or more. The visit is the sample; the nationwide deployment is the prize.
Years of walking shop floors, in multi-billion-pound estates and single-fascia operators alike.
2021
Maat prototype. Every fascia visited, 3,000+ images, 1,000+ pages of recommendations.
2023 onwards
600+ stores brought into a controlled operational rhythm and sustained for two years.
Earlier
Methodology origin. Old signage, range gaps, trading inconsistencies surfaced.
A rounding-error investment against material upside. Diagnostic work, not a commodity service.
From £75,000
Scope scales with estate size and category coverage. A smaller scope does not scale linearly downward.
"At £75,000 against a multi-billion-pound business, this sits at the rounding-error end of consultancy spend."
30-minute call to walk through the detail. No commitment.
Talk to Steve