Eureka Case 30 min Undergrad

Going Direct

You are Sara, 46, CEO of Belarte Cocina, a Spanish premium kitchen-appliance manufacturer based in Vitoria. For 22 years you have sold exclusively through retailers — El Corte Inglés, MediaMarkt, Worten, and independent kitchen showrooms. Your strategy team has just delivered a 60-page case for going direct-to-consumer.

The situation

The DTC argument: premium consumers increasingly research online and buy online. Smeg, KitchenAid, Bertazzoni — every premium peer either has DTC or is launching it. Belarte's wholesale margin is 38%; a DTC sale at the same retail price would earn 56%. The math, on paper, is irresistible.

The problem: launching DTC is not just a sales-channel decision. It requires finance to fund inventory and marketing, ops to build fulfillment and returns, marketing to construct a consumer-facing brand from a B2B brand, and HR to staff functions Belarte has never had. The four must work together. If any of them is significantly under-invested, the launch fails — and the existing retailer relationships are damaged in the process.

Your job in this case: read where each of the four functions stands today, decide the year-1 investment across all four, and commit to a launch shape. The integration is the strategy — under-funding any single function destroys the case for going direct at all.

The decision

What launch shape do you commit to?

  • A · Full launch in 12 months
  • B · Staged: 2 product lines, single region, 18 months
  • C · Don't launch DTC

The rest of the case is locked

The data, the calculations, the decision itself and what happens next open with your institution's access code.

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