Consumer & Retail

Consumer & Retail is one of London's top-three deal flow sectors, sitting alongside financials and industrials, so the job posting in front of you covers a busy patch. Coverage spans FMCG/CPG, luxury, apparel, food & beverage, restaurants/QSR, e-commerce/DTC, grocery and specialty/travel retail - eight sub-sectors with wildly different unit economics. FMCG trades 12-18x EV/EBITDA on volume growth and pricing power; luxury 15-30x on brand moats and scarcity narratives; grocery just 6-10x on thin margins and capital intensity. Knowing which box the target sits in matters before you touch a multiple. Your daily vocabulary will be like-for-like growth, sell-through rate, markdown rate, inventory days, gross and EBITDA margin, plus 4-wall EBITDA for stores. For DTC roles, expect CAC, CLV, return rate economics and cohort analysis. The trinity to internalise: brand power, inventory discipline, customer economics. Know the brand, interrogate the inventory, trust the like-for-likes. Diligence is where analysts earn their keep. Red flags include inventory rising faster than revenue (markdown risk), declining sell-through, deteriorating negative working capital in grocery, CAC inflation with flat LTV in DTC, and lease-adjusted leverage post-IFRS 16. Channel stuffing - pushing stock to wholesalers at quarter-end - is a classic tripwire. Every bulge bracket and most elite boutiques run a dedicated London consumer team, so this is a crowded, well-staffed patch. Technical skills tested in interview and on desk: comps construction, precedent transactions, working capital modelling, inventory analysis. Multiples compressed post-COVID - FMCG now 12-15x versus 16-18x at peak - so understanding why, not just what, is the difference. Read the JD carefully: sub-sector focus tells you whether the work is margin defence, brand valuation or unit economics deep-dives.

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