Consumer & retail
Companies that make or sell what people buy every day, from food and clothes to shops and brands.
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.
Open jobs
| Job | Firm | Level | Stage | Posted |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mergers and acquisitions · Consumer |  JPMorgan | Associate | 3+ years | 2 weeks |
| Equity research · Consumer |  Orbis | Analyst | 2+ years | 3 weeks |
| Investment banking · Consumer |  Citigroup | Analyst | 2+ years | 4 weeks |
| Investment banking · Consumer | JPMorgan | Associate | 3+ years | 4 months |
| Investment banking · Consumer |  Goldman Sachs | Associate | 3+ years | 7 months |