Manufacturing · Modular kitchens
Configurator upsells were discounted below their cost.
This marketing & margin audit surfaced $57k in recurring annual margin in a Manufacturing business, evidenced, senior reviewed, and delivered in 6 days.
The business
A modular kitchen brand sold through an online configurator with default bundle pricing baked directly into the tool. Customers designed their kitchens by selecting finishes and options, and the configurator priced each configuration automatically, so the margin outcome of any given design was determined by pricing logic that had been set up once and rarely revisited.
What triggered the audit
Configured orders consistently carried thinner margins than manually quoted jobs of the same specification, a discrepancy that points straight at the pricing tool itself. The audit priced a representative sample of real configurations down to their fully installed cost, testing whether the configurator’s defaults were protecting margin or quietly giving it away.
What the audit found
The configurator was systematically selling premium options below their true cost. Its default pricing applied standard discounts to upsell finishes and options without accounting for the full installed cost of those choices, and once fitting and associated labor were loaded in, many high spec configurations were being sold at negative contribution. Because the tool priced automatically and consistently, this wasn’t an occasional error; it was a structural leak repeated on every configured order that included the affected premium options. Customers were, in effect, being actively guided by the tool toward high spec choices that lost the brand money, and because configured revenue looked healthy on the surface, the negative contribution stayed buried in the pricing logic. Across the sampled volume it extrapolated to roughly $57k a year of margin the configurator was quietly giving away.
What we changed
Repriced the configurator’s upsells to a positive contribution with fitting and labor fully loaded into every option’s true cost.
Removed the default discounts that had been pushing high spec configured orders underwater on every single sale that included them.
Added a hard margin floor to the configurator, so no configuration can be sold below a defined positive contribution regardless of the options chosen.
Kept the configuration experience open and flexible for customers, correcting only the hidden pricing logic behind it rather than the design freedom itself.
The result
The outcomes were measured for three months after a 90 day implementation period. The published chart shows margin on configured upsell orders moving from −3% to +8%, an 11 percentage point increase, after fitting and associated labor were included in installed cost. $57k a year recovered by stopping the configurator selling premium finishes below installed cost, an annual figure equal to 10× the $5,950 Audit + Sprint fee. For any manufacturer with an online configurator, the leak was structural: default discounts pushed high spec orders to negative contribution on every sale that included them. If your tool prices automatically and hasn’t been checked against fully loaded cost, it may be actively guiding customers toward choices that lose you money. It takes pricing real configurations to installed cost to see it. A fixed fee audit does that in days and installs a margin floor that holds.
From kickoff to signed off findings: 6 days, inside our fixed 5–7 day window.
What the client said
$57k a year found in 6 days
Margin on configured upsell orders: −3% → +8%
“Configured orders always carried thinner margins than manual quotes. Cristian priced real configurations down to installed cost: default discounts were selling premium finishes at a loss on every order. A margin floor in the tool ended it.”
Cristian BragauSenior Auditor · signed this audit off