Axelmarj: Margin-Aware Promotion Planning for DTC Brands
Peak events decide the year, and a flat sitewide discount quietly gives away the margin you earned through the rest of it. Axelmarj is the tool we are building to plan promotions product by product, across your own store and every marketplace you sell on, with every price held above a margin floor you set. It is pre-launch. Early access opens through the waitlist.
Built by Axelwin, the Hamburg-based international ecommerce agency. No product yet, no paid plan, no customers to point at. Waitlist only.
Contribution margin protected across a single peak event, compared with a flat sitewide sale, in a model run on a sample 25-SKU cosmetics catalogue.
- Catalogue tiered from sales history and stock cover
- Every price checked against your margin floor, after marketplace commissions
- Launch and revert scheduled per channel
Illustrative model output on sample data. Not a client result and not a forecast for any specific brand.
Axelmarj is a margin-aware promotion planning tool for DTC brands, in development at Axelwin. It is built for the peak calendar: Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Mother's Day, Christmas, Ramadan and Eid, and Singles' Day 11.11. The plan it produces tiers your catalogue from real sales and stock data and keeps every price above a margin floor you set, after marketplace commissions, on your own store and on each marketplace. The name comes from the Turkish words kâr and marj, profit and margin. It is pre-launch, and early access is allocated from the waitlist.
The Spreadsheet Works Once. Then the Event Calendar Arrives.
Planning a promotion product by product is perfectly doable in a spreadsheet the first time. Brands trading Europe seriously do it several times a year, across their own store and several marketplaces, each with its own commission, its own calendar and its own price rules. At that frequency the spreadsheet becomes the bottleneck. It is rebuilt from scratch for every event, it is out of date the moment stock moves, and one person understands it.
So the plan collapses into the one move that scales without work: a flat discount across the whole catalogue. It is fast, it looks decisive, and it treats a product that would have sold at full price exactly like stock that has not moved in six months. Revenue holds up, the event reads as a success, and contribution margin is where the cost shows up.
Marketplaces widen the gap. Commission comes off the top on every channel, at a different rate per platform and sometimes per category, so one discount leaves three different margins across your store, Zalando and Kaufland. Nobody is checking that by hand at 02:00 the night before Black Friday.
The spreadsheet does not scale
Planning per product by hand works once. Several events a year, across several channels, it gets rebuilt from scratch every time and goes stale the moment stock moves.
Flat discounts hit the wrong products
One percentage for the whole catalogue gives the same cut to the products that would have sold at full price as to the stock nobody wants.
Commission changes the answer per channel
Marketplace commission comes off the top at a different rate per platform and sometimes per category. The same price is healthy in one channel and below cost in another.
A Plan Per Product, With a Floor Under Every Price
This is the target scope of the product. Features ship in stages, and waitlist members see each one first and decide what moves up the list.
Tiers the catalogue from real data
Sales history and stock cover decide which products carry the event and which need moving, so the discount follows what each product is actually doing instead of a category guess.
Holds a margin floor per channel
Every proposed price is checked against the floor you set, after marketplace commissions, so a plan that clears on your own store also clears on Zalando, Otto and Kaufland.
Keeps the brand in charge
You set the discount range, the margin floor and the goal for the event, with overrides at category level. The tool proposes, you approve. Nothing is priced without you.
Approves and schedules once
Approve the plan once and launch and revert are handled per channel on the dates you set, so prices do not sit discounted for a week after the event ends.
Built for Whoever Builds the Plan
Mid-market DTC brands in Europe
Brands running their own store plus marketplaces in several countries, with enough SKUs and enough events a year that promotion planning has become a real job nobody owns.
SMEs selling online
Smaller teams running the same promotion calendar against the same margin pressure, where the plan is built by whoever has time that week rather than by someone whose job it is.
Axelmarj does one job: the promotion plan. It is not a pricing suite and it is not trying to replace one. Plenty of teams with serious systems in place still build the actual event plan in a spreadsheet, because the system was bought for something else. Wherever that plan gets made in your business today, this is a tool for making it.
The Category Exists. It Was Never Priced for the Mid-Market.
Unified price and promotion optimisation is a mature enterprise category, scoped and priced for companies with a pricing team to run it. We went looking for the version that plans a brand's own store and its marketplaces in the same breath, for the people who do not have that team, and did not find it.
So the edge is not the maths. A margin floor is arithmetic and anyone can compute one. It is that the commission sits inside the calculation instead of next to it. It is that one plan covers your own store and every marketplace, not just the channel the software was bought for. And it is that the whole thing stays small enough to use in the week before the event, which is when the plan actually gets made.
The reason Axelwin is the one building it: peak season planning is what the team has done every year since 2015, in the German market since 2020, from the marketplace platform side and from the brand side. Axelmarj is the planning method we already run for marketplace management clients, turned into a tool brands can run themselves.
Join the Axelmarj Waitlist
The waitlist is doing real work right now: it decides which channels, which integrations and which parts of the planning flow get built first. Tell us how you sell and what your last peak event looked like, and that goes straight into the roadmap.
- First group invited when there is a usable version
- A walkthrough of the working prototype and the sample model behind it
- Direct input on which marketplace integrations come first
- No price, no contract, no obligation to buy anything later
Need this for an event that is already in the calendar? The waitlist will not help you in time. The peak season pilot will: we build the plan with you by hand this season, for a limited number of brands.
Request early access
We contact you about Axelmarj early access only. No newsletter, no follow-up sequence, and you can ask to be removed at any time.
Not Waiting? We Will Build This Year's Peak Plan With You.
The software is pre-launch, so this season we run the method by hand instead. You send one catalogue export: product, category, price, unit cost, inventory and recent sales. We build the margin-aware plan, tiered and phased, with the floor held per channel. You apply it, or we do.
A small number of brands only, for Black Friday and Christmas, because the work is done by hand. Applying commits you to nothing, and if the fit is not there we will say so.
What Axelmarj Is, and What It Is Not Yet
You are going to ask, so here it is before you have to. Nothing on this page describes software you can buy today.
Pre-product and pre-revenue
Axelmarj is in development. There is no paid plan, no live version and no customers yet. The waitlist is how early access gets allocated when there is something to use.
A working prototype on sample data
An interactive prototype exists and runs on a sample cosmetics catalogue with multi-platform commission modelling. It is not connected to any live store or marketplace account.
Built with Claude, built by an operator
The product is being built with Claude as the core engine, by a team that has planned peak season campaigns every year since 2015 and in the German market since 2020, from both the marketplace platform side and the brand side.
Axelmarj, Answered
Can I use Axelmarj today?
Not yet. Axelmarj is pre-launch and in active development, so there is no live product to sign up for. Joining the waitlist puts you in the first group invited to use it, and in the meantime it gives you a say in which parts get built first.
What is the difference between the waitlist and the Black Friday pilot?
The waitlist is for the software: no commitment, no date, and nothing is asked of you. The peak season pilot is work we do by hand this season for a small number of brands: you send a catalogue export, we build the margin-aware plan with you, and you apply it or we do. If you have an event in the calendar now, the pilot is the one that helps. If you want the tool when it exists, the waitlist is the one.
How is this different from the discount codes my store already has?
Your store applies the discount you decide on. Axelmarj is being built to decide the discount: it tiers the catalogue from sales and stock data, prices each product separately, and checks every price against a margin floor you set after marketplace commissions. The output is a plan you approve, which your store and your marketplace channels then execute.
Does it connect to Shopify and to my marketplace accounts?
Not yet. Today there is a working prototype that runs on sample catalogue data with multi-platform commission modelling, and no live integration with any store or marketplace account. Which integrations get built first is one of the things we are asking waitlist members.
How does it handle marketplace commissions?
Commission is treated as part of the cost, not an afterthought. The margin floor is checked after the commission for each channel, so the same product can carry a different discount on your own store than on a marketplace, and a price that would drop below your floor on one channel is never proposed for that channel.
Who decides the final prices?
You do. You set the discount range, the margin floor and the goal for the event, and you can override any tier or category. The tool proposes a plan and shows what each decision does to units and revenue first, then to margin. Nothing goes live until you approve it.
Which events is it built for?
The peak calendar that mid-market brands in Europe actually trade: Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Mother's Day, Christmas, Ramadan and Eid, and Singles' Day 11.11. Any event where a flat sitewide discount is the fallback is the case Axelmarj is built for.
What does joining the waitlist commit me to?
Nothing. There is no price, no contract and no obligation to buy anything later. You can ask to be removed at any time, and the details you share are used to shape the product and to contact you about early access, nothing else.
Get in Before the First Invite Goes Out
Axelmarj is being built now, and the waitlist is deciding what gets built first. Two minutes of detail about how you sell puts you in the first group invited, and puts your channels near the front of the queue.
Join the Early Access Waitlist