Entering a new market? Start with the consumer, not the container.
Most market-entry plans begin with logistics because logistics is the part that is easy to write down. It is the part that matters least.
There is a predictable order to market-entry plans. Someone works out the freight cost per unit, someone else finds the distributor margin, and a third person produces a spreadsheet with a landed price in it. By the time anyone asks who is buying the product, the number has been agreed and everything downstream is negotiating with it.
That order is backwards, and it is expensive.
The landed cost is an output, not an input
Landed cost tells you what you can charge. It does not tell you what the product is worth to the person holding it, and those are different questions with different answers.
A fragrance that costs eleven to land in a new market might sell beautifully at forty in a market where imported alternatives are scarce and the customer reads price as quality. The same product might need to clear at eighteen somewhere else, where it is competing with local product on a shelf it does not belong on. The landed cost is identical. The strategy is not.
If you fix the number first, you spend the rest of the project finding a customer who will pay it. Usually you find one, and then quietly damage the brand to keep them.
What to look at first
Who currently buys something adjacent. Not the target customer in the abstract — the person who already spends on imported beauty, or imported fashion, or imported food, in that market, and what tipped them. If that group is small, the market is a distribution question before it is a demand question, and that is a different project with a different budget.
What the shelf looks like. Not the competitor's shelf — the shelf where this product would actually sit. Adjacency, not category. The product competing for the same shelf space is frequently not the product in the same category.
What people already ask. In store, in the group chat, in the reviews of something comparable. The questions people ask are a better brief than any deck written about them.
The order that works
Establish the demand and the price the market will bear. Then work out what it costs to get there — landed cost, margin, compliance, partner terms. Then decide whether the gap between the two is a business.
It is normal for that answer to be no. It is much cheaper to find out before anyone has signed a distribution agreement.
