Men's grooming · UK + Ireland + DACH · Growth tier
Hartson & Co.
approx. £12M revenue, 26 staff
“We hired MarketWatch in October. By Christmas we'd repriced two SKUs, repositioned a launch, and stopped flying blind on Bramleigh. The Monday brief is the only intelligence document anyone on my team actually reads.”
The problem
Hartson's brand and pricing teams were ten people across two countries. Their existing competitive intelligence amounted to a Slack channel called #spotted, into which roughly four observations dropped per month. They were frequently reactive — a competitor would cut prices on a Monday and Hartson would notice on a Thursday because a customer service ticket mentioned it. They had no view at all on Bramleigh's promotional cadence and were guessing about North Atlas's UK launch timing.
The engagement
We onboarded Hartson onto the Growth tier in October 2025. Eight competitors were configured in week one, with custom thresholds tightened on the £15-£30 SKU band and on review-sentiment sensitivity. Siobhan McGrath ran the configuration session and writes the editorial review on the first three weeks of briefs before handing the cadence off to the Compass agent. The brief lands in James, his commercial director and his merch lead's inboxes every Monday at 09:00 BST.
Results
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Time to detect a competitor price cut | median 71 hours | median 4 hours 12 minutes |
| Hours/week of internal scrolling for intel | ~9 hours | 0 hours |
| Reactive merch decisions per month | ~5 | 0 (all moved to before-the-fact) |
| Time-to-action on a competitor launch | ~6 days | median 23 hours |
In their words
James Hartson called us on a Wednesday in September 2025 with a story we now hear once a quarter. Bramleigh & Co. had run a five-day price cut on their flagship aftershave — the same SKU Hartson competes most directly against — and Hartson had only realised on day four because a customer service ticket name-checked the Bramleigh price.
When we ran the historical price-tracking pass on Bramleigh in week one of onboarding, we discovered something James had genuinely not known: Bramleigh had executed the same five-day cut three times in 2024 and twice in 2023, always at the start of the school summer holidays or in the run-up to Father's Day. The pattern was visible the moment we lined the data up. Hartson hadn't seen it because no human was lining the data up.
The Compass weekly brief now flags these moments before they happen. The week before the predicted Bramleigh cut, the brief notes: "We expect a 5-7 day promotional cut on Bramleigh's Daily Sandalwood Aftershave starting around 17 May based on the 2023 and 2024 calendars. Hartson currently has no scheduled response." James's team chooses what to do with that — sometimes they match, sometimes they hold, sometimes they pull a different SKU's price down to absorb the demand. The point is the choice is theirs and the choice is on time.
Time-to-action is the metric that James cared most about, and it is the one that has moved the most. Median time from a competitor's launch event to Hartson having a written internal response went from six days (and frequently never) to twenty-three hours. The brief makes it possible because every finding has a recommendation; the recommendation makes it possible because James's team has agreed on what "good" looks like for each rule type.