A K-Beauty Retail Business Plan: The Numbers Section, Line by Line

A founder shows her business plan to the bank. The concept pages are beautiful: the market growth, the brand photos, the TikTok statistics. The numbers page says "year one revenue: 250,000 euros" with nothing underneath it, and the banker's only question is the one the plan cannot answer: where does that number come from? A business plan lives or dies in the numbers section, and the numbers section of a retail plan is not a forecast, it is a machine: put in honest inputs, and it tells you whether the business works before you sign a lease.

This is that machine, line by line, for a K-beauty shop or online store. The bands are planning ranges from the category, not promises; the discipline of building the machine is the point.

The short version

• Revenue is transactions times basket, never a market-share guess: build it from footfall or traffic, conversion and average basket, with a ramp that starts embarrassingly low.
• Gross margin on K-beauty retail typically lands in the 45-to-60-percent band before discounts and shrink; plan with the bottom of the band and let reality beat it.
• Inventory is working capital, not an asset on autopilot: the cash for the second order leaves before the first order has fully sold, and the plan must show the reorder cycle, not just the opening stock.

Revenue: the build, not the dream

Start with transactions. A physical shop: footfall past the door, the share that enters, the share of entrants who buy. A new shop on a decent street might see hundreds pass, dozens enter, and a conversion that starts in the low percentages and climbs with reputation; an online shop builds the same machine from sessions, conversion rate and the marketing spend that buys the sessions. Either way, year one is a ramp: month one is embarrassing, month six is informative, month twelve is the first number you can plan with.

Then the basket. K-beauty's routine logic gives a healthy shop a basket structure of one hero product plus attachments, and average baskets in the category commonly land in the twenty-five-to-fifty-euro band depending on format, with advice-driven shops at the top. Transactions times basket times opening days is the revenue line, and it should fit on one honest line of arithmetic, because every assumption in it is one you can test cheaply before signing anything.

Cost of goods and the margin machine

Wholesale cost of goods in K-beauty retail runs, as a planning band, around 40 to 55 percent of the net selling price, which puts gross margin in the 45-to-60-percent band. Plan at 50 percent, and then be honest about the leaks: the launch discounts, the loyalty mechanics, the damaged testers, the expiry write-offs on slow lines, and the shrinkage every physical shop has. A plan that shows 55 percent gross margin and 3 percent of leaks is a plan; one that shows 62 percent with no leaks is a novel. The margin structure of the category, including why the list margin is not the real margin, is dissected in the margin article and the pricing article.

Operating costs: the lines that kill quietly

Rent and occupancy for a physical shop, sized against the revenue machine, not the other way round; the classic test is occupancy cost as a share of revenue, and if the machine needs heroic conversion to keep that share sane, the location is wrong, not the concept. Staff, including the founder's own time at a real wage, because a plan where the founder works free forever is a plan for burnout with a liquidity buffer. Marketing, which for a new shop is not optional decoration but the cost of the footfall the revenue line assumed. And the small lines that add up to real money: payments and platform fees, packaging, insurance, accounting, and the software stack.

Inventory: the line everyone miscounts

Opening stock is a number; inventory is a cycle. The plan must show stock turning: the opening assortment selling through over its first months while reorders begin within weeks on the fast lines, which means the cash for reordering leaves before the opening stock has fully converted back to cash. The working-capital gap between those two curves is where new shops die with full shelves. The sizing rules, weeks of cover and reorder triggers, come from the reorder cadence article and the inventory sizing article; the plan just has to draw them as cash flows.

The template

K-BEAUTY RETAIL PLAN, numbers page (fill honestly)

REVENUE
  transactions/day ____ x basket EUR ____ x days ____ = EUR/mo
  ramp: m1 __% m3 __% m6 __% m12 __% of the steady number
GROSS MARGIN
  COGS __% of net sales  ->  GM __% (plan 45-55)
  minus leaks (discounts, testers, expiry, shrink) __%
OPEX / month
  rent+occupancy ____  staff (incl. founder) ____
  marketing ____  payments/platform ____
  other (insurance, accounting, software) ____
INVENTORY CASH CYCLE
  opening stock EUR ____  weekly COGS EUR ____
  weeks of cover ____  reorder starts week ____
  cash needed before first stock fully sells: EUR ____
BREAK-EVEN
  monthly GM EUR needed to cover OPEX: ____
  = transactions/day needed: ____  (compare with revenue build)
  month the machine crosses: ____

If the break-even line lands beyond month twelve at honest inputs, the machine is telling you to change the inputs: smaller space, online-first, narrower assortment. That is the plan working, not failing.

Questions buyers ask

What revenue should a first-year K-beauty shop realistically plan?

There is no honest single number, because the machine multiplies local inputs: a city-centre shop with strong footfall and an online store with a marketing budget live in different universes. What honesty looks like is the ramp and the test: a first quarter where the plan expects little and treats everything above it as information, and a break-even transaction count low enough that a normal street and a decent conversion reach it. If your plan needs the best case in every input to survive, the plan is the problem.

How do banks and investors read a K-beauty plan specifically?

As a retail plan with a category question attached. They read the machine: the revenue build, the margin honesty, the cash cycle. Then they ask the two category questions any informed reader asks in 2026: is the demand durable (the export and market data say yes, and the plan should cite them), and does the founder understand the compliance shape (one paragraph on sourcing route and Responsible Person answers it). A plan that handles both reads as a retail business in a growing category, which is exactly what it is.

What is the most common number founders get wrong?

The inventory cash cycle, by a wide margin. Founders budget the opening stock and forget that reorders begin within weeks, that the fast lines consume cash while the slow lines return nothing, and that the second order is due before the first has paid for itself. The second is the founder's own wage, which vanishes from the plan and reappears as a personal crisis in month nine. Both are modelling choices, both are visible in the template above, and both are cheaper to fix on paper than in the shop.

Sources

• Eurostat, retail trade statistics, 2026

The bands are planning ranges for the category as of 2 September 2026; build the machine with your own local inputs.