When brands begin evaluating EMEA retail expansion, they usually arrive at the same question relatively quickly: do we build this ourselves, or do we work with a partner who has already built it?
The honest answer is that it depends on where the brand is, what it needs, and how much time it has. But having spent a decade building nonplusultra around exactly this question — and having worked with brands from early-stage consumer electronics to global names like Meta, Ring, and Starlink — I have a fairly clear view of when RaaS makes sense, when in-house makes sense, and what the decision actually costs either way.
What RaaS actually means
Retail-as-a-Service is not outsourcing in the traditional sense. It is not handing off a function and hoping for the best. The model we operate at nonplusultra — and what I consider genuine RaaS — is contractual ownership of the retail and distributor relationship on behalf of the brand, with full transparency and accountability. The brand retains strategic direction, pricing authority, and brand standards. The partner owns execution — distributor setup, retailer negotiations, field sales, data reporting, POS compliance — across the markets in scope.
The key distinction from a traditional agency arrangement is that the brand does not lose the relationship. When we launch Shokz across MediaMarkt, Saturn, and Fnac, Shokz is the brand with the listing. We are the infrastructure behind it. If Shokz ever wants to bring that execution in-house, the relationship and the institutional knowledge are transferable. That is a different commercial dynamic from a distributor who owns the retail relationship and can use it as leverage.
When in-house makes sense
In-house EMEA retail makes clear sense in three situations. First: you are a large enough brand that the scale of your European business justifies dedicated headcount across multiple markets. A brand doing €50M+ annually in European retail has the volume to make full-time country managers, field teams, and regional heads commercially rational.
Second: your product category is complex enough that only deeply embedded people can sell it effectively. Some products require specialists who understand the technology at a level that a generalist field sales team cannot replicate. If your product is in that category, you may need to own the people who represent it.
Third: you are playing a long-term strategic game in Europe and the relationship capital that builds over years is itself a competitive advantage. For some brands, the retailer relationship is genuinely strategic. In those situations, owning it directly has compounding value.
When RaaS makes more sense
For most brands entering or scaling in EMEA, RaaS is the better choice — not because it is cheaper in every case, but because it is faster and lower-risk in ways that matter.
Speed to market is the most underestimated factor. Building an in-house EMEA operation from scratch takes 12–18 months in most cases: hiring the right people (who know the retail landscape, speak the languages, and have the retailer relationships), establishing distributor contracts, negotiating initial retailer listings, building the POS and field sales infrastructure. During that period, your competitors are gaining shelf space. We launched Starlink across major European CE retailers in four months. That would not have been possible starting from zero.
Risk reduction is the second factor. EMEA is not one market — it is twelve. The regulatory environment, the retail structure, the distributor landscape, and the consumer behaviour differ materially between Germany, France, the Netherlands, and the UK. A brand that tries to build in-house operations across all of these simultaneously is taking on enormous execution risk. Working with a partner who has already navigated those markets — who knows which distributors are actually reliable, which retailer contacts matter, and which promotional mechanics work in each country — removes a significant layer of risk from the expansion.
The third factor is commercial efficiency. Maintaining a field sales team across Europe — one that visits stores regularly, handles POS compliance, trains retail staff, and manages sell-through — is expensive. A RaaS model shares that infrastructure across a portfolio of brands, which means the cost structure for each individual brand is materially more efficient than building it solo.
The real question: what does your retail programme actually need?
The most useful frame is not RaaS vs in-house. It is: what does this retail programme actually need to work?
A brand entering Germany needs retailer relationships at MediaMarkt and Saturn, a distributor that can hold inventory and process orders efficiently, a field team that can cover the stores that matter on a regular visit cycle, a data infrastructure that tells you what is selling and where, and a POS execution capability that keeps your brand looking right on the floor. Most brands entering Europe for the first time do not have any of that in-house. Building all of it simultaneously while also managing a global business is a significant distraction from the actual task of growing the brand.
The brands that have worked best with us — SumUp scaling across EMEA retail, Shokz growing 200% year-on-year for four consecutive years, Ring building category leadership in DACH from zero — all shared one characteristic: they focused their internal resources on the things only they could do (product development, marketing, brand direction) and trusted an execution partner on the things that required local infrastructure and relationships.
The hybrid model
The model that makes most sense for most brands at growth stage is a hybrid: RaaS for the markets where you are establishing presence, with a clear path to building in-house capability in your most strategic market once you have proven the model and the volume justifies dedicated headcount.
Concretely: work with a partner to establish Germany, France, and Benelux simultaneously. Once you have two or three years of data, a proven sell-through model, and strong retailer relationships, hire a country manager for Germany specifically — and keep the partner running France and the Nordics. That sequencing avoids the trap of hiring before you know the market, and it allows you to scale without betting everything on building a function you have never run in Europe before.
What to look for in a RaaS partner
Not every agency that calls itself a RaaS partner operates this way. The questions that matter are: do you retain the retailer and distributor relationship, or does the partner hold it? Do you get full data transparency — actual sell-through by store, by SKU, by market — or do you get a quarterly summary? Is the field sales team branded and trained on your product, or is it a generic shared resource? And critically: what does the exit look like if you decide to bring the function in-house?
If a partner cannot answer those questions clearly, the commercial model is not genuinely RaaS. It is distribution by another name.
We have structured nonplusultra specifically around those principles. Every brand we work with retains full contractual ownership of their retail relationships. Every brand gets real-time data access. And every brand has a clear path to transition if their scale ever justifies building the function themselves.
The decision ultimately comes down to where you are in your growth curve and how much time you have. If you are trying to establish EMEA presence within 12 months, the in-house path is the wrong bet. If you are a €100M brand with an established European organisation, it probably makes sense to start building dedicated headcount in your top markets. Most brands we talk to are somewhere in between — and for them, RaaS is the answer.