How it works · Why forecast

A location decision is a revenue decision

A store lives or dies on who is within reach of its door. Most of what it earns is simply the people who live, work, and pass through its catchment. Marketing can make a good site busier. It cannot move it closer to the customers it never had.

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  • Location sets the ceiling on revenue; everything else works beneath it
  • A wrong site costs twice: the loss, and the site you skipped
  • Forecast the ceiling before you sign, with the reasoning attached
An aerial view of an Amsterdam canal, bridge and canal houses, the kind of location IRIS forecasts
Illustrative sample: street-level view of the candidate storefront on the Singel
Amsterdam CentrumSingel

Why forecast at all

Location sets the ceiling on revenue

Long before a manager or a marketing budget touches it, a store's ceiling is set by who lives, works, and passes within reach of its door. You can run a good location badly. You cannot run a bad location into a good one.

The costA wrong site is paid for twice: once in the money it loses, and again in the better site you never opened in its place. A lease locks both in for years.
The fixForecast the ceiling before you sign, so a gut call becomes a number you can open, question, and defend.

What sets the ceiling

Not a headcount. People with a reason to be there.

So what actually sits within reach? Not a headcount. The people who matter are there for a reason: they live nearby, they work nearby, or they are passing on their way somewhere, and together those three supply most of a store's customers. A good forecast starts by reading who is genuinely within reach, and why, not just how many dots sit on a map.

A catchment map for the Singel site in Amsterdam, drawn on live street networks. Illustrative sample. Catchment

Model proposes, you decide

The model points you to more of what works. The leap is yours.

Growth comes from two moves, and it pays to know which one you are making. Optimise around your winners and you open more of what already works. That is a real peak, and a safe one, but it is a local one. The higher peak is usually a kind of place, or a market, you would never have looked at, because nothing in your estate looks like it yet. A forecast is what lets you test that new ground before you commit, so you can reach for the better site instead of settling for the nearest.

Exploit · inside the 80% band

Repeat what already works. Returns are moderate but consistent: the baseline IRIS can stand behind.

Explore · unproven ground

Bet where you have no comparable yet. Mostly drawdowns, with the rare asymmetric spike. This is the cost of discovery.

The model secures the baseline; the leap is yours. A forecast is how you turn a blind bet on new ground into a decision with odds attached, before you sign the lease.

Illustrative sandbox · click a strategy 0decisions →cumulative €MRun a sequence of site decisions →
Exploit0 Explore0 Cumulative€0.0M

Where judgment leads

Your winners are survivors, not a template

Even inside what works, be careful which winners you copy. Your current network is shaped by survival bias: it is the sites that happened to work, not a controlled test of every site you could have opened. Read it as the template for the next one and you quietly bake in yesterday's luck. So IRIS puts the comparable stores behind every number on the table, with the reasoning attached, and leaves the leap to you. The data can inform it. It cannot take it for you.

Revenues of similar stores

Amsterdam Centrum · Singel Sample

Amsterdam Centrum
€1,200,000
Current location
Utrecht Centraal (181)91.7% match
€1,142,000
€1,205,000
Rotterdam Lijnbaan (82)91.3% match
€947,000
€902,000
Den Haag Spui (33)91.1% match
€1,111,000
€1,061,000
Eindhoven Demer (140)90.3% match
€1,036,000
€1,180,000
Groningen Herestraat (57)89.8% match
€1,010,000
€1,050,000
Predicted base Actual takings

Whose growth runs on location

For these teams, the site is the growth plan

Quick-service and retail: for the teams IRIS is built for, opening the right sites is the growth plan, whether that is one lease a year or a hundred. When the store is the product, the location decision is the one that compounds, for years, in either direction.

A quick-service restaurant counter: a customer paying for their order Quick-service & food

Quick-service & food

Model catchments, forecast turnover per revenue stream, and see whether the delivery demand is really there before you sign the lease.

Quick-service restaurants →
A retail store checkout: an assistant hands a customer their shopping bag Retail chains

Retail chains

Purchasing power, household composition and footfall for every catchment, so openings, relocations and closures are decisions, not gut calls.

Retail chains →

See who runs on IRIS. See all industries →

Before you sign

The only way to know a site for certain is to open the doors. A forecast will not remove that risk. It narrows it, and it tells you what you are accepting before you sign a lease that lasts for years.

See it on your own estate

See what a location decision is really worth

Location sets the ceiling on revenue. Book a demo and we will forecast a live site in your market with you, on your own data, so you can see where the ceiling really sits before you sign.

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