We publish what we wish had existed when our first client asked us to map Russia from scratch.

The problem we saw

Foreign fashion brands lose their first cycle in Russia to the same four mistakes — wrong marketplace chosen for their category, calendar arithmetic missed by two weeks, customs holds that bleed through the launch window, and return rates that surprise them in month three. None of these mistakes are exotic. All of them are documented somewhere in Russian-language operator blogs, AKIT reports, and marketplace seller decks. None of it is assembled in one place in English.

Every brand we have seen launch on Ozon or Wildberries paid the same tuition — six to twelve months of burned inventory and missed promo windows — to learn what could have been read in a weekend.

Why we are credible

We have spent years inside Russia's e-commerce ecosystem — operator side and research side. We have built marketplace launches for foreign brands, debugged EAC certification holds in real time, sat through Ozon and Wildberries category manager calls, and rebuilt promo calendars after platform rule changes.

We work pseudonymously because our operating clients prefer it that way. What we will commit to publicly: every figure on this site is traceable to a primary source — AKIT, Ozon IR, ProFashion, Kommersant, Russian Federal Customs Service. The full source hierarchy and our conflict-of-interest rules live on the methodology page. When we are wrong, we correct it in the article body with the correction date.

How that helps you

If you are responsible for whether your brand launches in Russia in 2026 — or whether it survives a second cycle there — the Playbook compresses the six-to-twelve-month learning curve into a weekend read with dated promo windows, the marketplace-by-category decision tree, the EAC and customs workflow, and the regional and seasonality math nobody publishes in English.

If you are doing your own research first, the 16 Insights articles are free, primary-sourced, and update when the market does. The free chapter gives you the operator primer — is it legal, what does it cost, what is the upside — in twenty minutes.

When you are ready to talk, reach the desk on Telegram — that is our primary channel. See /contact.