How Alexandra Okrent of Aroma360 unlocked millions in working capital by making existing data make sense
Most retailers think they fully understand their own performance, but according to Alexandra Okrent, Director of Finance and Business Intelligence at Aroma360, many of them do not. The gap between what conventional reporting shows and what is actually happening within a business at any given moment is where growth strategies fail, working capital disappears, and expansion decisions go wrong. Having spent her career building the analytical systems that close that gap, Alexandra sheds light on what the retail industry often gets wrong about growth, profitability, and data.
“My career started in institutional finance, with internships in fixed income in New York and London while still at university. That gave me early exposure to how rigorous financial analysis actually functions in practice: the accountability to senior stakeholders, the discipline of making a case that holds up under scrutiny, and the habit of looking past headline figures to understand what is really driving them,” she begins.
After completing her MSc in Financial Management at UCL, Alexandra joined TwentyFour Asset Management, a specialist fixed income firm, where she spent nearly six years managing institutional client relationships and contributing to the firm’s growth in assets under management. From there, she moved to Altum Capital where she was solely responsible for building the company’s investor presence across the UK and other non-US markets. Through this experience, she sharpened her ability to translate complex financial structures into narratives that sophisticated investors could evaluate and act on.
“I deliberately joined Aroma360 as Director of Finance and Business Intelligence in order to take everything I had built analytically and apply it at the operational level, where decisions are faster, feedback is immediate, and the consequences of getting things wrong are visible without delay. My role sits at the intersection of financial strategy, performance analysis, and the data infrastructure that connects them. I oversee financial planning, forecasting, and reporting across the business, manage a growing finance and business intelligence team, and have designed the analytical systems that give our executive leadership real-time visibility into store-level and product-level economics. I also lead work on supply chain finance and vendor contract structures, which has produced some of the most tangible financial outcomes of my time here,” Alexandra enlightens.
Three common mistakes
Founded in Miami in 2016, Aroma360 is a scent marketing and branding company built around the science of aromachology, which is the study of how fragrance influences mood, behavior, and emotional experience. Its core product is a scent diffusion system that creates consistent scent environments for both residential and commercial settings, alongside a portfolio of premium fragrance oils. Aroma360 stands out for its commercial model: rather than treating each sale as a discrete transaction, the business is structured around deepening customer relationships over time, moving from an initial purchase through recurring consumption into a long-term whole-home commitment. That model has built a customer base and portfolio that no direct-to-consumer brands in any category can fully replicate. The company’s 27 international retail locations serve as physical entry points into that broader relationship.
It is the discipline required to run this model effectively that informs Alexandra’s perspective on the mistakes retailers most commonly make when thinking about growth and profitability. “The most persistent mistake is treating them as sequential concerns rather than simultaneous ones,” she explains. “In many retail expansion strategies, the implicit assumption is that you scale first and address the economics later, or that profitability is something you optimize once sufficient size has been achieved. In practice, the habits and structures built during a growth phase tend to calcify. The cost base that was tolerable at ten locations becomes structurally burdensome at 20, and the promotional programs that drove volume in year two become brand liabilities by year four.
“Retailers also frequently mistake gross margin for the relevant measure of unit economics. A strong product margin looks compelling in isolation, but if the cash required to manufacture, store, and deliver that product is committed months before a customer pays, the working capital cost of that margin can be substantial and basically invisible in conventional reporting. Some of the most significant financial improvements available to retail businesses come not from changing what they sell but from restructuring how the supply chain is financed and how payment terms flow across it. The third common mistake is over-reliance on blended performance metrics, including averages across stores, channels, and customer segments, which mask an enormous amount of information. The locations or channels that are truly profitable frequently subsidize those that are not, and without granular visibility into that distribution, leadership makes expansion and investment decisions based on a figure that describes no individual unit accurately,” she continues.
Continuous data monitoring
Granular visibility is precisely what real-time data enables, and the difference between real-time and periodic reporting is not simply a matter of speed. “Monthly and quarterly reporting offers insights into what happened, while real-time data reports on what is happening now. The operational implications of that distinction are significant,” Alexandra highlights. “A performance problem identified in a quarterly review has typically had twelve weeks to compound. The same signal surfaced in a daily or weekly dashboard can be addressed before it becomes a structural problem. Beyond speed, the more important shift is the nature of the questions you can ask. When performance data arrives monthly, the dominant question is retrospective: why did we miss the mark? When it arrives continuously, the question becomes forward-looking: what are we seeing that predicts where the business is heading, and what can we do now to influence that trajectory? That is a fundamentally different managerial posture, and it requires both the infrastructure to support it and the analytical culture to act on what it surfaces. At Aroma360, the business intelligence systems I have built are designed specifically to enable that forward-looking conversation at the executive level. Leadership can see store-level performance, product mix, conversion patterns, and cost dynamics on a current basis, which means capital allocation decisions are made based on present reality rather than a month-old approximation of it.”
The supply chain work Alexandra has led at Aroma360 illustrates this approach well. When she joined the business, the working capital position across its product supply chain was not visible in a way that connected the cash commitment at each stage to the overall liquidity picture. Conventional reporting showed margins and revenue, but did not make clear the large amount of cash sitting locked in the pipeline at any given time, cash that was committed well before goods arrived and payment terms had elapsed. By building a cash flow model that mapped the full journey from procurement through to customer receipt, it became possible to see the scale of the working capital constraint and precisely where in the supply chain cash was being held and for how long. That visibility was the precondition for the renegotiations that followed, and the financial release was substantial, running into millions of dollars per month. A similar dynamic applied to Aroma360’s logistics cost structure, where modelling the full picture of what was being paid and why revealed that inherited contractual arrangements were more expensive than a better-structured agreement would have been. In both cases, the insight came from building an analytical framework that made existing data coherent and decision-relevant for the first time.
As Alexandra emphasizes, financial intelligence is not a mere back-office function, it is the infrastructure through which a retail business understands itself. “When it is built well, it changes what gets measured as well as what gets decided and how quickly. The businesses navigating the current environment most effectively are those where the finance and data function is connected to strategy, where performance is understood continuously rather than reconstructed in arrears, and where the people making commercial decisions have the analytical clarity to act with conviction. It is a question of how seriously an organization treats the discipline of knowing, precisely and on a current basis, what is true about its own performance,” she ends.
Alexandra’s analysis shows that the retailers who will navigate the next decade most effectively are those who have built the discipline to know exactly what their data is actually telling them.
Alexandra Okrent
www.aroma360.com