I spent almost twenty years in commercial roles across large corporates like L'Oréal Group and Coty, plus smaller startups and scale-ups, running seven-figure P&Ls. That experience spanned YSL Beauty, Giorgio Armani Beauty, Lancôme and Rimmel, to name a few. The pattern holds whatever the size of the business. Brands that grow revenue per customer without discounting are the ones that designed the shape of the range deliberately, some time before the customer got anywhere near a basket.
Average order value is revenue per transaction, so it rises when the range gives a single order somewhere to go. Good-better-best tiering, sets priced as considered pairings rather than markdowns, premium variants, and add-ons designed into the visit or the basket. None of it touches the price. Purchase frequency is a separate lever.
That is the mechanical answer. The rest of this is what building it looks like.
Two things need separating before we start, because they get merged constantly and they are not the same number. Order value is how big one transaction is: revenue divided by transactions. Frequency is how often the same customer comes back, which shows up in repeat rate and lifetime value, not in average order value. Both are legitimate ways to grow revenue per customer, and a founder chasing that usually needs both. But they are built differently and measured differently, so this piece deals with order value first and frequency separately, and says which is which throughout.
The premise, stated once so we can leave it alone: discounting is the obvious lever here and it works against you, because it buys a bigger order once at the cost of teaching the customer to wait for the next one. That argument is made properly elsewhere. Everything below is range design, and none of it is a discount in a better outfit.
Order value is a design problem, not a checkout problem
Most conversations about average order value start at the wrong end. A team looks at the checkout page, adds a "customers also bought" module, and calls it solved. It rarely moves the number. By the time a customer reaches checkout, the range has already told her what kind of purchase this is — and a module at the till cannot argue with it. If the entry product is priced and packaged as a one-off, she treats it as a one-off, and she is right to, because that is what the range said.
The decision that actually sets order value happens upstream, in how the range is built, months before anyone reaches a basket. Which is good news for a founder-led brand, because upstream is the part you control completely and it costs nothing but attention.
What the entry point teaches about the size of a basket
Every range teaches the customer something about what a normal purchase here looks like, whether or not anyone designed it to.
If the entry point is a single standalone item with nothing visibly attached to it, a single item is the basket. If the entry point is visibly part of a system, a cleanser that is obviously step one of three, a treatment that is obviously the opening stage of a protocol, she can see the whole thing at the moment she is deciding, and a meaningful share of customers take more of it in one go. Nobody has to be persuaded of anything. The range has done the work.
So the useful exercise is to map the range as a structure and ask two questions of it. What sits above and alongside the entry product? And can the customer see it while they are still deciding, or do they have to go looking? A brand with a clear hero product and no visible step up from it is leaving order value on the table structurally, and no amount of marketing around the hero product will recover it.
Sets that read as a considered pairing
A set raises order value cleanly when the customer reads it as more, and it fails when she reads it as cheaper.
The mechanics are simple enough. A set priced at a visible saving against buying the items separately teaches the same lesson a straight markdown does: wait for the set. A set priced at or near full combined value, and presented as a considered pairing or a discovery route through the range, raises the transaction size while saying the opposite.
Gift sets are the clearest example of this working at scale in public. Business of Fashion beauty correspondent Daniela Morosini reported that gift sets have "transitioned from being a stocking stuffer at a more affordable price to a luxury offering driving this holiday season's sales" (Business of Fashion, December 2025). That is a reported observation about one gifting season in one market. My own view, which goes beyond what she reported, is that the same commercial logic works year round: any considered pairing of a hero product with a smaller companion does the job a gift set does, whatever the month.
A premium tier for the customer who was always going to spend more
Not every customer is price-sensitive, and a range offering one version of everything gives its highest-spending customers nowhere to go. A larger format, a richer finish, a collaboration edition, a version with a service layer attached: each exists to capture spend from the customer who would happily pay more for more.
Harvard Business School lecturer Rafi Mohammed, writing in Harvard Business Review, argues that businesses "crimp profits by using discounts to attract price-sensitive customers and by failing to give high-end customers reasons to spend more" (Harvard Business Review, 2018). His subject is pricing tiers, and his good-better-best structure is a pricing structure. My extension of it is mine and not his: the tier is better built into the product line than into the price list, because a product the customer can see and want does work a price point cannot.
This is also where a founder's instinct to keep the range simple can quietly cap order value. Simplicity is right at the entry point, where the job is to be easy to choose. It is the wrong instinct at the top of the range, where the job is to give an existing customer a reason to trade up. The "best" tier is not there to convert new customers; it is there to let existing ones spend what they were already willing to spend.
Add-ons and sequencing inside a single visit
For clinics, order value rarely rises through a longer price list. It rises through what is attached to the visit already booked: an add-on priced at the point of booking as part of a considered protocol, or an entry treatment structured so its obvious companion service sits inside the same appointment.
That detail matters more than it sounds. An add-on decided in advance, as part of how the treatment is built, moves the value of that visit in a way that asking a practitioner to upsell in the room rarely does, because it takes a sales conversation out of a clinical one. The practitioner is recommending a protocol they already believe in. Nobody has to perform.
Selling a course of treatments is a related but different move, and it belongs in the next section, because a course spreads spend across several visits instead of raising the value of one.
The other lever: frequency, and why it is not order value
Everything above changes the size of a single transaction. What follows does not, and it is worth being exact about that, because refill and subscription programmes are routinely sold to founders as an order-value play. They are not one. They change how often the same customer buys, which shows up in repeat rate, purchase frequency and lifetime value. Average order value can sit completely flat, or even fall, while the customer becomes considerably more valuable.
That is a reason to build it and a reason to measure it somewhere else.
Refill programmes are usually pitched as a subscription mechanic: a lower price for a recurring commitment. The stronger version prices the refill at or close to full value and sells the convenience and the habit. A smaller, better-packaged refill format. A reminder that arrives when the product is due to run out. A straightforward reorder that is not a fresh decision each time.
For consumable ranges this is the most dependable route to a second and third order I know of, because it does not require the customer to notice a new product, only to remember she needs the one she already trusts.
The clinic equivalent is the treatment course and the next booking. Design what a client books after the first appointment, so the second visit is a planned step in a programme instead of a decision she has to make again from scratch. That is frequency and retention, so watch it on rebooking rate and on what a client is worth across a year, not on the value of one visit.
Where the discipline comes from
None of this is checkout optimisation. It is the same discipline behind any well-run product range at scale: deciding, before a customer ever reaches a basket, what a full purchase is supposed to look like and what should come after it, then building the range so both are visible.
A founder does not need corporate resource to apply it. They need to look at the range as a structure, be honest about whether anything sits above the hero product at all, and then decide separately what brings the customer back.
So: go and look. If there is a hero product and nothing obvious above or beside it, you have found the thing capping your order value, and it is a design decision away from being fixed. If the real gap is that nobody ever comes back, that is the other lever, and it is a different piece of work.
Frequently asked questions
What counts as average order value for a business that sells appointments?
Average order value is a money number: total revenue divided by number of transactions. For an appointment business that is average value per visit, and it works the same way. The number people often reach for here, treatments or add-ons per visit, is a units-per-transaction measure. It is useful, and it usually explains why the money number moved, but it is a different number and worth keeping separate from it.
How do we know if our range actually needs restructuring?
Ask what the entry product is training a new customer to expect next, then check whether that next step exists and is visible on the site. If there is a hero product and no obvious step up from it, the gap is structural, and checkout messaging will not close it.
Does a refill programme have to be a subscription?
No. Pricing it as a straightforward reorder usually protects margin better than a discounted recurring commitment. The commercial win is removing the decision each time the customer needs more, and the saving is what you give away to get it. Judge it on repeat rate and lifetime value, though, because a refill programme raises how often she buys rather than how much she spends in one order.
Author: Kirsty Newman is Founder of The Boutique Consultancy. She spent almost two decades at some of the largest corporate powerhouses in beauty and luxury, including YSL Beauty, Giorgio Armani Beauty, Lancôme and Rimmel (L'Oréal Group and Coty). She went on to work with a number of startups as they scaled, before striking out on her own. Across this time, she has run seven-figure P&Ls and teams of 16, with direct engagement in venture capital funding and expansion.