Vegetal Progress and Cecilia Holistic Beauty: Optimizing Pop-Up Store Location Strategy in Cyprus

Claudia Franzè, Noura El Hassan

Product #:W49536

Supplier:Ivey/AUB

Discipline:International Business, Operations Management

Setting:Cyprus, Italy, 2025

Details:Case (PDF) • 7 pages • 2026-08-18

Subjects:

Geography:

Cyprus Italy Asia Europe Cyprus Italy

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In mid-2025, Vegetal-Progress SRL (Vegetal-Progress) and Cecilia Holistic Beauty (CHB) faced a strategic decision: selecting the optimal Cypriot city for a pop-up store intended to test market expansion into the Mediterranean region over an eight-month period. The initiative aimed to limit long-term risk while leveraging synergies between Vegetal-Progress’s nutraceutical heritage and CHB’s experiential clean-beauty model. With a capped budget of €80,000, the family-owned brands had to balance tourist flows, spending patterns, brand alignment, and operating costs across Nicosia, Limassol, Larnaka, and Paphos.

Learning Objectives

This case can be used in strategic management and operations management and research courses at the undergraduate and graduate level. By working through the case and assignment questions, students will be able to do the following:

Formulate and solve an optimization model for location selection. Students will translate a strategic business problem into a binary integer linear program (BILP) by defining decision variables, objective functions, and constraints that capture real-world trade-offs.
Analyze and communicate optimization results for managerial decision-making. Beyond running the model, students will learn how to interpret and present the outputs in a way that informs business strategy. The objective is to emphasize that the value lies in linking quantitative results to strategic choices, rather than simply reporting numerical outcomes.
Integrate strategic and quantitative decision-making frameworks. Building on the optimization exercise, students will combine strategic analysis (market attractiveness, customer alignment, brand positioning) with quantitative methods to evaluate international location options for a niche luxury brand.
Assess the impact of international expansion on the business model. Students will examine how entering the Cypriot market through a pop-up store could affect the companies’ business model, considering changes in value creation, delivery, and capture. By applying business model innovation frameworks, they will evaluate whether the expansion requires adaptation of channels, revenue streams, or customer relationships.
Evaluate internationalization strategies for family-owned businesses. Students will analyze the opportunities and challenges of a third-generation family enterprise expanding into new geographies. Students will explore how heritage-based competencies (trust-based supplier networks, quality-driven and artisanal production) interact with new complementary assets (digital platforms, experiential branding) when entering a strategic hub such as Cyprus to serve Middle Eastern and regional premium markets.