MARKET OVERVIEW
Poland sits at the centre of European logistics infrastructure – a major hub for road freight, cross-border supply chain operations, and warehousing. Alongside the freight and transport sector, Poland has a developed automotive aftermarket: a large base of independent and chain-operated body shops, truck dealership networks, and a growing collision repair segment that operates across both urban centres and regional markets. The US automotive aftermarket provides a relevant point of comparison: a structurally fragmented market operating at continental scale, where major chains and independent operators coexist within the same commercial ecosystem.
The automotive aftermarket is one of the more commercially active and structurally complex segments of the B2B economy in both markets. Purchasing decisions are local and relationship-driven; market entry requires direct engagement rather than standard distributor channel placement.
HOW WE SEE THIS SECTOR
Our work in this sector is currently concentrated in automotive aftermarket – specifically body repair and surface preparation. We have mapped this market twice: once in Poland, and once in the United States. In Poland, we built a custom prospect database of body shop operators for a Nordic abrasives manufacturer, ran direct Polish-language outreach, and generated early commercial signals – three of ten visited body shops took independent follow-up actions within weeks of the product introduction. We identified a dealer contract approach as the most effective route to market and recommended importer endorsement as a supporting mechanism. In the US, we built a national map of body shop chains and independent operators, reconciling commercial database records against chain-published location data to identify approximately 3,500 additional chain locations not correctly classified in standard sources, and producing individual descriptions and evaluations for around 3,500 qualifying independent operators.
The methodology we developed for this segment – custom universe definition, territory-level mapping, structured outreach with pre-qualified interest levels – is directly applicable to other fragmented B2B verticals where the challenge is the same: making an unstructured market commercially navigable.
