Company Description

The emotional logic behind the numbers.

Your dashboard tells you what happened. It does not tell you why it happened, and why is the only part you can act on. RemCal Insights is a qualitative research consultancy in New York City. We find the emotional reasoning that drives people to buy, switch, stick or quit and we translate it into language your team can use on Monday morning.

Our whole job is to take risk out of the decision. For brands and agencies, that is the risk in what you say and what you build next. For investors, it is the risk in the check itself: whether the excitement you see around a brand is real and whether the growth you are underwriting belongs to the brand or to a trend passing through it.

How we get there

We run 1:1 consumer and user interviews, expert and decision-maker interviews and focus groups. We combine the rigor of psychology with the curiosity of journalism, which in practice means we keep asking until we reach the reason underneath the reason. People rarely lead with the truth about why they bought something. They lead with the acceptable version. Getting past that takes trust, patience and an interviewer who knows when the first answer is not the real one.

We are not category specialists, and we say so on purpose. We are specialists in people. We go as deep as a client needs in whatever category they need, and we have done it across beauty, personal care, food and beverage, wellness, supplements, health technology, fashion, retail and e-commerce.

What it does for brands and agencies

Two things, mainly.

Communication gets stronger because you stop guessing at what to say. When you know the emotion a product is actually solving for, the message writes itself and you stop spending media dollars on a benefit nobody cares about.

The product pipeline gets stronger because you stop building against stated preferences. What people say they want and what they are actually trying to fix are different, and the gap is where the good ideas live. Agencies bring us in to pressure test a concept, a design or a campaign against real consumers before the money goes out the door, often on short timelines and under NDA.

What it does for investors

Growth curves look the same whether a brand is riding a moment or building a habit. The difference shows up in how customers talk about it: whether they can name what it replaced, whether they would be annoyed if it disappeared, whether their loyalty is to the brand or to the category trend carrying it.

We do commercial due diligence and portfolio work for private equity and venture firms: reading real demand, testing whether growth is durable and surfacing the issues that only come out when you talk to customers, lapsed customers and the professionals who sell the category. Sometimes that confirms the thesis. Sometimes it is the reason a client walks away from a deal with confidence.

Finding the right people

Hard recruits are where studies quietly fall apart. We use specialist recruiting partners, digital communities and early-adopter networks to reach people most firms write off as too niche: category experts, medical and professional gatekeepers, lapsed buyers, subculture audiences and low-incidence consumers. There is almost always a way.

What you get

A narrative deck that moves from findings to themes to recommendations, with verbatim quotes behind every theme. Long-form written reports in Word or PDF when you need them and a two-page executive summary when senior stakeholders need the answer and nothing else. Every insight traces to a specific quote or observation, and we are clear about what is in the data versus what we are inferring from it. No data dumps.

Most studies run two to three weeks from finding the right people to a full report.

Track record

More than 1,500 expert and decision-maker interviews. More than 500 consumer interviews. Research fielded in five or more countries.

Founded and led by Rachel Martin, with 15 years in qualitative consumer research including time at The Sound, InSites Consulting and The Big Picture, a background in psychology and editorial work for HuffPost and Family Circle.