When Medvelle launched in 2023, the first thing the data showed was something we did not expect: med spas and aesthetic clinics were paying wildly different prices for the same medical consumable. Not similar products but the same product: the same gauge, the same size, the same box. What one clinic was routinely paying ran two, three, up to four times what another was paying at the same time for the identical item.
The same supply, many prices
What clinics arrive paying: one product, one spec, up to 4x the price
1x = every clinic arrives paying the same
Per-unit price across clinics pre Medvelle, before standardization. Each of the ten items compared at one exact specification of gauge, size, and pack. Spread is the 90th percentile over the 10th for the same exact product. Source: Medvelle onboarding order data.
The clinics paying the least were neither the largest nor the most sophisticated. The highest-volume buyers were scattered across the price range like everyone else. Clinics with a dedicated purchasing person did no better than clinics without one. It was not the supplier either: in hundreds of cases, clinics buying the identical item from the same vendor still landed more than 50% apart. And no clinic was consistently cheap: the same clinic often had the best price on one item and one of the worst on the next. Wherever a clinic landed, nothing about the clinic explained it.
Why clinics overpay
The value of time. No clinic spends the time to negotiate or price-check certain items. The expensive items get watched: injectables cost enough per vial to earn attention, and their prices undergo lengthy negotiations. Everyday medical supplies are the opposite case. Comparing or negotiating prices on a box of lancets costs an hour of staff time to save a few dollars, and no clinic can justify that hour. So no one spends it. Multiply that decision across every item and every clinic, and nothing in the market ever pushes prices together. The spread is not a failure of effort: it is what supply costs do when the attention costs more than it saves.
How the ROI analysis works
The arithmetic flips the moment one buyer purchases for many clinics at once: the time is invested once, and every clinic gets the result.
That is why the first thing Medvelle runs for every new clinic is an ROI analysis: every item the clinic already buys, benchmarked against what the same item sells for across the Medvelle network and every supplier that carries it, at the exact specification. Across the ten consumables in this review, Medvelle's analyses found offers in the market 32% to 92% below what clinics were paying.
The same ten items, before and after standardization
Coral is the per-unit price the clinic was paying. Teal is the Medvelle network price for the equivalent item, which is what the clinic pays after standardization. Price per unit, indexed, where what the clinic paid at onboarding = 100. Source: Medvelle onboarding standardization reviews, anonymized clinic groups.
The pattern is consistent: the largest savings land on the everyday items. Needles and syringes shed 83% to 92%. The shallowest cut, ultrasound gel at 32%, sits at the higher-priced end of the basket.
From the very first analysis on, active comparisons continue at every reorder. Because every order, every supplier, and every invoice runs through one platform, the checking is built into the buying itself.
The result: lower COGS
Three years ago, the data surprised us: the same box, at wildly different prices, and nothing about the clinics to explain it. Today the same review runs for every clinic that joins, and it always ends the same way: the many prices collapse into the best price available. That is what Medvelle was built to do.
