Customer Trust Guides Channel Selection More Reliably Than Category Benchmarks

A consumer brand's route to market often gets assembled by watching what everyone else runs. Whichever brand in the category moved first decides which channels the rest will open and in what order. Copying that channel mix costs little and running it costs a great deal, and beauty operators now treat early expansion into low-margin or operationally complex distribution as a cash flow risk. Most of that money is committed before the brand knows where its own buyers place their confidence.

Aditi Garg works in the CEO's Office at Libi & Daughters, a UK luxury skincare brand founded by a dermatologist and built on six generations of family formulations. Garg leads B2B partnerships there, and she joined in October 2024 after close to three years in venture capital, first at 360 ONE Asset and then as a founding member of Signal Ventures, where she evaluated early-stage consumer businesses. Her years on the investor side gave her a view of what a channel decision costs a brand before its founders can feel the impact.

"You have to find out where your customer is sitting, and who they have been trusting. A brand has to identify that channel first and then build on top of it," says Garg. Her test runs ahead of any channel decision, and the answer moves from one brand to the next. A brand performing well on one platform tells another brand very little about who its own buyers listen to.

Slow beauty, high-touch customer relationships

Libi & Daughters sells primarily to women over 30, and Garg describes the products as built for the real problems a person faces. Those customers invest in what she calls "slow beauty," and they buy on efficacy. To reach offline customers, the brand relies on events, which give the team a chance to build a personal, high-touch relationship with each buyer. "For a high-consideration luxury product, discovery may happen on social, but trust is often built through multiple touchpoints, including expertise, recommendation, education and personal experience with the brand," says Garg.

Most of Garg's buyers have read up on the brand before any contact. Around 65% of consumers now research products with AI tools before buying, and only 17% trust what those tools recommend without checking it themselves. She says those buyers still want the founder's thinking and evidence that the formulation works, and she treats AI visibility as a weaker signal than it looks on paper. "I haven't seen any of my customers come to me and say, 'I found you on ChatGPT or on Google,'" Garg explains. "They have read about us, they have read about the formulation, they have read about our approach. On paper, ChatGPT is effective, but I don't think our real customer is buying from that angle."

The cost of going wide

Much of direct-to-consumer marketing runs on channels that other brands built first, and Garg counts that inheritance as the common mistake. Launching on a storefront platform is fine in her view, and she treats the harder decision as whether a B2B route or a practitioner-led one suits the product. Brands that skip that decision and go wide at once rarely check what each channel returns, leaving margins, repeat purchases, and customer retention unexamined. "I don't think a brand should just go with the channels that have been inherited by the other brand," Garg notes. "They have to have their own corner, they have to identify it. The brands that survive for 20, 30, 40 years will be the ones that found that space."

Brands spending across every channel at once can look healthy from outside while the financials say otherwise, and Garg has watched the pattern end badly. She puts the collapse at three to four years for brands that burned easy money and opened everywhere, and she asks how many times an investor will step in once the margins stop holding. "If your margins are going down and down by opening up many, many stores, many, many channels, how would you survive?" says Garg. "With the marketing presence, the financials are equally important. That is what makes a brand sustainable."

Her own rule is to measure the current channel before building the next one, using customer acquisition cost, repeat rate, lifetime value, and margin. A channel that clears those numbers still has to earn its place with the customer. "Before entering a new channel, brands should ask three questions: does the customer trust this channel, can the economics work sustainably, and does it strengthen rather than dilute the customer experience?" Garg adds.

Emails from the experts

Email and messaging often get run as an extension of the sales mechanism, and 43% of shoppers unsubscribe from a brand they otherwise like when it sends too many messages. Garg objects to what goes inside the message, and she counts both channels as effective. She treats them as an addition to the events and the personal relationships a brand is already building. At Libi & Daughters, those messages pair product news with skincare education from the brand's dermatologist founder and the philosophy behind the formulations. "Emails and WhatsApp are effective for sure, but they should be an add-on," says Garg. "It can't be just a CTA. It should be information-led, it should be founder's vision-led."

Garg reports the conversion on education-led emails running well above the brand's purely promotional ones. The guidance inside those emails comes out of what customers have already said. She reads a comment about a moisturizer for the question sitting behind it, and she takes a single comment as a sign that many buyers want the same change. "If the customer is asking A, you cannot give them B," Garg concludes. "You have to hear what exactly their requirements are. On that basis you will be drafting your email, your marketing messages, and the whole chain of your strategy."