How to Grow Faster by Focusing on Fewer Channels #611

There’s a quiet pressure in ecommerce that’s hard to ignore. Every week there’s a new channel worth testing. A new platform gaining traction. A competitor showing up somewhere you’re not. And before long, “we should be there too” starts to feel less like a question and more like a requirement.

But what if that instinct is actually slowing you down?

That’s exactly what Jaimee Vilela, Managing Director of Cooki Haircare, pushed back against. After acquiring the brand as a lifestyle business, Jaimee and her partner scaled from $179K to over $3 million in revenue in just two years, using just two core channels: Meta and Klaviyo.

In this Playbook: 

• How Cooki Haircare scaled from $179K to $3M using just two core marketing channels
• Why “channel addiction” is one of the most expensive mistakes in ecommerce
• How focusing on fewer channels can actually increase clarity and performance
• Why more channels often lead to worse attribution, not better data
• And how building depth in one channel creates a defensible competitive advantage

Visit StudioHawk to learn more.

Connect with Jaimee
Explore Cooki Haircare
Cooki Haircare’s episode
Krumbled Group’s episode
Pet Circle’s episode
Motto’s Fashion’s episode
Kakadu Plumb’s episode
King Kong’s episode

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Look, you probably know this already, but customers aren't just Googling products anymore. They're asking AI what to buy. And if AI can't understand your brand, it won't recommend it. That's why Studio Hawk, Australia's largest dedicated STO and AI search agency, is offering at Descartes Listeners a free STO and AI search master plan. You'll get an in-depth audit of how your brand appears across search and AI platforms, plus a custom roadmap to improve your visibility. And to help you get started straight away, you can also download their free e-commerce AI visibility toolkit. It's packed with prompts, checklists, wireframes, and a step-by-step digital PR framework. Head to studiohawk.com.au forward slash add to cart. That's studiohawk.com.au forward slash add to cart to download your exclusive toolkit and request a personalized master plan. We'll put the link in the show notes as well. One thing I've noticed across 600 odd episodes of this show, honestly, how did it get to that point? And honestly, across my whole career in e-commerce is that the pressure on e-commerce managers and marketing leaders to be on every new platform has never been higher. And I get it. There's that graph that I think everyone's seen around how long it takes different platforms to reach 100 million users or whatever the number is. Radio took 38 years, TV took 13 years, the internet took four, Instagram took two and a half, and maybe GPT takes six days. And it keeps accelerating. By the time you've decided whether a new platform is worth your attention, half your competitors are probably already on it. And the instinct is to show up everywhere. It feels like the right call. It feels ambitious. But here's what I've actually seen. The e-commerce teams that perform the best aren't the ones that are running the most channels. They're the ones who know their core channels so well that the results look almost unfair to everyone else. People don't know how they're doing it. Jamie Vallella bought into cookie hair care as a lifestyle business with her partner Lucas. In 2023, they did 179K of revenue. Last year, they closed over 3 million. And that's on Meta and Clavio. That's it. No complex stack, no sprawling team, no TikTok strategy, just two channels run really well with strict discipline around what stays on and what gets switched off. When she went looking for outside counsel on whether to diversify, she eventually landed on a free consult with growth advisor, Nick Sharmer. Yep, that Nick Sharmer. His advice was to stay on Meta. Don't diversify yet. And that's what today's playbook is about. Let's hear it from Jamie.

SPEAKER_01 2:55

In 2023, the business did 179K in Rev. In 2024, we did 1.1 mil in Rev. And then last year we closed at just over 3 million in Rev. And that's just been Meta and Cladio. I think we started some token Google search late last year, and I'm not that invested in it. And I think that's because it can be really easy to go really broad and dilute yourself across a lot of channels and be sort of have that channel addiction. But I needed to find product market fit. I needed to prove that what I'd bought could scale in a niche or in multiple niches. And so I put all of my energy and focus into learning to buy ads for the first time myself, making ads and scaling those ads. And so really, I think you could go and do an amazing affiliate program and you could spend time on organic, which I literally haven't. But I think you've got to pick a couple of channels and do them really well. And I think once you do well on those, you earn the right to broaden out from there. And that's where we would be this year, which is exciting.

SPEAKER_00 3:50

One of the things that I loved when we caught up was how lean your team is. And it makes sense when you position your marketing strategy like that. Standing on one leg, I love that analogy. So as you think about that though, and potentially broadening out the channels, does that change also your team structure as well?

SPEAKER_01 4:09

Not really. I think you can scale to 10 million in revenue on Meta alone if you wanted to. And again, as long as you're growing the brand organically alongside that, whether it's organic socials, whether it's community building, like we've done really successfully, you know, even email database. Retail is an amazing way to grow community around the brand, which is was a big part of our last year. We went into a hundred new stores in September and we're now at 175. So that was a whole story in itself. But we kind of got picked up by GoVita, who approached us after seeing the buzz around the brand in store. And so I think you can stay incredibly focused and narrow on your channels up to 10 mil if you wanted to. Obviously, you would not grow the brand as quickly as if you were doing a lot of top of funnel activity. And I think there's real wisdom in knowing those trade-offs. For Lucas and me, it's definitely our lifestyle business. So we have no desire to, you know, raise and burn and grow super fast and sell in five years for a huge profit. This is our lives, and we love these businesses and we plan to have them for a long time. And so for us, growing a small team really well and doing a few things well is more important to us. And so yeah, I think we could broaden out and I would love to, but I do think Meta is, you know, a really powerful channel. I'll give you a wild anecdote, which is that I was on a podcast last year in the UK and she asked me for my e-com top tip. And I said, Oh, well, I'm gonna be so boring and say chat GPT, but it's a specific way I've been using chat, which is that I went onto e-com guru Nick Sharmer's website, downloaded a bunch of his resources, and said to chat, You are Nick Sharmer. Here is his website, here's all of his methodology, here's everything he's ever said or done, help me with these scaling challenges. And he became my friend. And so Robot Nick was my friend, real Nick Sharma, heard that episode. And I ended up getting a free consult with him for half an hour from New York at 5 a.m., which was so kind of him. And he'd heard this crazy story, and we got an intro from a mutual friend, which was really lovely. And I put this to him, I said, look, I'm scaling so lean on Meta. What do you think? Like, should I diversify? And he was like, no, just stay there. You can keep scaling in that direction. And I think it is dangerous. Like you can have performance marketing addiction, you can risk not having a true deep brand. All these things we know. And I know best practice because I've had marketing teams of 10 and ginormous budgets in the past, which is, you know, I now laugh in the direction of thinking of how my day looks and how my to-do list looks. But I think when you are buying and growing a business, your first three, five, 10, whatever you're trying to do, your biggest risk is going to be channel addiction and going too broadly too quickly and not being able to attribute correctly because you're double dipping. And so I plan to stay lean for as long as I can get away with. And I think you soon start to surface problems such as, oh, you know, brand awareness is a problem or following is a problem, or whatever these things might be. And that's when you think, okay, well, how do I grow those channels better? But in terms of revenue and profit, meta can be fantastic if you know what you're doing with creative.

SPEAKER_00 7:02

Nick Sharmer, hey, what a name drop. But here are three things that I've taken from Jamie's story and from the conversations across the Add to Cart archive that I think are worth taking back to your business around being disciplined with your channels. Number one, you earn the right to expand. You don't assume it. There's a phrase Jamie used in that clip that you just heard that I think is worth sitting with: channel addiction. It's the pull towards adding something new before you've mastered what you've already got. And it's one of the most common and quietly expensive habits in e-commerce. The instinct makes sense. I get it. A new channel feels like a new opportunity. TikTok is exploding. Affiliates are working for someone else. A competitor just launched somewhere new. The pressure is real and it is constant. But every channel you add without mastering your existing ones doesn't just cost you money, it costs you attention. And attention is actually the most valuable resource, not budget. Kira Rumble runs three brands under the crumbled group. A few years ago, her TikTok accounts were generating enormous organic reach. The opportunity looked obvious to everyone around her, but she still said no, because she hadn't yet maxed out what was possible on meta. And that's not being timid. That's knowing the difference between an opportunity and a distraction, which is honestly one of the hardest skills to develop in this industry. So the practical question to ask yourself isn't should we be on this channel? It's have we genuinely earned the right to expand by mastering what we already have? It's not as sexy, but it's a good question. If the answer is no, the new channel isn't going to fix anything. It's just going to make the existing problem harder to see. Which leads us to lesson two. More channels don't mean more data. It actually means less clarity. Here's a story that comes to the top of my head a lot when we talk about this topic. John Wilde from Pet Circle shared that at one point the business was spending around$300 million a year across search, meta, and coupons. Three channels, huge budget, sophisticated team, and customer growth was still negative. They weren't acquiring new customers. They were recirculating the same ones over and over and over, crediting the same purchases to multiple channels simultaneously. The dashboards looked healthy, the attribution looked clean, but underneath it, the model had stopped working entirely. And that's the thing that most people don't want to say out loud in a marketing meeting. Lauren French from Motto was really, really refreshingly honest about this when she told me that she was running paid, organic, influencer, and PR simultaneously, and it made attribution almost impossible. She said they genuinely didn't know if they got it right. And I think most e-commerce teams are exactly in that position. The more channels you run before you're ready, the less you actually know around what's the thing that's driving growth. And when you can't see clearly, you can't make good decisions, you end up optimizing for what's easy to measure rather than what's actually making the difference. Treat attribution clarity as a strategic asset. If you can't cleanly answer what drove that sale, you've probably got too many channels running and you're not ready for them all. And number three, depth compounds, breadth doesn't. The most underrated advantage in e-commerce marketing isn't finding a new channel before your competitors do. It's knowing your existing channel so well that they can't catch up even if they try. Talia Mandy built genuinely sophisticated email capabilities at Kakadoo Plumco. And she didn't have a huge budget. She had deep segmentation, complex flows, specific list management built over years. And when I asked her about it, she was pretty direct. If she'd been trying to do every channel, there is no way she would have reached that level of expertise in email. It was only available to her because she protected her attention. Sabri Subi has a framework for this, and I've always kind of liked it. He talks about the T-shaped marketer. Learn enough about email, paid search, SEO, conversion rate optimization to be able to manage them and also ask the right questions, ask the bullshit questions, and then go deep on one. Not because the others don't matter, but because genuine expertise somewhere is worth more than surface knowledge everywhere. The practical version for your business is pick the one channel that is closest to working really well and ask, what would it take to be truly excellent at it before you do anything else? Not good, excellent. The kind of excellence where your competitor is studying your site and your business to try and figure out how you're doing it. That's the standard that you're building towards. And you won't get there by being on every channel at once. Jamie went from$179K to$3 million in two years on two channels. Not because she got lucky with the algorithm or had a bigger budget than everyone else. It's because she made a deliberate decision around where to put her attention and she held that line even when the pressure to diversify was real. That discipline, it's available to any e-commerce team. It just requires being honest about the difference between adding channels because the strategy calls for it and adding channels because it feels like progress and we want to look like we're keeping up. If you want to go deeper on this, whether that's auditing your current channel mix or figuring out where to double down, jump into the AdDocart community. There are hundreds of e commerce professionals in there every day asking exactly these questions and sharing what is actually working. You can join for free over on adducart.com.au. That's the playbook for the week. I'll see you Friday.