Cooki Haircare’s #1 Lesson: More Growth with Fewer Channels
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.
No sprawling channel mix. No complicated stack. Just focus.
Earn The Right To Expand
One of the most dangerous habits in ecommerce doesn’t feel dangerous at all. It feels like ambition.
Jaimee calls it channel addiction, the pull to add new platforms before you’ve truly mastered the ones already working.
The logic is easy to justify. If something works, more of it should work even better. Add TikTok. Launch affiliates. Test influencers. Expand everywhere.
But every new channel doesn’t just cost money. It costs attention, and attention is the real constraint.
That’s why operators like Keira Rumble from Krumbled Group have deliberately ignored new channels (even when they were working for others): because they hadn’t yet exhausted what was possible on their core platforms.
The question isn’t “should we try this channel?” It’s “have we actually mastered the ones we’re already on?”
Clarity Beats Coverage
More channels don’t give you more data; they usually give you less clarity.
As businesses expand across paid, organic, influencer and PR, attribution becomes increasingly blurred. Multiple touchpoints claim the same conversion. Dashboards look healthy. But the underlying truth becomes harder to see.
That’s something echoed by Jon Wild from Pet Circle, who shared in his ATC episode how even large-scale spending across a few channels can lead to misleading signals: with growth appearing strong while new customer acquisition stalls.
Similarly, Lauren French from Motto noted in her own ATC episode that running multiple channels at once made it difficult to confidently understand what was actually driving results.
This is where many ecommerce teams get stuck: not because they’re doing too little, but because they’re doing too much to see clearly.
Depth Creates Advantage
There’s a difference between being present everywhere… And being excellent somewhere.
The brands that consistently outperform aren’t the ones experimenting with the most channels. They’re the ones who understand one or two channels so deeply that competitors can’t replicate what they’re doing.
That kind of depth doesn’t happen by accident.
Tahlia Mandie from Kakadu Plum Co built advanced email capabilities over time (segmentation, flows, list strategy) because her attention wasn’t fragmented.
It’s the same principle behind the “T-shaped marketer” concept popularised by Sabri Suby from King Kong: know enough about everything to manage it.
But go deep on one. Because depth compounds. Breadth doesn’t.
When Focus Becomes Strategy
Jaimee Vilela didn’t scale Cooki Haircare by chasing every opportunity. She scaled it by ignoring most of them.
By focusing on two channels, she built clarity. By staying disciplined, she built expertise. And by resisting the pressure to expand too early, she created a business that could scale without complexity.
That’s the real lesson. Growth doesn’t come from doing more, it comes from doing the right things, repeatedly, at a higher level than anyone else.
Because in ecommerce, the advantage isn’t being everywhere.
It’s being undeniable somewhere.
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
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