The strongest customer relationships often start with understanding why people keep choosing you and where you can stay relevant in their lives.
We sat with several brand owners from our network during one of KarmaClub’s regular sharing sessions in Bandung.
The conversation began with familiar worries: the macro situation, marketplace fees, competition, consumer spending, and all the things happening around a business that founders cannot fully control.
Then someone said, “I just want to sell more to the customers I already have. My niche. My loyalists.”
Suddenly, we were no longer talking about macro forces. We were talking about something more fundamental, and much more within our control.
To put this into perspective, study after study, from Harvard Business Review to Bain & Co., has shown that acquiring a new customer can cost significantly 5 to 25 times more than retaining an existing one.
For many growing brands, that existing customer base may be more important than they realize.
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As a thinking partner to a growing number of consumer brands in Indonesia, one of the questions KarmaClub often discusses with business owners in our network is simple: who keeps choosing you, and why?
One of the first brands we worked with, Tenue de Attire, is a good example.
They have stayed relatively consistent about building for young urban men who want clothes that feel easy to wear, but still have personality. Their patterns, colors, price point, and even the name of their community, City Boys Club, all reinforce that.
The best brands we've seen have this clarity.
They have a clear understanding of who their loyalists are, and what differentiates their product from other options in that category. Not just "better quality" or "good design". But truly different in a way that matters to their specific people.
Once you understand who those people are, the next question is how to stay top of mind for them.
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Here is an uncomfortable truth: brand owners think about their business every day. Customers do not.
Even loyal customers may only buy from you a few times a year.
So the goal is to stay familiar enough that they remember you when the need comes up. That requires understanding more than purchasing behavior, and really asked:
What do they watch? Where do they spend time? What conversations are they already having? Who do they ask for advice?
Tenue, for example, built a strong presence on TikTok because their audience are prominently Gen-Zs. But—and this is the important part—the content that worked for Tenue wasn't actually about the clothes. It was Mas-Mas Tenue acting out situations, jokes, and trends that already resonate with their audience.
They are not forcing the product into the feed, but becoming part of a conversation their audience is already having.
For Bruule, the trigger is different.
Because many of their products are bought for gatherings, meetings, or gifting moments, staying top of mind also means understanding when those moments happen. The team keeps track of recurring occasions, such as arisan and meeting schedules, and reminds customers when the next one is coming up.
The principle is the same: understand not only who your customers are, but when your product becomes relevant to them.
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When some of us at KarmaClub worked in online marketplaces, we obsessed over digital behavior. How do we stay top of mind in their feed, their browser, in our own apps?
The hard truth we realized was that most of our customers' still spend much of their lives offline.
And the same principle applies there.
For some brands, loyalists may spend time at bazaars, cafés, sports communities, hobby groups, or curated stores.
Bruule, for example, also places booths near offices and hospitals, where sharing and gifting occasions naturally happen.
Another example is Happy Go Lucky in Bandung. One of our team members described going there not to buy something they already had in mind, but to discover things they did not know they wanted.
That makes the store more than a sales channel. But it becomes part of the discovery journey.
We have also had brands ask whether they should open their own physical store. There is no right or wrong answer here. When we met Kiky, the founder of SCH—formerly Ouval Research—he cheekily reminded us that there was no option back then. If you wanted to sell, you went offline.
Today, opening a store is a much more deliberate decision.
Some brands in our network strongly advocate for going offline. Others have tried it and wished they had waited. Both experiences are useful.
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The same goes for building your own webstore.
Marketplaces are hard to beat on convenience, selection, and traffic. For many brands, they will remain an important sales channel.
But marketplaces also limit how much you know about the customer.
Your own channels, whether a website, WhatsApp list, event, or physical store, give you a chance to build a more direct relationship. And often, that relationship starts offline.
A weekend market like Brightspot, small workshop, trunk show, or community event can give customers a reason to know the people behind the brand. A WhatsApp number collected there can later become an invitation to a new launch, early product access, or a reason to visit your website directly.
You're not competing with the marketplace on convenience. You're offering something the marketplace can never give: a direct relationship, insider access, and the feeling of being part of something special.
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After all, there are already many ways to reach customers, and as channels keep evolving, there will only be more.
But the starting point stays the same: why does this specific group of people choose you over other options?
Understand where they spend time, what they care about, what they value about your product, and who they look to for inspiration. And then decide how your brand should show up.
What we keep learning from brands that stand the test of time, like SCH, is that they understand their segment and stay true to it. Not just for a quarter or a year, but as a fundamental commitment. That is the real work.
And maybe that is what we were really talking about in that room in Bandung: not how to fight every macro trend we cannot control, but how to go deeper with the people who already believe in what we are building.
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