By Ramin Seyed,
For 25 years, I have sat in rooms where the future of brands gets decided. Boardrooms, investor meetings, creative teams, PR sessions. Looking back honestly at those years, the sharpest decisions rarely came from the loudest person in the room. They came from leaders who stayed closest to the customer while everyone else was focused on internal power.
Staying Close To The Customer
Staying close to your audience means more than collecting data or monitoring social media. It means listening to what customers actually say, watching how their behavior changes, and being willing to adapt your strategy when the market tells you that you are wrong. The best leaders do not simply ask what their audience wants. They build systems that allow them to keep listening.
Three examples make the point better than any opinion ever could, and all three come with numbers behind them.
Tina Müller And Douglas
Tina Müller took over as CEO of the German perfumery chain Douglas in November 2017, at a moment when e-commerce was reshaping the entire industry. She pushed online expansion relentlessly and drove Douglas to a record revenue of 3.6 billion euros in 2022, with more than 1.2 billion euros coming from e-commerce alone.
Müller has emphasized the importance of understanding changing customer behavior and aligning strategy with customer needs. Early in her tenure, she even spent her first week working in stores to understand what customers were looking for and how the business was serving them.
Huda Kattan And Huda Beauty
Huda Kattan started in 2013 with a borrowed $6,000 from her sister, Alya. That small sum became Huda Beauty, a brand valued at $1.2 billion as early as 2017. In 2025, she and her family bought back (paywall) the stake held by investor TSG, returning the company fully to founder ownership.
No corporation, no agency, no traditional advertising budget at the start. Just an extremely precise understanding of what a community actually wanted, built through social channels and direct audience interaction rather than conventional campaigns.
Kim Kardashian And Skims
Kim Kardashian co-founded Skims in 2019 with Jens Grede. Six years later, the brand reached a valuation of $5 billion following a $225 million funding round led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives, as CNBC reported in November 2025. That same year, Skims crossed $1 billion in annual net sales.
Skims is not a conventional apparel company. It is a brand built around personal credibility, a clear brand promise and an unusually close relationship with its audience. Its partnerships now extend beyond fashion, including official partnerships with both the NBA and WNBA.
Three completely different worlds—a corporation, a beauty startup, a celebrity business—and yet one common thread runs through all three. Each leader stayed close to the audience, built with patience and protected the core idea from unnecessary internal noise.
Four Lessons For Leaders
So, what can other leaders actually learn from these examples?
1. Create Direct Access To Your Audience
Do not rely exclusively on reports, dashboards or layers of management. Read the comments. Speak to customers. Watch how people use your product when nobody from your company is in the room. The closer the feedback is to the source, the faster you can recognize what is changing.
2. Listen Without Defending
Leaders often ask for feedback while already knowing what they want to hear. Real listening requires the willingness to change your mind. When customer behavior contradicts your strategy, the question should not be who was right. The question should be what the market is telling you.
3. Build For Consistency Rather Than Applause
Strong brands are rarely created through one campaign or one viral moment. They are built through hundreds of decisions that reinforce the same promise over time. Patience is not the absence of ambition. It is the discipline to keep investing in something before the market fully recognizes its value.
4. Separate The Idea From The Ego Behind It
In strong organizations, the best idea should win regardless of who brought it into the room. Leaders who are more concerned with receiving credit than creating results can unintentionally silence the very people who could move the business forward. Ego turns collaboration into competition. Good leadership turns different perspectives into an advantage.
The Leadership Advantage Of Listening
The numbers behind Douglas, Huda Beauty and Skims illustrate what becomes possible when leaders remain focused on their audience, their teams and the long-term strength of the brand. Brands today are no longer built by advertising budgets alone. They are built by the ability to create genuine closeness to an audience and by the discipline to protect that closeness year after year.
After 25 years in this business, my conviction is simple. The future of brands will not belong to the loudest ego in the room. It will belong to the leaders who listen most closely, build with patience, remain open to better ideas and understand that the strongest decision is not necessarily the one that carries their name.
Feature image credit: Getty
By Ramin Seyed
CEO of HuRa, has spent 25 years building brand trust in PR, events and personal branding across global markets.
