The channel where you sell has already set your price.
Before they see your product, customers have already seen where it is. And they place it in that setting’s price range, whatever your communication says.
The channel is usually chosen out of commercial urgency: there is a need to grow, someone offers distribution, a store opens because it seems to be time. Each opening has its logic. What is almost never assessed is its positioning cost. That cost does not appear in the month’s results. It appears months later, when the customer has already repositioned the brand in the range of the channel where they found it.
In fashion, the channel is as much a part of the product as the fabric. The same garment in a curated store and on a marketplace is not the same product, even if it is physically identical.
When a brand is in channels that do not match its positioning, the channel is compensating for an incoherence that lives in another layer.
A case
A direct-to-consumer streetwear brand, with the web as its only channel. Growing meant opening its own store and wholesale, domestic and international. It is the same case we told in ‘Margin is not fixed in the margin’, now read from the channel.
The decision was not to open channels but to order them: each one with a function relative to the web. The web remained the main channel, and the own store and wholesale were organised around it. The selling price of the star product did not move: €39.90 before and after.
The result, between 2023 and 2026: from one to four channels and from 16,000 to 135,000 units. The brand gained market depth and a new positioning. Wholesale brought visibility, visibility brought more visits to the web, and those visits turned into more sales. Everything flows back to the web.
A well-ordered channel does not compete with the main one. It feeds it.
Opening a channel is a brand decision
Opening a channel is not a logistics decision. It is an identity decision with positioning consequences. Before signing with a distributor or opening a point of sale, the question is not how much it will sell. It is which range it will place you in and what that channel does for the main one.
What to look at in your brand
Look at where your product is today and ask yourself three questions. Which price range does that setting place your brand in? Does each channel have a function relative to the main one, or do they all compete for the same customer? Is your selling price the same in all of them, or does each channel tell a different brand?
If you cannot answer the second, you do not have a channel strategy. You have presence.