Building a luxury affiliate agency through losing clients, with Lo Digital's Chikay Lo

Lo Digital is a boutique affiliate agency for luxury and premium brands that sits between PR and performance marketing. In this Lessons from Losing episode, founder Chikay Lo tells an Awin interviewer how she left in-house roles to start it, how she coped when several clients left at once and why she wants the channel judged beyond the last click.

In this episode

• Lo, who spent over a decade in house at Cult Beauty and Net-A-Porter, describes an agency that flips the usual lower-funnel affiliate model towards content and creators (0:30, 1:01).

• She built Cult Beauty's affiliate programme on Rakuten from 2015 into one of the network's top accounts; luxury brands initially dismissed affiliate as vouchers and fraud, so meetings were hard to win (1:30, 2:00, 2:31).

• A consultant interviewing her in 2021 told her the in-house role was not right; she started her own business at the end of 2022 (4:30, 5:00, 5:30).

• For a year and a half she ran six full-service accounts alone; a panel talk for PR professionals, in plain language, brought a wave of inbound enquiries (7:01, 8:01, 8:31).

• After her first hire, clients left back to back for reasons unrelated to performance; a year's cash buffer helped, and she now stresses cash flow, late-paid invoices and caution (9:01, 9:31, 12:00).

• She wants the channel judged on more than last click, brings a performance director's view of search, CSS partners and paid social, and credits an outside mentor for her blind spots (3:30, 22:31, 24:32).

Interview from Lessons from Losing by Awin, published on YouTube.