Kanikka Dewanii started Mintree with a decision that went against the popular playbook of the moment. While many founders were being encouraged to go directly to consumers, Kanikka Dewanii chose a slower and less glamorous route: building the brand through salons and a B2B model. It was not the easiest path, but it was grounded in an understanding of how beauty products are actually experienced, evaluated, and trusted.
The choice reflects an important lesson in entrepreneurship: the fastest-looking route is not always the strongest foundation for a business.
Before founding Mintree, Kanikka Dewanii had already spent years learning the beauty industry from inside it. Her experience included working on products at L’Oréal Paris, launching products at Benefit in the UK, and studying at the London College of Fashion. Those experiences gave Kanikka Dewanii an opportunity to understand an important difference between marketing a beauty product and creating one that people genuinely want to use again.
Beauty is an industry where perception matters, but experience matters even more. A product can look impressive in an advertisement, yet the real test begins when someone actually uses it. Kanikka Dewanii recognized that the salon could provide something digital advertising could not: a direct environment where products could be experienced, discussed, evaluated, and tested repeatedly.
That insight shaped Mintree’s early strategy.
Instead of relying heavily on advertising to create consumer demand, Kanikka Dewanii built the company in an environment where professionals could directly judge the products. Salons became more than distribution points. They became places where the company could receive continuous feedback from people working with customers every day.
That approach also introduced discipline.
In a B2B salon-first model, weak products cannot easily hide behind attractive campaigns. A salon owner has little reason to reorder a product simply because its branding looks good. The product needs to perform well enough for professionals to keep using it and for their customers to return satisfied.
For Kanikka Dewanii, this created a powerful feedback loop. Instead of depending only on traditional focus groups or carefully controlled research environments, Mintree could learn from actual product usage. Professionals could reveal what worked, what needed improvement, and what customers were responding to in real situations.
That kind of feedback can be uncomfortable for a growing company because it removes the distance between the product and its users. But it can also be one of the most valuable forms of learning.
Kanikka Dewanii’s experience demonstrates why founders should be careful about copying startup formulas simply because they are popular. “D2C first” may work exceptionally well for one category or business, while another company may need a completely different route to establish credibility.
The more useful question, as Kanikka Dewanii suggests, is not simply which channel can generate customers faster. It is where a company can earn belief first.
For Mintree, that belief was built inside salons.
The result was a foundation that could later support a D2C expansion. By the time Mintree entered its D2C phase, the company had already spent years receiving feedback from professionals and building products through practical use. According to Kanikka Dewanii’s account, Mintree now reaches more than 10,000 salons across India, while its products have been stress-tested by more than 100,000 professionals over the years.
The numbers are significant, but the larger lesson lies in how they were built.
Kanikka Dewanii did not treat the slower channel as a temporary obstacle. She used it as a learning system. Every reorder, every customer response, and every professional recommendation could become evidence about whether the product deserved to grow.
This is particularly relevant for founders operating in crowded markets. When competition is high, it is tempting to prioritize visibility before proving value. Social media can create attention quickly. Advertising can accelerate awareness. Strong branding can make a company appear established. But none of these automatically creates repeat demand.
Kanikka Dewanii’s approach puts the sequence in a different order: establish usefulness, earn trust, learn continuously, and then scale the reach.
That does not mean every company should begin with B2B. It means founders should understand why a particular channel fits their product and where customers are most willing to believe in it.
The story of Kanikka Dewanii and Mintree therefore offers a broader perspective on growth. Building a company is not always about finding the shortest path to the market. Sometimes it is about finding the environment that gives the business the clearest truth.
For Kanikka Dewanii, salons provided that environment.
The decision to begin there created constraints, but those constraints also created accountability. Without excessive reliance on advertising, the product had to earn its place. Without vanity metrics, repeat usage mattered more. Without a distant customer relationship, feedback arrived quickly.
That is the kind of discipline that can turn a distribution strategy into a product-development advantage.
Kanikka Dewanii’s journey ultimately shows that the right first channel is not necessarily the one that produces the loudest launch. It can be the one where customers, professionals, and the market give a company the most honest feedback.
Growth can come later.
Trust has to come first.
