Listen to our companion podcast for this series, “Memory is the New Competitive Moat” on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

One would think a user conference the chance to wax poetic about “the future of marketing and customer experience.”

Instead, at the Tobacco Dock in London, K:LDN gave the Klaviyo executive team a chance to cut through the hyperbole and dissect the harsh realities that their clients and their Champions face daily: a collapsed funnel and a hyper-informed consumer already building real relationships with LLMs before a brand can get a word in.

Klaviyo’s newest release, an AI agent called Composer, is their response to this moment. Marketing teams are feeling pressure to drive incrementality: aggressive goals, tighter budgets; so naturally AI makes work more efficient and effective. But many are learning that the speed and volume of output can have its downsides, too.

The real stakes lie in the quality of the experience, and the meaning behind every interaction. 

AI is already spitting out more mediocre content than any digital channel can contain, flattening brand marketing faster than anyone anticipated. The result is a daunting gap between usage and trust. A survey of 8,000 consumers conducted by Klaviyo found that while 60% now use AI weekly, only 13% completely trust it.  We found similar results in our annual AI-Trust-in-Commerce study.

Some brands are working to close this gap.

In front of 1,000+ peers, executives from a billion-euro Italian beauty giant still running like a startup, a 200-year-old British shoemaker rebuilding its email program from scratch, and a 60-year-old fashion label going all-in on digital are using trust as a metric to win and nurture customer relationships.

Kiko Milano: Winning a Thousand Times a Day

Some brands measure a good year in customer acquisition or total revenue. While that still matters to Kiko Milano as a business, Chief Customer Data and Digital DTC Officer Thomas Davis measures his success by how good customers feel about themselves.

“We've done our job when customers come in, and he or she has had a very good experience, resonates with the brand, and really comes out as a confident shopper or competent consumer.”

- Thomas Davis, Chief Customer Data and Digital DTC Officer, Kiko Milano

Kiko Milano is the largest makeup brand in Italy, with roughly 1,000 stores and an online presence in more than 80 countries, resulting in nearly €1B in revenue. Davis, who joined the team in 2024, expected the infrastructure of a company that size. What he found was more like a family business that had outgrown its systems.

"When you hear something of that size and stature, you think, or you believe, that maybe there's a lot of process in place, there's a lot of enterprise applications running,” Davis said. “And what I actually found was that Kiko Milano was much more of a family-run, startup-size mentality."

The Cornerstone Problem

"I think trust is the cornerstone of AI right now," Davis said. AI is moving fast enough, he argued, that the industry owes itself a moment of caution and intention before it pushes to accelerate operations. Data accuracy and access serve as the source of truth, from product details to the brand book. And all teams need to be able to tap into this knowledge base through the AI workflows they’re testing, refining, and scaling daily.

"The data needs to be validated even outside of what the prompt is telling you,” Davis explained. “If it's not accurate and people are making decisions on inaccurate data, I think the number is going to be a big problem. And I do feel that we will see a few of those blow-ups over the next year or two as the trust and the alignment, the accuracy, is fine-tuned."

Davis made a point of separating caution from risk aversion, which has historically been brands’ biggest inhibitor of innovation. "That doesn't mean don't experiment, doesn't mean don't push forward," he said. It means knowing which parts of the system still need a human to check their work.”

This is the actual driver of transformation for Davis. The people make the tools reach their full potential, not the other way around. 

"Any transformation, anytime you look into the future, I think it's about bringing humans with you, your team with you,” Davis explained. “It comes down to people, comes down to belief. It's seeing the vision and believing the vision, and that's much easier said than done."

Confidence, Compounded

When he was asked what winning looks like two years out, Davis didn't share a specific number. Because in his mind, success isn’t a revenue target or a total number of doors. Instead, he described a customer walking into a store and leaving confident, happy, and more connected with the brand. 

With Klaviyo, a migration that took 60 days to go live in February 2026, Kiko Milano can make these moments of clarity and connection a scalable outcome, resulting in thousands of little wins a day.

“The art of the possible is there," Davis explained, "when you put the right pieces together, and you put the right drive on it." 

Despite being a global, billion-euro brand, Kiko Milano still runs like a start-up and sees the smallest, most human moments of trust as a true measure of success. Now, these little moments can compound; thousands of little moments a day, every day, and across all channels.

Clarks: Rebuilding Resonance One Segment at a Time

Mario Protano joined Clarks as Marketing Director about a year ago to find a 200-year-old brand with a modern-sized problem: while it had strong heritage in the UK, it had weak awareness in the US and Canada. Its email program only amplified the issue by mistaking volume as a viable engagement strategy. 

"We were just sending constant emails to the entire file,” Protano said. “We're talking three million subscribers, and basically we were sending emails to the same people seven days a week. Depending on the promotion or the revenue numbers we had to hit, it would be three times a day. So, as you can tell, a lot of unsubscribes, a lot of unengaged people."‍

- Mario Protano, Director of Marketing, Clarks

The rebuild began in the least glamorous, yet most imperative place. In January 2025, Clarks conducted a full CRM replatform, which was obviously not an ideal time. Yet the team marched on, starting by optimizing existing journeys, then introducing new ones. Although the Clarks subscriber list was growing “considerably,” engagement was down. Protano worked with Klaviyo's customer success team to build an engagement room to bring back customers who had become inactive.

Creative as a Trust Trigger 

Before Protano arrived, Clarks had no defined customer personas. Building them meant conducting thorough research. CDP data, social listening through a new agency partner, and a hard look at demographics and psychographics provided the context Clarks needed to create up to four personas: three “core” ones, and one “aspirational.” This approach allowed the brand to speak to both its existing customer base (70% of the Clarks business is driven by older female customers) and the younger cohort driving its future growth ambitions.

Testing surfaced a clear split in creative approach. "An older customer would expect that polished imagery,” Protano said. “[The] younger customer wants to see user-generated content; they don't want to see those professional images."

Persona work like this is a trust exercise. It's an admission that one message earns belief from one customer and actively costs it with another.

Earning the Inbox

Clarks’ work with Klaviyo, which Protano considers “a partner, not a vendor,” has turned email into the brand’s core channel. Initially, the inbox operated as a volume play, hitting subscribers at every possible moment. Now, it’s an intention play, engaging specific personas with the creative, messaging, and incentives that resonate most. 

"We really need to make sure that we're considered an authorized sender, but also what's critical here is engaging,” Protano said. “It has to be relevant. It has to be information that the customer finds valuable and starts to engage with."

But what happens when engagement doesn’t necessarily lead to ROI? Protano didn't dress it up: "Senior management just doesn't get brand awareness, do they? There is no ROI... We have to reset expectations."

It was a small moment, but a telling one. For Clarks, trust isn’t just something the brand builds with customers. It's something a marketing team has to keep rebuilding with its own leadership, budget cycle by budget cycle, in order to get the freedom to test, iterate, and innovate as its customers evolve.

Fiorucci: Consistency Is the Strategy

Some brands have the luxury of a store to fall back on. Despite being a 59-year-old brand with a lot of cultural heritage, Fiorucci doesn't have a brick-and-mortar presence to make “omnichannel engagement” a complete reality. 

Alberto Nicotra joined the Italian brand in November 2024 from Versace. As its new Chief Digital Officer, he had a mandate to reposition Fiorucci as "accessible luxury" for a new generation. Every ounce of brand equity runs through the branded eCommerce experience, which means every dollar and impression has a clear outcome.

"The strategy that we put in place... is really starting everything from Fiorucci.com,” he said. “Fiorucci.com is our center of communication."

Before any work could actually be done, Nicotra’s team had to rebuild the machine underneath the hood. The project kicked off on June 20 and, five months later, Nictra and his team migrated the brand’s CRM to Klaviyo to create a unified “record,” and relaunched the site on Shopify.

The Full Wardrobe, and What It Costs to Maintain

Fiorucci's new strategy, which the team calls Full Wardrobe, is a strategic shift for how the brand is trying to earn a place in consumers’ lives. 

As Nicotra described, it’s not so much about trying to get people to purchase a full wardrobe, but “a way to show how we’re going to really treat the brand to engage our customer not just with specific products, but a full set of products that they really can find our values and goals.” 

It sounds like a merchandising decision, but in practice, it's a consistency mandate that touches every single output the brand produces. Underneath the overarching question of “is this the right message?” the Fiorucci team questions the subject line, the content, even the font.

"It's really painful because we ask ourselves lots of questions, and we do five times for the same job. But we need really to be consistent, otherwise the risk to be simple, and to be perceived for what we are not, is very, very high."

‍- Alberto Nicotra, CDO, Fiorucci

Fiorucci is applying a similar methodology for AI. Nicotra and his team guide the vision and frame the brand’s judgment, whil AI acts as a tool to work downstream and apply it consistently. 

"For us, the best scenario is to utilize AI as an accelerator to deliver what is at the end,” Nicotra said. “It’s a bridge between the mind and the thought that you have as a human and the delivery of the potential actions that you can leverage with AI.”

Heritage as an Asset

The clearest proof point of Fiorucci's approach came about eighteen months ago, before Nicotra's tenure, with the brand’s Piazza San Babila activation. It was a guerrilla-marketing and virtual-experience hybrid that rebuilt the brand's legendary Milan storefront that closed years earlier, through scannable codes placed around the actual historic square. For two weeks, passersby could unlock a virtual pop-up and buy from a capsule collection tied directly to Fiorucci's archive.

This is an example of how the brand’s heritage coexists with technological experimentation and CX innovation. The virtual store reimagined the brand’s story and turned it into both a new memory and mode for consumers to transact. 

Nicotra's closing advice to the room doubled as a thesis statement for the whole session about how new entrants can respect a founder’s original vision despite the ongoing pressure to moderize. 

“You feel that responsibility to protect the story and the heritage of the brand, so what I've done is study the story, going deep into understanding why [brands] were successful, what they are, what calls on the values are connected with that trend. [At Versace and Fiorucci] I personally looked at where the products connected to the archive. Really study, go deep, and ask questions to the people with more experience. Spend time to get into the spirit of the brand before making any decision.”

Brands’ New Vow of Trust 

These three brands have very different histories, customers, and goals. They even approach marketing and customer experience completely differently. And when speaking of AI, neither stated “automation” as the fundamental goal. 

What they described in three different vocabularies was belief. Davis spoke of a confident shopper who felt beautiful and connected to the brand. Protano broke down how brands need to be considered “authorized sender” as consumers continue to be overburdened by marketing messages. And Nicotra's emphasis on embracing the old (heritage) and the new (digital innovation) showed how he’s preparing his brand for the future.  

In the agentic era, the brands that have the most trust will be the ones with the clearest advantage. Because anyone can plug in a prompt and copy-and-paste a campaign; it takes a special type of creative mind to create a brand and story that cultivates authentic connection.