Maxine Laceby started making collagen in her kitchen. Her friends wanted it. Other people started asking. She built a website, set up a subscription, and started shipping it in letterbox-friendly boxes.
That was 2017. There was no collagen market to speak of. No competitors. No playbook.
Nine years later, Absolute Collagen is a £30M business with 80% of revenue coming from subscribers — one of the strongest retention figures in UK consumer brands. Maxine’s daughter Darcy, who has a food science degree, joined early and became the scientific backbone of a brand that now holds the largest peer-reviewed clinical trial on a collagen supplement globally.
From the outside, it looks like a brand that got lucky — the right product at the right time, with a founder who happened to be great with customers. The reality is more deliberate than that. And one decision in particular explains more about how Absolute Collagen got here than almost anything else.
They stopped trying to hunt new customers.
The subscription isn’t the product — it’s the relationship
Most brands treat subscription as a billing mechanism, a way to smooth out revenue, reduce churn friction, automate the reorder. Absolute Collagen built something different from day one.
“It was never a sit down moment and there was no strategy to it whatsoever,” Maxine told Treyd Secrets host Peter Beckman recently. “It was just putting her — the “absoluter”, the person who wanted it — right at the forefront and making her life as easy as possible.”
That instinct — to orient everything around the existing customer rather than the next one — turned out to be the foundation of a retention engine that most brands spend years trying to reverse-engineer.
Here’s what the first 30 days as an Absolute Collagen customer actually looks like: your order ships the same day you subscribe and typically arrives the next. Inside every first box is a welcome booklet — not a coupon, not a discount code, but an explanation of the brand, the product, what to expect, and importantly, what not to expect. Results take 6 to 12 weeks. That’s stated upfront, deliberately, because a customer who understands the timeline is a customer who doesn’t churn at week three.
After that, email flows reinforce the same message. You’re invited into a closed community of around 20,000 subscribers — self-regulated, not managed by the brand — where customers share their journeys, answer each other’s questions, and troubleshoot together. Maxine does customer calls every week. Events happen at the Absolute Collagen office. At the one-year mark, you receive a free full-size skincare product worth around £50.
None of this is accidental. All of it is expensive. And all of it is the point.
“We spend about 50% of our resource on getting new customers and about 50% on keeping the customers that we have,” Darcy explained. “It can’t just be all about the new customer.”
The moment something wasn’t right
For a period, it was. Absolute Collagen grew fast, cast the net wide, and chased the new customer hard. Meta rewarded them for it — the platform, as Darcy put it, “just wants you to keep focusing on the new customer.”
But something started to feel off.
“I sat in this boardroom in one trade meeting and I just said, something’s not right,” Maxine recalled. “We’re bringing in all these new customers and we were losing loads as well.”
The diagnosis: they had drifted from their core customer. The wider targeting was pulling in people who didn’t really connect with the brand — and people who don’t connect don’t stay. Lifetime value was dropping. The subscription numbers looked fine on top, but the quality of the base was deteriorating underneath.
The decision they made next was, by Maxine’s own description, terrifying.
They stopped acquiring new customers and refocused entirely on who they already had — and who they actually wanted. Their core customer: women roughly 35 to 50, with specific attitudes, habits, and spending patterns that Absolute Collagen had tested and mapped extensively.
“We did go backwards and I knew we would and that was fine,” Maxine said. “But we really focused on who she is and bring in a quality customer.”
The results came. Customers started sticking at higher rates. Lifetime value went back up. The narrower net turned out to catch better fish.
“By closing that net and going for a more targeted audience, it’s made us stronger. And I don’t think people understand that as much.”
What good retention actually looks like
It’s easy to talk about retention as a concept. Absolute Collagen has the data to back theirs up.
Their clinical trial — the largest peer-reviewed study on a collagen supplement globally — showed a 60% increase in skin elasticity after 12 weeks compared to placebo, and a 27% increase in new hair growth. They also measured what happened when a subset of participants stopped taking the product: results declined significantly within eight weeks across 100% of that group.
That finding became a retention tool. The data reinforces the habit message — take it every day, don’t stop — and Absolute Collagen uses it throughout the customer journey to do exactly that.
The result shows up in behavior. Six out of seven days per week, on average, is how often Absolute Collagen customers take the product. For comparable collagen brands, Darcy says the figure is closer to three or four. That single metric — daily compliance — is one of the clearest indicators of a customer who will stay.
“If they’re not quality and they don’t resonate and they don’t take it every single day, their lifetime value goes down,” Darcy explained. “So you’ve really got to build that.”
The subscription model also creates something most brands don’t have: predictability. Revenue is forecastable in a way that pure DTC or retail simply isn’t. The flip side is that the model is sensitive — an economic downturn, Darcy notes, shows up in churn figures almost immediately, often before you’d see it in any other indicator. “You can literally predict that’s going to happen by the state of the news, to be honest.”
The channel expansion question
Absolute Collagen is now available through Boots — the UK’s biggest health and beauty retailer — and on Amazon, in addition to its own website. That’s a significant shift for a brand that was 100% direct-to-consumer for its first several years.
The reason they waited is instructive. “It wouldn’t have made sense for us to go into retailers in the beginning because collagen wasn’t understood,” Darcy said. The education piece had to happen through a direct relationship with the customer first. Once the category existed and the brand had the proof points to back it up, retail became an amplifier rather than a foundation.
Even now, DTC accounts for around 80% of revenue. Retail is additive, not structural.
The challenge of multi-channel for a subscription-first brand is real though. Absolute Collagen has a firm rule: no one should ever be better off buying the product somewhere else than on their website. That creates friction with retailers who want to run promotions, and it requires careful partner selection — choosing retailers who want more than a transactional relationship, and doing the work to maintain community even when the customer came in through Boots.
“If you’re a customer of Absolute Collagen, whether that be from our website, Boots, Amazon — you’re a customer of Absolute Collagen and you’re invited into the same ecosystem,” Darcy said.
That’s a harder thing to operationalize than it sounds. It means in-store booklets explaining the brand story. It means a sales approach built on education, not just placement. It means accepting that some channels give you less data — retail customer behavior, unlike DTC, largely belongs to the retailer — and planning accordingly.
What this means for subscription brands
The Absolute Collagen model isn’t easily copied. It took nine years, a clinical trial, a proprietary community, and a founder who still gets on the phone with customers every week to build what they have.
But the underlying logic is transferable. A few things stand out.
Subscription retention starts before the first delivery. The welcome experience — what arrives in the box, what email comes next, what expectation is set — determines whether the customer gives the product enough time to work. Most brands underinvest here entirely.
Quality of customer matters more than quantity. A smaller base of customers who genuinely connect with the brand and use the product consistently will outperform a larger base of customers who don’t — in lifetime value, in word of mouth, and in the data you’re able to build on top of them.
The decision to go backwards can be the right one. Slowing acquisition to fix retention is counterintuitive. It is also, in Absolute Collagen’s case, what turned a fast-growing brand into a durable one.
“We know the business better than anyone else,” Maxine said. “And we know the customer better than anyone else.” That, more than any metric, is probably the real Treyd Secret.
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💜 Want to hear the full conversation? Listen to the Treyd Secrets episode with Maxine and Darcy Laceby on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
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