Early.Partners has launched KYC (Know Your Customer), a three-week customer research sprint aimed at helping D2C brands understand who their customers are and what drives their purchasing decisions beyond the data available through dashboards and CRM systems.

As D2C brands expand across marketplaces, quick commerce and their own websites, they have access to growing volumes of customer data, including what consumers buy, where they shop, purchase frequency and spending. However, Early.Partners argues that this data does not necessarily explain why customers make those choices.

The KYC sprint involves recruiting and speaking directly with customers, analysing their behaviours and motivations, and translating the findings into actions across brand positioning, communication, product and growth. It looks at what brings consumers into a category, why they choose a particular brand, what makes them return and what they value.

The offering is aimed at D2C brands that have moved beyond relying primarily on founder intuition but may not yet have a dedicated consumer insights function. Rather than building another demographic profile or customer persona, the sprint focuses on the motivations and behaviours behind customer data.

KYC has been developed in-house at Early.Partners and will sit alongside the firm's strategy and brand work for early-stage and growing businesses. The first cohort closes on 25 September 2026.

Meghana Bhat, co-founder, Early.Partners, said, “If you go looking for what’s not working, you’ll find no shortage of opinions. And it’s impossible to act on all of them. Instead, talk to customers who are already choosing you. Understand what they value, why they choose you and what makes them come back. Then double down on what’s working. That’s what Early’s KYC objective is: finding the signals that matter and turning them into growth. There’s a point in a company’s journey where the founder can no longer be the proxy for the customer. That doesn’t mean intuition stops being valuable. It means you need to complement it with evidence from the people actually buying and using your product.”