APPAREL · EU

1,400 SKUs translated and SEO'd for six markets in two weeks. Launch caught peak season.

An $8M apparel brand had clear demand in three new EU markets. The blocker was 1,400 products that needed copy, alt text, structured data and translation. Contractor quote: $48k + four months. Their marketing lead would still need to check every page. They were going to miss peak season — about $1M in projected revenue. We built a tool that drafts product pages in their voice, translates them with a native-speaker check, and ships the SEO bits all at once.

Brand name withheld. Translation quality measured by native-speaker review pass rate. Sample PDP outputs in three languages available on the audit call.

14 days

VS 4 MONTHS

$48k

CONTRACTOR SAVED

MARKETS LIVE

~$1M

PEAK CAPTURED

APPAREL · EU · 2026 · DETAILS REDACTED

THE PROBLEM

A market launch was blocked by 1,400 PDPs that needed writing.

The brand had product-market fit in their home market and clear demand from three neighbouring countries. The launch plan was Q1; by Q2 they hadn't started, because the catalog work was a four-month grind nobody wanted to start.

The contractor quote came in at $48k plus four months of lead time. The team's marketing lead would still need to QA every page. The opportunity cost was a missed peak season.

WHAT WE BUILT

The catalog as a workflow, not a project.

Step 1: learn the brand's voice. 60 of their best existing product pages became the reference set. In blind tests, reviewers couldn't tell drafts from originals.

Step 2: translate per market with a native-speaker check on a sample of each batch. We never auto-publish. Every page gets one human signoff per market.

Step 3: SEO. Alt text per image, structured data per product, collection page suggestions pulled from real purchase patterns.

The launch happened. We hit peak season in three markets instead of missing it. I would have paid the contractor — instead we kept the workflow.

THE OUTCOME

Markets opened, catalog as a workflow that compounds.

Time to ship 1,400 SKUs to 3 new markets4 months → 14 days−96%
Translation contractor cost$48,000 → $0saved
Markets live1 → 6+5
Projected peak revenue captured~$1M (was on track to miss)captured

WHAT WAS MESSY

Where the first round of translations failed.

First-pass Italian translation sounded like generic ecommerce. We added a 'tone tuning' step with one Italian copywriter doing a calibration round; subsequent batches passed native review at 92%.

Structured data caught a long-standing inventory schema issue. Half the products had GTINs in the wrong field. The catalog engine surfaced it; we fixed it as part of the pilot.

WHAT'S NEXT

Same workflow now ships new SKUs to all six markets on day one.

Every new SKU now goes through the workflow at launch — six markets in one pass. The brand's PDP time per SKU is 30 minutes (review + sign-off) instead of an outsourced cycle.

More field notes

All field notes →

DTC SKINCARE · EU