How a premium sportswear brand set a personal best with 1,400% sales growth in a new market
A global sportswear company with a presence on every continent wanted to deliver a premium customer experience across 20 languages. But global ambition was growing faster than the operations supporting it. Campaigns, product launches, retail store content, and customer communications were all managed by a lean team with no automation or integrations. By building a connected AI-powered global content operation through the Phrase Platform, the team increased output by 78% year-on-year while reducing costs. The company also launched a localized website that drove a 1,400% increase in sales in the target market within six months, and positioned the company to compete for the 80% of the world’s consumers who do not speak English.
The global sportswear company operates across multiple continents and competes at the premium end of the market. With a diverse global workforce and a rapidly growing international footprint, the brand holds itself to the highest standards across every customer touchpoint. From e-commerce and marketing campaigns to retail and customer communications, consistency is a core priority.
As the business expanded into new markets and launched more product lines, content volume grew far faster than headcount. A centralized, technology-led approach was the only viable way to meet demand without compromising brand standards or exhausting budgets.
CHALLENGE
A global brand outgrowing its content infrastructure
The company’s international content operations ran on Google Sheets, requiring teams to manually move content between systems. There were no automated workflows, no integrations between the content platforms, and no scalable way to add new languages.
For a brand where the founders and senior leadership hold exacting standards on language quality, this approach created constant pressure. A growing catalog of products, campaigns, and retail openings demanded a level of speed and consistency that manual processes simply could not deliver.
Campaigns were briefed, creative concepts approved, and copy finalized before anyone considered how the message would resonate in Seoul, São Paulo, or Munich. That meant rework, guesswork, and customer experiences that didn’t reflect the premium standard the brand is built on.
The company needed technology that would run quietly in the background, freeing the team to focus on strategy, quality, and the stakeholder relationships that drive global growth. Manual, file-based content operations simply could not keep up with a brand expanding at this speed across this many markets.
“Everything needs to be premium. There’s a big emphasis on this and a big effort to make sure it happens. That comes with a lot of scrutiny.”
Localization Program Manager
SOLUTION
A global content ecosystem engineered for performance
The company adopted Phrase to centralize and scale its global content operations. The immediate priority was a major website redesign that demanded a level of automation the previous setup could not provide. A single integration evolved into a connected ecosystem spanning the company’s website, product catalog, CRM, and design workflows. AI is embedded throughout to handle growing content volume at speed. Each capability was introduced to solve a specific business challenge and remove manual work from the content lifecycle.
Key elements of the solution include:
Phrase TMS with Phrase Orchestrator for workflow automation. All translation projects are centralized while automating routing, assignment, and delivery across 20 language pairs.
Contentful integration for e-commerce and website content. The impact is transformational. Content now flows directly between the CMS and the localization workflow, eliminating manual export and re-entry and giving the team the operational capacity to launch the Korean website.
Custom API connector to PIM system, handling 60–70% of all content. Built using Phrase APIs, this custom connector automates the movement of product descriptions, technical specifications, and commercial education materials without requiring manual intervention during production cycles.
Braze integration for localization of CRM emails and push notifications. With 400–500 email campaigns and push notifications going out per year, the team was drowning in managing content between spreadsheets and the CRM platform. The Braze integration removes that manual layer entirely and gives translators visual context for the email content they are working on. The CRM team can now focus on higher-value work, including A/B testing, analytics, and engagement strategy.
Phrase Language AI and Custom AI with seasonal retraining.With models retrained each commercial season, output quality improves continuously. Human translators lead on highly creative campaign work.
Figma plugin for digital product work. Used selectively for mobile app and digital product content where visual precision matters, this integration brings localization directly into the design workflow so translated content never leaves the design environment.
“The way I look at the Phrase Platform is it’s something that I don’t need to worry about. It’s running in the background and it’s so efficient, I forget about it. And I can actually dedicate my time to strategizing.”
Localization Program Manager
STATS & FACTS
1,400%
increase in sales within six months of launching a local language website
78%
year-on-year increase in localized content volume
3%
cost reduction over the same period that content volume surged
~170 products
fully localized per commercial season within approximately six weeks
~75%
of content processed with AI-assisted translation
THE IMPACT
The biggest revenue win of the year came from the smallest team
The most powerful evidence in this story comes from revenue data. Across every market where the company has introduced a local-language experience, the pattern is consistent. Customers engage more, convert more, and buy more when they are addressed in their own language.
Fastest growth lever in a new market. Within six months of launching a local-language website, sales in that market increased by 1,400%. The implementation took roughly three and a half months, with localization itself requiring just six weeks.
Local-language content outperforming English. German-language content now drives higher engagement and purchase rates than English-language content globally.
More content, lower costs. Year-on-year content output increased by 78% while costs dropped by 3%. Content volume per season grew from 25,000 to nearly 45,000 words, while turnaround times decreased by 50%.
AI-assisted translation at scale. Approximately 75% of all content is now processed with AI-assisted translation, with models retrained each commercial season. Quality improves cycle over cycle, and the approach has been central to delivering 170 products fully localized per season in approximately six weeks.
Changing perceptions across the business. Commercial results are changing how internal stakeholders think about language investment and global growth.
“Within six months, our sales in a localized market went up 1,400%. That showed us how much offering consumers an experience in their own language impacts the business.”
Localization Program Manager
WHY PHRASE
The best results come from the strongest partnerships
The company needed an intelligent platform that could scale with a fast-growing global business. The platform also needed to act as an extension of the global content team, providing capabilities that would normally require an entire department, while adapting to the company’s continued growth. Phrase stood out for several reasons.
A platform that scales with the business. As the company expands into new markets, adding new content types, and increasing volume, the platform is growing with it without requiring the team to grow too.
Accelerating AI adoption. With the Phrase Platform introducing AI-assisted translation at scale was straightforward, with the tools and support to train, retrain, and refine models as the business learns what works. That has been critical to handling growing volume without growing cost.
A collaborative approach to problem-solving. The team operates as an extension of the customer’s own team, co-designing solutions and helping build internal business cases before they are presented to stakeholders. Every major capability in the ecosystem is shaped through this model.
Continuous innovation. At every stage of the company’s expansion, new capabilities are introduced to to support its evolving business needs. The upcoming exploration of bring-your-own-engine and Phrase Data are the latest examples.
A shared vision for growth. Both teams believe language is a growth lever, not a cost center. That alignment shapes every conversation and every decision about what to build next.
“Our global content volume increased by 78%, but the cost went down 3%. 170 products per season, fully localized in a month and a half. We couldn’t do that without Phrase and AI.”
Localization Program Manager
LOOKING AHEAD
Building for every market, from day one
The ambition is to eliminate the “English first, everything else second” model entirely. Every market’s experience should be considered from the moment a campaign concept or product strategy is conceived, not adapted afterward.
For customers, this means content shaped for their preferences and cultural context from the start. A US consumer might respond to storytelling, while a Japanese consumer expects technical detail and precision. That level of intelligence and adaptation turns language into a competitive advantage that directly influences purchasing decisions.
The roadmap includes expanding the Braze integration to cover the majority of CRM volume, integrating Google Gemini via Phrase’s bring-your-own-engine capability, and deploying Phrase Data to bring localization performance measurement into business decision-making for the first time.
The data already proves that speaking a customer’s language drives revenue. The next stage is making sure every function in the business acts on that insight from day one.
All images are for illustrative purposes only and do not depict the customer’s employees, products or facilities.
80% of the world doesn’t speak a word of English. If you only cater to an English-speaking audience, your business will always be capped at 20% of the world. Phrase is helping us turn that ambition into reality.
Localization Program Manager
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