If you are a lover of mountains and outdoor sports, you are sure to have heard of Snowleader. Created in 2008 in Annecy by two friends who were passionate about sport, the French startup sells sports items online in three areas: snow, urban and outdoors. Today, Snowleader has almost 300 brand partners, over 12,000 products and is in 8 countries with 30% of its turnover coming from international sales.
Snowleader: the Reblochon Company
At the beginning of the brand’s history, Snowleader looked for a way to set itself apart from its competitors: they decided to send Reblochon cheese to any customer spending over €150. This original gift became a trade mark of the startup, and it became known as “The Reblochon Company”.
For export, Snowleader adapted this principle and now sends gifts internationally of different types of cheese, Opinel knives or even French salami sausage. It’s a great way to please their customers and get them talking about the brand!
International markets: an objective in the Snowleader DNA
From the time the company was created, the founders always envisaged moving into international markets. In a sector that relies so heavily on the seasons, investing in export was, for Snowleader, a way of protecting itself from risk, especially due to the weather.
Snowleader is already present in 8 countries and 30% of its turnover comes from international sales. But of course, moving into international markets raised various challenges for Snowleader, beginning with the localisation and translation of their e-commerce site.
British consumers have a strong appetite for the mountains and mountain sports, so Snowleader began by extending to the UK. The translations were carried out internally by bilingual employees. But with the opening of markets in Germany, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, Russia and then Spain, a new solution was needed to industrialise the translation workflow and accelerate the time-to-market.
Snowleader therefore sought a solution that allowed:
- Access to professional, specialist translators, who could quickly translate all the product files, the site framework and the SEO content from French into English, German and Spanish;
- Integration of the translation process with the product information management system in place;
- Optimisation of the translation budget benefitting from term reoccurrence and repetitions;
- A guarantee in the quality and consistency of the translations and their relevance in order to meet their targets.
“We were looking for a technological solution to allow us to quickly deploy our product catalogue in several languages.”
Thomas Rouault, Snowleader Founder and CEO
Snowleader therefore chose TextMaster to support them in their international development. Thanks to the combination of a wide network of translators and powerful technologies (a proprietary translation memory Memento™ and the interactive glossary Lexio™), the brand launched more than 280 projects and had more than 2 million words translated.
The result: in one year, Snowleader’s international turnover doubled. Thomas Rouault, founder and CEO of Snowleader, acknowledges a real return on investment: a 40% saving overall on the projects and 50% gains in productivity. He particularly appreciates the performance and ease of use of Pilot™, TextMaster’s online platform.
