Building a founder-led brand for five language markets
Sandra Šuc could not find outdoor leggings that fitted properly, and neither could the women following her. So in 2019 she made some. The first product, the Hiker, took over a year to develop, and the business ran out of her living room while she did it. Alpine Nation now sells across Europe and North America. Its own site carries more than 3,000 customer reviews, averaging 4.82 out of 5.
That start still shows in everything the brand publishes. The line is "For women, by women!". Products come from what followers actually ask for. The content that performs best is Sandra talking straight into a phone camera: "Hi! I'm Sandra, the founder of Alpine Nation."
None of that is a marketing position. It is simply what the company is. The brand has held onto it while growing into a business that ships worldwide. There are two storefronts, one for Europe and one for North America.
Long before it had to, Alpine Nation localised its European storefront into five languages. This was not machine translation behind a flag menu. The copy was rewritten in full, and even the tagline was rewritten rather than translated. Für Frauen, von Frauen! Od žensk, za ženske!
That is a large amount of work for a company of this size, and it was done before the sales justified it. It tells you how the company thinks. A customer in Munich or Zagreb was never going to be treated as a visitor to a Slovenian shop.
Video was the one part that could not follow. A video existed in the language it was shot in, and in no other. A German customer read the brand in German, clicked a product video, and heard English. So did an Italian customer, and a Croatian one. The brand is built on a real person speaking to you, so the language matters. Subtitles were not the answer, because a subtitle turns a personal message into a caption. The viewer stops watching a person and starts reading a screen.
Translating and lip syncing founder video without reshooting
The footage Alpine Nation had already shot now goes out in nine languages. Nothing is recut, and there is no second shoot day.
The glossary matters more than it looks. Alpine Nation's product families use ordinary English words as names. The names are Hiker Leggings, Ascent Hiking Pants, Summit Pocket Leggings, Drift Air Long Sleeve Tee, Flow Joggers, Vertex Hoody, Nimbus Shell Jacket. Left alone, a translation engine turns Hiker into a common noun and Drift into a verb. A customer who just watched a video about one product can then no longer find it. The glossary locks the names. The product is called the same thing in the video, on the page and at the checkout, in every language.
Lip sync stops the result looking imported. The content is face to camera, so lip sync is the difference between usable and unwatchable.
The website had spoken German and Italian for years. Video is where people meet Sandra, and now it speaks those languages too.
Growing to nine languages of video ads with GeckoDub
175 videos now run in nine languages: German, Austrian German, Dutch, Swedish, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Croatian and English.
Those numbers are worth comparing. The website speaks five languages. The video speaks nine. In Dutch, Swedish, Spanish and Portuguese, the video now arrives ahead of the storefront. The old way of making video kept video a step behind. Video now runs in front.
What changed is what a shoot day produces. It used to produce one language. It now produces nine, from the same footage, so adding a market to a launch costs close to nothing. Alpine Nation no longer schedules non English markets as a separate project. They are part of the same launch.
That is the part worth noticing. Alpine Nation does all of this with no localisation team and no agency on retainer. A product goes live in nine languages on the same morning, run by the same small team that develops it. Very few brands at this size operate that way.
Alpine Nation was running the same English creative across multiple markets. They tested GeckoDub by translating those videos into Dutch. ROAS improved 42% and CTR 40% — and translating product videos for every market went from weeks to minutes.