Selling activewear across Europe from an English-only store
Domen Turek and Vida Nadler started Authletic in December 2023. They sell women's activewear across Europe, and there are still just the two of them.
Activewear is a crowded category, and the hard part is being recognised in it. Authletic managed that in under two years. The name is a pun on authentic and athletic. The taglines are Athletic. Authentic. and Love, Lift, Laugh. The tone is fast, warm and playful, and it is the reason customers choose them over a rack of near identical leggings.
They built the storefronts to match. Authletic runs localised country sites for Slovenia, Czechia, Slovakia, Poland, Croatia, Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria, Greece and Romania. Very few two person companies do that in their first two years.
Video was the part that could not keep up. A video only ever existed in the language it was filmed in, so the localised sites were reading in one language and watching in another.
Translating a brand voice that resists translation
The difficulty shows up in three words taken straight from their own product pages.
Anti-Cameltoe is a real Authletic category, complete with a camel emoji. Butt Lift is the flagship product descriptor. Hidden Scrunch is a garment feature. None of them has a clean equivalent in Croatian, Polish, Czech or Greek, which is why the brand keeps them in English on its own localised pages. Tone is the harder part. Pitch them too clinically and the brand sounds like a medical catalogue. Pitch them too literally and the warmth is gone. Get it wrong and you have not lost a word. You have lost the voice the whole company is built on.
This is why the first step is script control rather than translation. A native speaker settles those lines before any audio exists. The old way of making video left the answer to arrive in the comments, after a campaign was already running. The collection names go into a glossary and never move: Calla, Naya, Eve, Talia, Alva.
The old way meant recording everything six times over. For a team of two, that meant English everywhere, or nothing.
Opening new markets with six languages of video ads
Authletic now produces short form video in six languages from one original: Croatian, Czech, Greek, Hungarian, Polish and Slovak. That is 125 localised videos, made by a team of two.
Several of those markets are ones the brand had never advertised in. That is the part worth noticing. This was not about lifting results where Authletic was already competing. Video in one language had never justified the spend in those countries, so the door stayed shut. It is open now.
What makes that work is that nothing gets remade. The same footage, the same edit and the same timing carry into every language, so the tone the brand is built on survives the trip. Authletic sounds like Authletic in Warsaw and in Athens, which for a brand whose whole appeal is its voice is the only version worth shipping.
Two people, less than three years in, running paid video in six languages and localised storefronts in ten. That is not a normal position for a company this size.
Really good software that was missing from the current AI solutions! It saves us a lot of time producing mass UGC content for our ads.
Domen TurekCo-founder, Authletic
Localising is not something you do once you are big. Authletic treated it as part of getting bigger.