Running nine country stores as nine separate productions
There are two ways to sell perfume across Europe. You open one store and ship abroad from it, or you build a store in each country.
Fragrance Perfumes built a store in each country. Slovenia, Croatia, Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria, Czechia, Romania, Slovakia and Poland each get their own domain and their own offers. Where the market has its own currency, the store uses it. The same promotion appears in each market in its own words:
3 ZA 2 NA VSE PARFUME · 3 ZA 2 NA SVE PARFEME · 3 x 2 SU TUTTI I PROFUMI · 3=2 MINDEN PARFÜMRE · 3 ЗА 2 НА ВСИЧКИ ПАРФЮМИ · 3 = 2 na všechny parfémy · 3 LA PREȚUL DE 2 LA TOATE PARFUMURILE · 3 ZA 2 NA VŠETKY PARFUMY
Prices run in euros, forints, koruna, lei and zloty.
That takes real discipline to run, and it is a large part of why the business has grown so fast. Under the old way of making video, it also meant filming everything again for each country.
Translating video ads for a vocabulary-heavy category
Fragrance has words of its own. Note pyramids, sillage, and the language of top, heart and base notes. People who buy perfume know these words well. Translated word for word, they read as amateur. That lands just as a customer is choosing a twenty euro bottle.
So every translated line is checked and fixed before any audio is made. The brand's recurring phrases get the same care, so a product is described the same way in Ljubljana, Budapest or Bucharest.
Working from one source film gave the stores a single voice. The old way filmed, cut and narrated each version on its own, and one shared voice was hard to hold that way.
The old way meant making the same video once per country. Even then, one brand voice was hard to hold.
Launching one promotion across nine markets in the same week
190 videos in seven languages: Croatian, Italian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Czech, Romanian and Slovak. That covers every store beyond the Slovenian home market except Poland.
The change is not that the videos got cheaper. It is that a promotion now goes live in every store in the same week, in the right language and with the right offer wording. The old way of making video used to set the pace. Smaller markets ran a film made a fortnight earlier, because that was when there was time to make it.
That matters more here than in most of retail. Fragrance runs on short, dated promotions. A three for two that reaches Bucharest two weeks after Ljubljana is not the same promotion. Half of its run is already gone.
It also changes what opening a country costs. A new store used to mean a domain, a payment setup, a social presence and a production budget. The production budget was the part that grew fastest. That is no longer true.
Adding a country used to mean adding a production job. Now it just means adding a language.