Running eleven country storefronts as eleven local brands
Most companies selling across eleven countries run one site with a flag menu in the corner. PUELLA does something considerably more advanced.
It runs eleven separate stores, ten of them on their own national domain, each carrying the brand name translated into that country's word for scents. puellavone.sk. puellavune.cz. puellaillatok.hu. puelladufte.de and puelladufte.at as separate businesses despite sharing a language. puellazapachy.pl, puellavonjave.si, puellamirisi.hr, puellaparfumuri.ro, puellaprofumi.it, and puellascents.com for everyone else.
Several markets have their own social accounts, making the brand feel like a familiar local business.
None of this was inherited. Martin Švenk was 24 when he started PUELLA in 2020, working out of his childhood bedroom in Košice after a stretch driving a taxi and delivering food. Slovakia had no laundry perfume category at the time, so rather than entering one he built it, and around sixty domestic brands have since appeared trying to copy the model. Forbes Slovakia named him to its 30 pod 30 list, describing a company with revenues in the tens of millions of euros, more than 150 employees and a presence across eleven foreign markets. EY made him Slovakia's Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year in 2024, an award he collected in the building of the National Council. Founders who build a brand that travels are rare enough. Founders who create the shelf it sits on are rarer still.
The product is laundry perfume, positioned not as a better fabric softener but as a replacement for the category.
That is an argument, and arguments have to be made in words. There is no photograph of a smell. Everything depends on someone describing the sensation convincingly, at the right pace, in a register that sounds like pleasure rather than chemistry, which is why this category lives or dies on video.
So video was the one layer of the operation still being made centrally and pushed outward, while everything around it had been built market by market. In a business constructed specifically so that no market feels secondary, that was the one place where the seams showed.
Lip syncing product video with GoSync 3.0 across seven languages
PUELLA's videos are people talking to the camera with a bottle in their hands. That is how this product is sold, and it is also the hardest kind of video to translate. A hand comes up. The bottle passes in front of the face. The speaker turns to show the label. For much of the shot the mouth is partly hidden.
GoSync 3.0 is built for this. It works out where the lips are moving even when something covers them, so a hand or a bottle crossing the face does not break the picture. It keeps working when the speaker turns their head or walks across the shot. If two people are on screen, it follows each face separately and matches every voice to the right mouth.
The result is that the Italian version looks filmed, not dubbed. Someone watching in Milan sees a person speaking Italian, not a foreign video with Italian audio added on top.
The translation is handled with the same care. GeckoDub translates whole scenes rather than single lines, so the meaning and the tone survive, not just the words. Before any audio is made, PUELLA's team can read the translated script and change it. That is the moment that decides how the video sounds, because fragrance copy has to feel like pleasure, not chemistry. Animated subtitles are added on top, so the video still works with the sound turned off, which is how most people watch.
Eleven stores were built so that every market would feel local. Video was the one place where it still felt imported.
1,075+ videos already localised and translated with GeckoDub
1,075 videos across seven languages: German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Croatian, Slovenian and Romanian. German covers both the German and Austrian stores, and Slovak is the language the originals are shot in, which is why the count is seven rather than eleven.
That first number is worth stopping on. A thousand localised videos is the kind of figure you expect from a media company or a broadcaster, not from a home fragrance business in Košice. It is what it looks like when a company decides that eleven markets means eleven markets, and then keeps feeding all of them rather than letting the small ones drift.
GeckoDub handles the volume because it runs as a bulk operation rather than a file by file queue. PUELLA uploads a full batch of source videos in one go and translates them in parallel across all seven target languages. What would otherwise be a sequential grind, rendering one language, moving to the next and repeating, collapses into a single action that fans out simultaneously. At the scale of a hundred plus source videos, that parallelism is the difference between a workflow that fits inside a week and one that never finishes.
Proofreading scales the same way. Because every translated video links back to its original in GeckoDub's media library, PUELLA's team reviews the source script once rather than checking each language version independently. One proofread pass on the Slovak original propagates corrections across all seven outputs, so quality control grows with the number of languages covered rather than the number of videos produced.
The change that shows up is in the calendar rather than the budget. Campaigns used to start in Slovakia and Czechia, because those markets justified the production cost, then roll outward over following weeks as time allowed. Romania and Italy were usually last and sometimes got nothing.
Every store now launches together. For a company that deliberately built eleven local identities instead of one multilingual site, that is not a convenience. It is the thing the whole structure exists to deliver, and video was the last part not delivering it.
Overall, we have been really happy with GeckoDub! The tool has opened a completely new door for us when it comes to creating video content for our expansion markets, and we are really excited about that. It has made creating localised content much easier for us and is definitely helping us move faster and grow in new markets.
BSc. Tereza FričováHead of Digital Experience, PUELLA
If you have built a real store for every market, do not let the video be the thing that gives you away.