The opportunity

The audience was there, the language was not

Fairtex began in 1971 as a textile manufacturer. Its founder, Phillip Wong, grew up with Muay Thai, started making his own equipment when outsourcing it fell short, and went on to open a training facility in Pattaya. Sponsoring ONE Championship took the brand onto the global stage. Today Fairtex covers Muay Thai, MMA, jiu-jitsu and kickboxing, still makes every product in its own factories in Thailand, and has just marked its 55th year.

For most of that history, online came last. Sales ran through distributors, and the website sat at the bottom of the list. As buying habits shifted during the COVID years, Fairtex moved from Magento to Shopify, rebuilt the store around how shoppers actually browse, and ran one global site in English and one for Thailand, later adding a third store for Europe.

English only took the brand so far. The team knew it was losing shoppers wherever English is not the everyday language, and the fixes on hand did not hold up. Language apps and Shopify plugins left copy mistranslated or not translated at all, and a separate Japanese site could not be kept up at the same pace as the others. The demand was visible. The store just could not speak to it.

Half a translation loses the shopper just as surely as none.

Challenges

Six things in the way

What we put in place

Everything translated, down to the blog

Glopal now runs the European store in 20 language versions, and not only the product pages. Titles, product descriptions, navigation, blog posts and Google Ads all reach the shopper in their own language, so a customer in Spain or Poland meets Fairtex in Spanish or Polish from the ad onwards. The team sets the rules: terms that must never be translated stay untouched, terms that read differently in a market are adapted for it, and every language version stays in sync.

Operations did not change. Orders still run through the existing Shopify store, and the European warehouse in the Netherlands processes them exactly as before, with the same Dutch team. Ads no longer need a speaker per market either. Campaigns and the Google Shopping feed are translated in the back end, so marketing spend goes where the demand is rather than where the team happens to have a linguist.

One store, every surface in 20 languages, with the team’s own rules held everywhere.

The timeline

Six weeks, straight through peak

Results

A new country every day

At the time of the webinar Fairtex had been live for just over a month, early days for a channel where organic usually takes time to warm up. The signs were already there. Spain, a large market that had always been hard to reach, picked up, and so did Poland, a market the team had been told existed but never managed to open. Germany overtook France as the top market in Europe, abandoned carts fell, and in France growth jumped once shoppers no longer had to hunt for the language switcher.

The surprises matter as much as the leaders. New customers turn up from a new country most days, from Finland to North Macedonia, and South Korea is sending far more visitors than early search research suggested. Customer service chats now arrive in Eastern European languages. Traffic from South America is strong enough that shipping, not demand, is the constraint, which is why warehouses there and in the US are next. None of it took a new marketing plan, only speaking to shoppers in their own language.

Speak the language, and the markets nominate themselves.