From English-Only to a Truly Global Webstore: How Fusalp accelerated its international e-commerce by Translating their Premium Buyer Experience for 24 markets at Once.
At Glopal, we love seeing brands unlock their true international potential. Recently, we sat down with Julie Allanet, Head of E-Commerce at the iconic French luxury sportswear brand Fusalp, to discuss their incredible e-commerce journey.
Founded in 1952 in the French Alps, Fusalp brings real tailoring know-how to high-performance skiwear. Today, their sophisticated silhouettes are worn everywhere from mountain summits to city avenues. But taking that premium, highly technical French DNA to the rest of the world required a massive shift in their digital strategy.
Here is our conversation on how Fusalp abandoned risky single-market bets in favor of a data-driven, globally scalable localization strategy.
Glopal: Julie, to start us off, how does e-commerce fit into Fusalp’s wider business and international ambitions?
Julie: E-commerce isn’t a separate channel for us; it’s genuinely part of our whole business model. It acts as a growth driver, a digital flagship, and a service channel. Internationally, our website is often the very first place people discover Fusalp, so the digital experience has to be just as premium as stepping into one of our physical boutiques.
More than that, e-commerce is a smart way for us to test our potential in new markets without over-investing upfront. Compared to opening a physical store, it’s a much lighter entry point: you can launch, learn fast, and validate demand before you scale.
Glopal: Before working with Glopal, what did that international expansion look like, and where were you hitting roadblocks?
Julie: Actually, the day-to-day operational side of international expansion wasn’t our main roadblock. We’ve been working with Global-e since late 2023 to handle international payments, logistics, taxes, and duties, which helped us scale very quickly across multiple markets.
However, with the strong growth we saw over those two years, we realized we had hit a ceiling. If we wanted to keep scaling quickly, translating the experience into local languages was the mandatory next step. We sell high-value products with highly technical features and materials. If a customer is going to invest in a premium outfit, they need to feel completely reassured and clearly understand the product details before purchasing. Navigating a website in a non-native language was becoming a significant barrier to conversion for customers who aren't fully bilingual in English.
We had learned a hard lesson about this when we tried to expand into South Korea using a traditional, manual translation process to build a digital flagship. It was expensive and slow, and the market dynamics ultimately weren't what we expected. That taught us that you cannot bet everything on a few markets with heavy, upfront translation investments. We needed a scalable way to break down the language barrier globally without slowing down our momentum.
Glopal: That language barrier can completely break the customer journey. Can you share an example of how that friction played out in real time?
Julie: Absolutely. We ran an A/B test in Germany using Google Ads in German versus English. We assumed the German ads would perform better, and they did in terms of click-through rate. But then we saw a much higher bounce rate.
Why? Because people clicked on a German query and landed on an English site. That disconnect broke trust instantly. International growth requires consistency across the full funnel. If the entire journey isn't localized, you create friction immediately.
Glopal: How did things change when you partnered with Glopal to overcome these translation hurdles?
Julie: The biggest change was that we moved from a slow, market-by-market approach to a scalable model from day one. Instead of agonizing over one or two countries, we used Glopal to launch in 24 languages straight away. The speed of execution was a game-changer. We signed at the beginning of the summer and had all 24 countries live by September, just in time for our critical winter peak season.
It also gave us incredible agility. We didn't just translate the website; we translated our Google Shopping feeds and Meta catalogs. When we create new landing pages, they are instantly available in 24 languages. That meant we could activate acquisition properly in each market—bringing in local traffic and giving them a seamless, localized end-to-end experience, combining Glopal with what we already had with Global-e. On markets fully translated by Glopal, we achieved a strong Year on Year +28% growth for our peak season.
Glopal: Looking at your strategy today, how do you approach international growth differently compared to before?
Julie: Today, it is a much more iterative and data-driven approach. In the past, the natural temptation was to pick a few countries, invest a lot, and hope they become the next big thing.
Now, we launch much more broadly to create coverage, and we let the market tell us where the real demand is. Once we are fully translated in 24 markets, we monitor the data closely. We look for early traction signals: steady organic demand, improving conversion, and paid campaigns that show healthy efficiency.
Where the demand is real, we double down. We invest more in localized marketing and refine the experience. Where the economics don't work, we pull back. This always-on "test and learn" model is much more capital-efficient. We are spreading our bets, but scaling only when we have proof. Building international step-by-step based on evidence, not intuition, gives us a massive strategic advantage.
Glopal: Thanks Julie!
