Field notes
Ten sites,one engine.
Disciplines applied
ShapeNation was the longest of my pre-Maxis roles. Twenty months running a portfolio of low-cost training and fitness sites across the Nordics, all sharing one back end and four go-to-market realities.
The brief was scaling. Not making one site bigger, but making the operating model so that adding a country or a brand stopped being a six-month project.
That is where I learned the difference between localisation and translation.
See it first
Storefront mockup
Drop in a screenshot.
What I did
- 1Built the multi-site operating model. Shared platform, country-level merchandising, market-specific search strategy.
- 2Ran paid, organic, email under one framework. No channel silos. The dashboard was singular and so were the decisions.
- 3Owned the operations layer. Strategy, plans, budgets, vendor management, content frameworks, internal training.
- 4Localised search intent, not just copy. What people search for in Denmark is not what they search for in Sweden. Keyword maps were rebuilt per market.
- 5Hired and trained the team that ran it. Multi-market consistency is people making the same decision twenty times in a row.
What I took with me
Translation is not localisation.
Localise at the keyword layer, not the page layer.
Omnichannel by default.
Stitching channels together later costs twice as much. Build the customer view once.
The model is the moat.
Build the operating model first. Add the markets second.
Workplace photo
