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BYLT Basics is an e-commerce (mainly) clothing retailer that blends style with comfort with its quality essentials and apparel for women and men.
From every interaction with the brand, you get a sense of energy and vigor. Since starting in 2016, the company has opened 5 physical stores across the US and has launched an app that its customers are raving about.
After its initial success in the US, BYLT was curious if its unique approach to getting people dressed would do just as well in international markets.
The paid media team had started to take some interest in foreign markets. Then Spencer Toomey – Growth Manager at BYLT – contacted us when they needed their ads translated in a number of languages.
As a paid media specialist, Spencer oversees all the creative and ads for multiple channels, including social, TV, out of home, and even some streaming platforms. He manages the budgets per channel and per campaign.
After expanding to the European market, BYLT was seeing low performance in online ads on Meta.
“As a growth manager, I have targets every day, week, month, and every quarter that I’ve got to hit. And a part of that equation is the baking in of the international side.”
“I knew from working in a previous company that if I could increase the margin on international, it would make my US target easier to hit. I knew how powerful moving the needle internationally could be and the impact it could have.”
He knew he had to turn to localization services to hit his most recent aggressive international targets.
Between experimenting with translating top-performing US ads himself and asking his brand director to translate creative assets, he realized these weren’t sustainable ways to grow.
“It wasn’t scalable having our brand director translate a ton of assets.”
Spencer and the team didn’t know how to localize assets. They were worried about sounding too generic – or getting something terribly wrong and only realizing after the fact.
They were already experiencing poor ad performance in Europe, and didn’t want to waste any more spend. So they reached out to us and requested translations in Spanish in a bid to test that market before deciding whether to enter fully.
Having seen others get it wrong in the past by quickly publishing machine-translated content only to see it damage their brand, Spencer wanted to start small and build up to bigger things.
“It was just the trust factor, right? We met you and we just started small. I think you just got to start small.
“I would definitely recommend anybody to just do it in steps. You don’t want to spit out a 1000 words and 10 languages, run with it, and put yourself in a sketchy position.”
For this project, it was key to connect with the audience. The emphasis was on creativity and insight – so we got native transcreation human teams to produce the translations.
These received excellent feedback from in-house Spanish speakers who were highly confident in the native tone of the Spanish assets, and this helped build up the trust.
Having humans create content was a key requirement for Spencer and the team.
“Everything was great with you. You were really flexible on pricing on the initial run.
“Even though you’re on the other side of the world, we never waited long for you to send over assets. You were fast.
“We have to work super fast to keep up and stay ahead of the competition on the creative side, so I think it’s important to find a partner who can work within your flow. Even though you’re on the other side of the world, we don’t have to wait long for you to send over the assets, it’s seamless with our flow.”
– Spencer Toomey, Growth Manager @ BYLT Basics
As a result of partnering with Native, BYLT now has seamless assets that enable them to scale internationally.
We created the foundations for localization, creating a “flywheel” and putting them in a position where they can easily add more countries and comfortably unlock more top line revenue.
As Spencer’s 2025 targets come out and goals change, he sees Native as a key partner in driving future international success.
© Native 2024