An established Italian wine producer with strong domestic presence and a clear plan: enter Germany, France, and the Netherlands without burning capital on paid media. The bet was on infrastructure — search-led, locally credible, sustainable. Built once, compounding from day one.
The brand had won awards at home but was effectively invisible outside Italy. Existing imports relied on a single distributor in each country and a static .it site. There was no foothold in local search, no local PR network, and no infrastructure to capture wine-curious consumers searching in their own language.
Time-to-revenue mattered, but so did not faking it. Wine buyers — especially in Germany and France — spot translated-by-Italian copy immediately. We needed real localisation, not Google Translate.
Set up hreflang infrastructure across .it / .de / .fr / .nl, with proper subfolder strategy and canonical hygiene to avoid duplicate-content traps.
Worked with native wine writers in each market — keyword research per locale, food-pairing angles tuned to local cuisine, terroir storytelling in voice.
Built a backlink and editorial pipeline to wine journalists, sommeliers, and lifestyle media in each market. Distributor co-marketing where it made sense.
EU-compliant ecommerce, region-aware shipping, B2B portal for restaurant and distributor enquiries. Lead capture wired to a unified CRM.
At the end of the nine-month EU expansion engagement, all three target markets live.