How Elevate Outdoor Collective reached full translation coverage across 12 brands and 11 storefronts, for the first time

Overview

Elevate Outdoor Collective is the company behind twelve well-known names in skiing, snowboarding, and snowshoeing. Each brand keeps its own voice and its own customers with brand-specific and shared-service teams covering the US, Canada, APAC, and several European markets, while a shared direct-to-consumer (D2C) organization runs the technology, content, and ecommerce sites behind all of it.

For localization, that means Emily Gem, Director of Global Website Operations, and her team have to keep eleven storefronts and twelve brand voices moving through one workflow on a schedule set by the ski season: sites get built from January through June, launch around July, and carry the brands through their biggest selling months, November through March.

The challenge: twelve brands, one inconsistent process

Before Smartling, localization at Elevate Outdoor Collective was inconsistent. The company had recently merged its North American and German operations, and translations arrived piecemeal before being dropped into its content management system (CMS). An early attempt at machine translation software added some automation, but the workflow around it stayed almost entirely manual, and coverage stalled well short of every product being translated.

"Season after season, our goal was to get to full translation. We could never get past twenty-five to thirty percent."

— Emily Gem, Elevate Outdoor Collective

When Emily talks about what a localization partner actually needs to solve, she frames it as two separate problems: 1) the translation itself, having the technology and quality to get the words right, and 2) the process behind it, a system to manage workflows as content changes and grows across a dozen brands. Their early tools solved neither.

The gap wasn't only about volume. Ski and snowboard gear came with its own vocabulary, and generic machine translation missed it constantly, occasionally badly enough that a playful product tagline came back reading like an entirely different product category, which could negatively impact trust and international sales. Getting that right meant more than swapping tools. It meant a partner whose technology could learn from corrections over time, and whose linguists understood the difference between a technical ski brand's voice and a playful snowboard brand's voice, because Elevate Outdoor Collective needed both.

The solution: one connector across the whole portfolio

Elevate Outdoor Collective's early localization setup covered a single brand in Germany, translating from a layer in front of the site rather than from within the CMS. As the team looked to scale across all eleven sites, they worked with Smartling to move to a different approach: implementing Smartling's Contentstack connector, which integrated Smartling directly into the CMS already running all eleven of the company's sites.

Moving to the Contentstack connector addressed the challenges of cost, efficiency, and quality. For example, Contentstack's Interstack References feature lets shared content, like shipping policies and repeated labels, live once and get pulled into all eleven sites instead of being duplicated and translated brand by brand. This cuts down both the volume and the cost of translating it.

The Contentstack connector also enables Elevate Outdoor Collective’s team to move more efficiently by sending entries to Smartling en masse once ready in Contentstack, and receiving them back in bulk too.

From a quality perspective, Smartling's linguists now work from individual brand profiles, so a brand with a more technical, performance-driven voice and a brand with a more playful, lifestyle-driven voice each keep their own tone and stay consistent across every language. Plus, brands that share a similar audience can share translation memory with each other, so common terms and phrases don't get translated from scratch across a dozen labels.

The connector came together for Elevate Outdoor Collective in the fall of 2025, with a short, focused engagement to implement and configure it for their setup. Content was moving through it by December.

“With the old solution, everything was reliant on our site code. If we added a new field we didn't want translated, that was developer time, and any new feature meant extra QA just to make sure it still worked with that setup. With Contentstack, that's controlled in our CMS, the same source all of our sites are already built on, so my localization expert or any of our admins can manage that now, not just a developer."

— Emily Gem, Elevate Outdoor Collective

That distinction matters as the site keeps evolving. Since translation lives in the same CMS the sites are already built on, new features and content structures don't need a developer to keep them in sync with Smartling, they're automatically part of the system translation already reads from.

The results: full translation coverage

The clearest proof came ahead of the launch for the Winter 2026–27 season, a launch that means far more than a single product update. Each site gets a full reskin, including a new homepage, landing pages, and product lineup with fresh descriptions. That's the volume the team's earlier solutions could never keep up with. New-season marketing starts in August and runs through September, right before the brands' busiest stretch of the year: November through March. A site that isn't translated by that launch means marketing to non-English-speaking customers in English right as the highest-revenue months begin. Every one of Elevate Outdoor Collective's eleven sites went live with its products fully translated, company-wide, for the first time, rather than rolling out gradually after launch as in past seasons.

“This was the first year that we were able to launch all of our sites with the products translated before launch.”

— Emily Gem, Elevate Outdoor Collective

Alongside that, the shared translation memory setup delivered a 26% cost savings in its first year. The portfolio now runs on four standardized languages (German, French, Spanish, and Italian) across all eleven sites, with German and French seeing the deepest coverage.

For Emily, the bigger risk was never just about the calendar. It was what a missed launch would have cost in trust. Being a shared service, Elevate Outdoor Collective's brands trust the team with their vision and their presence in each country, which means getting the language right is imperative.

Investing in people, not just software

As AI took on more of the day-to-day translation work, Elevate Outdoor Collective invested in more human expertise to guide it. An opening on the content team, originally scoped around product content and promotions, went to a multilingual candidate with deep localization and translation experience: Mélodie Jemmely, Web Content Coordinator. That expertise turned out to be exactly what a growing, multi-brand program needed.

“It wasn't even the role we were originally hiring for, but we realized that was a massive miss on our team. I was managing Smartling beforehand, and that wasn't the right way to do it. Mélodie has genuinely owned and expanded this process in really amazing ways.”

— Emily Gem, Elevate Outdoor Collective

Because Mélodie’s background spans both digital content and language technology in LLM environments, rather than traditional localization alone, she brings a different lens to owning the Smartling relationship: not only about managing the translation process, but also a focus on how each brand’s voice is translated and represented.

She manages brand profiles, working directly with internal teams in Europe, as well as Smartling’s linguists and project managers. The translation memory is structured to create shared translation consistency across the portfolio while preserving each brand’s character. Full translation coverage at launch was made possible by combining both software technology and human expertise.

La diferencia de Smartling

• 25–30% translation coverage before launch became 100% across all 11 e-commerce sites, for the first time company-wide
• Developer hours needed for ongoing translation maintenance dropped from weeks of setup plus monthly upkeep to zero
• Standardized on four languages across 11 e-commerce sites, including German, French, Spanish, and Italian
• 26% cost savings in its first year from shared translation memory across brand groups with similar voices, with more expected as the program matures

La diferencia de Smartling

Looking ahead, Emily and her team are already talking with Smartling about pushing localization further than direct translation.

“Right now we're taking English copy and translating it. The next version of this, for me, is localization with a personalization lens: different content for different markets, not the same words translated everywhere.”

— Emily Gem, Elevate Outdoor Collective

That could mean creating content that feels more relevant to customers in each market rather than translating the same English source across regions, and extending the same approach beyond e-commerce into email and other customer communications. For a shared-services team supporting twelve brands, it's the next step past translation and toward something closer to being built for the market.